Disasters are tragic and frightening events, whether emerging from the climate crisis, armed conflict, or health catastrophe. They reveal deep social inequalities, and compel fear and insecurity. But times of catastrophe can also serve as opportunities to turn toward collective resilience and mutual aid and build unlikely alliances between communities.
Naomi Klein’s 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, documented how after the initial “shock” of disasters—from Hurricane Katrina’s flooding of New Orleans to the invasion of Iraq to the Indian Ocean tsunami—governments fast-track policies that a distracted and desperate population would be less likely to accept under “normal” circumstances. These governments often impose austerity by cutting public services and privatizing the economy, and repressing citizens who resist. More recently, Klein has weighed in on Hurricane María’s devastation of Puerto Rico, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the current evisceration of federal funds and workers to show how governments continue to use disasters to shock people into agreeing to prioritize corporate profits.
On the flip side is what I call the “resilience doctrine.” In my work as a geographer with a focus on Native sovereignty and interethnic relations, I’ve seen how, in the wake of disasters, communities can collaboratively ensure immediate survival, and envision practical collective solutions to the crises of everyday life. The “resilience doctrine” emphasizes “disaster collectivism” over disaster capitalism, public over private ownership, a “sharing transformation” over the profit motive, economic equality over austerity, green regenerative planning over growth planning, local foods over global food systems, and renewable energy over mined fuels. It also recognizes that a “return to normal” that only restores the status quo is inadequate to prevent future shocks.
Because disasters focus practical attention on basic human and ecological survival, they can prefigure a healthier society. Rebecca Solnit’s 2009 book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, revealed “the ability of disasters to topple old orders and open up new possibilities” when “strangers become friends and collaborators, goods are shared freely, [and] where the old divides between people seem to have fallen away.”
A number of climate-related disasters, including those Klein and Solnit have studied, have led to examples of practical collaborative resilience that bring together ordinary people across racial or cultural barriers and ideological lines, even in conservative areas. The Common Ground Relief collective after Katrina in 2005, and Occupy Sandy after Hurricane Sandy struck New York in 2012, provided basic needs to the most vulnerable communities. After a tornado leveled Greensburg, Kansas, in 2007, city leaders reconstructed using renewable energies and nonpartisan politics. Mutual aid groups formed after last year’s Hurricane Helene in North Carolina and the recent Los Angeles fires have provided necessary relief based on “solidarity, not charity.”
Indigenous nations around the world are disproportionately affected by climate change, and are responding with innovative, inclusive models of disaster resilience. Pacific Northwest Native nations are reducing vulnerabilities to disaster by collaborating with non-Native neighbors. Tribes’ assertion of “power back,” which projects their influence outside their reservations into their original ancestral homelands, benefits Native and non-Native communities alike.
In western Washington, the Tulalip Tribes and white farmers have been in perennial conflict over cattle waste in salmon streams. But both groups are finding their livelihoods threatened by increased run-off from melting snowpack and glaciers, which feeds lowland spring floods, scouring salmon egg nests, and leaving less water available during summer droughts. The Tulalip Tribes approached lowland farmers to alleviate this ongoing climate disaster together, drawing on longstanding Indigenous knowledge. The Tribes help the farmers by trapping beavers, which they relocate to upper stretches of the watersheds. The beavers build dams there to store the run-off, preventing spring floods and releasing water during summer droughts, as in the precolonial era. The Tulalip Tribes are also keeping some cattle waste out of salmon streams by turning it into green bioenergy, and selling it back to the farmers at low rates.
Because disasters focus practical attention on basic human and ecological survival, they can prefigure a healthier society.
The Swinomish Tribe similarly has developed coastal flood mitigation plans with local governments that had previously opposed tribal sovereign jurisdiction. The Nisqually Tribe has worked with the city of Olympia to move their joint drinking water source out of a lowland spring vulnerable to rising seas, and with federal agencies to raise a freeway to give space for floods and tidal flows.
Even when cooperation isn’t so starkly bridging divides across racial and political divides, disaster planning has spurred tribal solutions that are providing models to non-Native communities. Washington coastal tribes (such as Quinault and Quileute) are proactively moving infrastructure to higher ground to avoid tsunamis and storm surges, which sea-level rise amplifies. The Shoalwater Bay Tribe recently built the country’s first tsunami evacuation tower, which also provides a refuge for non-Native neighbors. In California, the Yurok Nation uses cultural fire management to prevent catastrophic forest fires.
These alliances for disaster resilience mirror other unlikely alliances of Native nations and their rural white neighbors (such as fishers, farmers, and ranchers) for salmon habitat restoration, dam removals, climate resilience, local economic recovery, and opposition to mining and fossil fuels. In building partnerships such as the Cowboy Indian Alliance that stopped the Keystone XL oil pipeline, tribal leaders also lure rural white neighbors away from right-wing racist populism toward a cross-cultural anticorporate populism. Some areas with the most intense conflicts over tribal treaty rights to harvest natural resources developed the strongest alliances to protect or even co-manage the same resources.
On the Washington coast, the Quinault Nation opposed three oil export terminals that would endanger salmon and shellfish in Grays Harbor County. Tribal leaders built bridges to white fishers who had opposed treaty rights, and they joined together to prevent an oil spill disaster and protect their towns from explosive trains shipping the crude oil. Quinault Nation President Fawn Sharp commented, “a lot of the relationships we have with our neighbors arose out of … division, strife, and conflict, but through that … they’ve come to know who we are.” In 2017, the Quinault and their allies defeated the oil terminals (among about 20 halted fossil fuel projects), curbing the regional expansion of the oil industry.
Whether through fossil fuel opposition or climate change adaptation, the climate crisis can hasten necessary changes for a healthier future that otherwise may take decades to implement. Effective emergency planning can more evenly divide resources among neighbors and also strengthen ecological methods that will weaken future shocks from so-called “natural” disasters.
Disasters are never positive, but our responses to them can contain the kernels of a better world. By affirming a positive view of human nature, mutual-aid networks demonstrate how civil society can succeed where elite institutions, driven by a negative view of human nature, often panic and fail. Since disasters bring out the best in people, as well as the worst, these alliances, and the community resilience they build, should be studied to reduce harm to the human and natural world, and to provide a little inspiration and hope.
Zoltán Grossman is a professor in geography and Indigenous studies at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, where he has taught about disaster resilience. He is the author of Unlikely Alliances: Native Nations and White Communities Join to Defend Rural Lands.
Primary editor: Talib Jabbar | Secondary editor: Sarah Rothbard
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