In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

This past weekend, I finished two good books that are definitely worth reading for anyone interested in emergency preparedness and response: Homeland Security And Federalism: Protecting America From Outside The Beltway (Praeger International) by Matt A. Mayer and A Paradise Built In Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise In Disaster (Viking) by Rebecca Solnit.

At a time when there is such polarization on many public policy issues, it was striking to read books by two authors from different sides of the political spectrum who, in a different ways, both argue for more of a bottom-up approach — and the centrality of local communities — to disaster preparedness and response.

In Homeland Security And Federalism, Mayer, a former DHS official who now leads the Heritage Foundation’s Homeland Security And States Project, traces the “nationalization” of disaster preparation and response. He argues the U.S. ”must reverse” that centralization and return to a more federalist approach which puts more responsibility in the hands of states and localities.

In A Paradise Built In Hell, Solnit, a contributing editor at Harper’s magazine, also focuses on the role of communities in responding to crisis. Using well reported case studies from five major North American disasters, including 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, Solnit shows how (contrary to popular perception fostered, she argues, by Hollywood and the media) citizens do not panic but instead rise to the occasion in disaster. These two authors may come at the topic from disparate locations, but they both present similarly strong arguments for local empowerment and responsibility.

That theme is also touched upon in another new book, John Farmer’s The Ground Truth: The Untold Truth Of America Under Attack on 9/11 (Riverhead Books). Farmer, a “9/11 Commission” staffer and former New Jersey Attorney General, looks closely at the nation’s response to the attacks during the day of September 11th. In his conclusion, Farmer’s first “starting point” is that “Crises are lived from the ground up, not from the top down.”

I will be writing more about these interesting books and interviewing their authors in the days to come.