Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire

Summary

How to reclaim power in a time of perpetual crisis

We are living through a Long Emergency: a near-continuous train of pandemics, heatwaves, droughts, resource wars, and other climate-driven disasters. In Lifehouse, Adam Greenfield asks what might happen if the tactics and networks of care that spring up in response to these times might be brought together in a single, coherent way of life?

Using examples from the Black Panthers' "survival programs," the astonishingly effective Occupy Sandy disaster-relief effort, and the neighborhood-based mutual aid groups that sustained many during COVID lockdowns to the large-scale, self-organized polities of municipalist Spain and Kurdish Rojava, Greenfield argues for rethinking local power as a bulwark against despair—a way to discover and develop the individual and collective capacities that have gone underutilized during all the long years of late capitalism, and a means for thriving in the face of impending catastrophe.