UN Climate Change on Facebook
John Walter (on his Substack) gives his opinion on:
The 5 Places In America You DON’T Want To Be When Society Begins To Collapse
His conclusions are based upon this way of thinking:
When we speak of the end of the world as we know it, we usually imagine spectacular explosions: nuclear bombs, killer pandemics, cyber attacks that extinguish the lights in an instant. But history teaches us that civilizations more often die in whispers, through gradual erosion, through the accumulation of micro-failures that, on a certain morning, transform into catastrophic system failure.
The five regions examined share characteristics making them particularly vulnerable to systemic collapse: high population density, infrastructure dependency, environmental stress, and limited exit options. They are not the only vulnerable regions in the United States, but they represent concentrations of risk exceeding national averages by significant margins.
For those finding themselves in these regions, questions become ones of timing and preparation. Relocation is optimal strategy, but it requires resources, flexibility, and willingness to abandon social networks and economic opportunities that may have taken decades to build. For those who cannot relocate, preparation takes form of redundancy: water storage, food reserves, alternative heating or cooling, communication plans, and community networks providing mutual aid when formal systems fail.
But beyond the practicalities of preparation lies a deeper recognition that we have built our civilization on assumptions of permanence that geology and physics do not guarantee. The Northeast Corridor assumes that water can be moved hundreds of miles indefinitely. California assumes that desert can be made to bloom through engineering will. Florida assumes that the ocean can be held back by pumps and walls. Phoenix assumes that heat can be air-conditioned into submission. The Industrial Midwest assumes that pension promises can be kept through financial alchemy.
These assumptions have persisted because, for decades, they have worked well enough. The water has flowed, the crops have grown, the cities have functioned, the checks have cleared. But systems operating at the edge of their capacity have no margin for disruption. They are, in the terminology of engineers, “brittle”—strong under normal conditions but prone to catastrophic failure when stressed beyond design parameters.
What the next decade may bring is unclear. Perhaps the infrastructure investments that have been promised for generations will finally materialize. Perhaps the climate models are too pessimistic, and the jet stream will stabilize, and the rains will return, and the aquifers will recharge. Perhaps the financial wizards will discover some mechanism for making the mathematics of pension obligations work. Perhaps.
But perhaps not. And if the systems do begin to cascade into mutual failure—if the water stops flowing, and the power goes dark, and the trucks no longer arrive, and the temperature does things that human bodies cannot survive—then your location will determine whether you are among those who adapt or among those who become statistics in a catastrophe that future historians will struggle to explain.
The choice, for now, remains yours. The window, according to those who watch these systems most carefully, may be narrower than we wish to believe. The ground is shifting. The question is whether we will feel it in time to move our feet.
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I may not be a "prepper" - the term I think used for those people trying to live completely "off the grid." But I have already lived through one catastrophe where the infrastructure of a community failed. And since I depend upon having electricity (not to mention food and water) for medical conditions, I do take this seriously.
As the second anniversary (Sept. 27) of Hurricane Helene just passed, those of us who were impacted (and still are) in Western North Carolina are considering how we reacted, and what we hope to do differently to have better outcomes from failures of the systems we depend upon.
Those weeks and months changed the lives of people who had never expected tropical storms to toss their mountain homes and the very infrastructures of electric power, cell service, water and sewer services, roadways, and governance into chaos.
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Of note are not just the personal tragedies, but that I-40, an interstate highway, is still under repair where it was damaged by storm waters near the North Carolina/Tennessee border - two years later!!
DOT published this shot of the Pigeon River taking out part of I-40 on Sept. 27, 2026, saved from FaceBook Oct 16.
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I personally have seen that the biggest unexpected wonderful thing that happened was how neighbors helped each other with this sudden catastrophe in North Carolina.
Everyone showed respect of each other's lives...safety first! Gone were political or religious differences. Shared were any resources, no matter how meager their stockpile. Finding solutions to the new difficulties was everyone's job. For instance, having no supplies or communication (cell towers were down) there suddenly appeared poster board signs on telephone poles saying where to go to get a hot meal, or drinking water, or where there would be a meeting. Volunteers prepared those hot meals, mostly being served at churches.
And a community town meeting in the town square was facilitated by a brilliant young Forest Service volunteer. That format was soon followed by the larger city governments...whose officials valiently tried to provide answers through whatever media was available.
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Our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. |
BRYAN STEVENSON |
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Pottery at the Durango Autumn Arts Festival
