Not a prediction about the future. A claim about who it has already reached, and when it is likely to reach you.
“The future will need places like… this Hub, and people like… us, to do it.”
Spoken by a young person during a break in the work at the Great Plains Action Society's Indigenous-led Urban Resilience and Innovation Hub, Iowa City, April 2026. Recorded in A sense of wonder, 11 June 2026. Everything below is the argument for why that is right.
I am seventy-five. For two years I have used the word collapse in nearly everything I publish, and the most persistent criticism of my writing is that I never actually argue for it — I announce the conclusion and move straight to what should be done. That is fair.
So this page is the argument, arranged so you can take it apart. Three things to do here: walk the seven systems and open the evidence at each one; find where you already sit on the distribution; and argue back, using the four best objections I have been given.
A society is collapsing when the systems it depends on for its basic needs can no longer deliver them reliably, and the institutions that would ordinarily repair those systems can no longer do it.
A single failing system is not collapse — countries run on failing systems for decades. The claim is that these hold each other up, so the failures do not add. They multiply. Pick a system from the ring or the list below; its evidence appears here.
Years ago I asked my friend Ronnie James, while we worked together at Des Moines Mutual Aid, why more people are not aware of the injustices of the capitalist economic system. He said it was because they personally hadn't been adversely affected by capitalism — yet. Awareness of systemic failure is not distributed according to evidence. It is distributed according to injury. Mark whichever of these have already happened to you.
Whatever your number, the people whose number is higher have been saying this longer and have been believed less — because the position that gave them the knowledge is the same position that gets their testimony discounted. For the Indigenous peoples of this land, all six arrived in the nineteenth century, deliberately, by named hands.
Nothing here is scored, sent, or stored anywhere but this browser. Clear the page and it is gone.
These are the four strongest objections I have been given, usually by people I respect, put as forcefully as I know how to put them. Pick one. When my answer doesn't satisfy you — and on at least one of these it shouldn't — push again.
I have been told, fairly, that I state conclusions and never the conditions under which I would abandon them. Here they are. Any one of these would count with me as serious evidence that I have the trajectory wrong. I do not expect them — but they are named now, and you are entitled to hold me to it.
Ticks are kept in this browser only, so you can come back to this list in a year and see what actually happened.
I am not asking you to be afraid, to withdraw, to stockpile, or to organize your life around an ending. Fear is poor fuel and burns out fast. What follows is not a retreat. It is construction work.
The name of your water utility, its source, its treatment capacity, when its board meets. Then the same for your electricity. Most people cannot answer these about the systems their life depends on. It takes an afternoon.
Find the mutual aid work already happening where you live and attend — and do nothing else until you are invited to. That invitation will not come at your first visit, or your fifth. Trust is built by returning.
Relationships take years and cannot be acquired in an emergency. That is the whole argument for beginning now. To support the Hub: Honor Native Land Fund, and the Decolonial Repair Network.
Find yours. Show up. Keep showing up.