by V. Arrow
Either way, we needed to collapse the coasts of the United States, Mexico, and Canada an adequate amount to reduce landmass enough to result in “the brutal war for what little sustenance remained.”THG18 We chose to reduce Mexico significantly to create the futuristic border crisis we saw as the likely cause of Panem’s racial tensions (which will be explored further in both chapter two and chapter three), and theorized that the polar ice melt would take care of much of Canada.
Given that the “Sinking California” theory is actually pretty much science fiction—which is okay, because so is the Hunger Games—we had a fair amount of leeway in how we wanted to pursue the various avenues of geological cataclysm.
First, we pinpointed a specific assumption about the time frame of Panem: 400–500 years from the present. That allows not only for the minimum 300 years necessary for the large-scale geological catastrophes but, overlapping that somewhat, also the 74 years of the Games–tesserae system and, before that, time for a pre-existing Panem to develop a full culture and go through the kind of sociological and socioeconomic transformation that could lead to the First Rebellion—most likely, at minimum, another 60–100 years. At least three to four generations of social programming would be necessary to create the kind of district identity separation that would foster the distinct and hegemonic cultures that make up the districts; however, the genetic homogenization Katniss describes in the Seam would require at least six. If you assume that one factor contributing to the fall of North America is the depletion of oil reserves worldwide, and extrapolate from estimates that, at the current depletion rate, oil reserves will be emptied by 2054,ii that sets Katniss’ Panem in at least the late 2400s.
~2054
(approximate depletion of oil reserves)
~300
(approximate time for widespread geographic and cultural change)
~60
(time before the First Rebellion)
+ 74
(time after the First Rebellion)
2488
(start of The Hunger Games)
Then we looked at actually sinking the continent. Here’s some of that encroaching seas theory Meg and I looked up: between 1900 and 2000, the ocean rose six to eight inches due to global warming (a global temperature rise of half a degree celsius, according to the United Nations Population Fund). Supposing the same rate for those 300 years—until shortly before the First Rebellion, in our estimation—that’s another eighteen to twenty-four inches of oceanic rise. Think that’s a crazy estimate? Some experts estimate a twelve-inch rise just by 2050!iii
At that rate of rise, coastal cities all over North America and the world would be at risk of sinking—kind of like Venice is sinking now, by a few inches each decade—with southernmost Florida, the Louisiana coastline at the Gulf, North Carolina’s Pamlico-Albemarle Peninsula, along Chesapeake Bay, and the Texas–Mexico shoreline east of Galveston being most at risk.iv Other threatened U.S. cities include New York-Newark, New Orleans, Boston, Washington, Philadelphia, Tampa-St. Petersburg, and San Francisco.v
Part of the problem in those areas is that many millions of years ago, during the Ice Age, “around the periphery of where the glaciers sat [in] places like Chesapeake Bay and the south of England—the land was actually squeezed upward . . . by the downward pressure nearby.”vi These areas of raised land have been slowly sinking ever since (just a few millimeters a year but still sinking), which makes the sea level rise greater than average in those regions. In some coastal areas, most notably along the Gulf of Mexico in Louisiana, the land is falling as well; thanks to massive oil and gas extraction, the continental shelf is collapsing “like a deflated balloon,”vii which would significantly diminish the available land for districts that require access to the ocean or southern climate (like District 4 and District 11, respectively). Plus, if we conjecture that the economic and political climate in Panem was indeed partially caused by the depletion of oil and gas, major problems to the Gulf area seem inevitable.
The Great Lakes region, too, is heavily at risk from flooding. However, given what we know about District 12 and District 13’s location along the Appalachian mountain ridge and District 11’s location in the Deep South, some adjustments had to be made for purely canonical reasons. If all of the geological theories were taken as absolutes, Panem simply isn’t possible. The falling of the Gulf area and the flooding of the Great Lakes region would split North America into two smaller subcontinents, and train travel from District 12 to the Capitol would be impossible. So we endeavored to come up with the most accurately sunken map we could with canon still taken as, well, canon.
This was our first attempt at deciding where to set the geological boundaries of Panem:
FIG. 2
Although feasible, it wasn’t really jelling for me. Meg brought up that there would be a natural flood break at the Sierra Nevadas and, likely, the Grand Canyon, creating new ocean/land borders for the country.
So we decided to look up some more “factually accurate” scenarios. A professor of geology at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay actually spelled out his ideal sci-fi approach to Sinking California on his departmental website. Although his approach isn’t precisely how we chose to utilize fault lines, it’s still worth noting. He argues that the western provinces of Canada have a higher chance of survival than California because the San Andreas Fault and East Pacific Rise join up near Baja California,viii which is a significant distance from the Pacific Northwest region. He also notes that the “slippage” of the California coast would cause devastating tsunamis that would “demolish the whole Pacific Rim and possibly [even] cause damage in the Atlantic. They might well make two or three circuits of the earth before dying out.”ix In our subsequent attempts, this contributed to our decision to flood parts of the Atlantic coast east of the Appalachians, which helped to place District 12 and District 13.
Rising sea levels along the 3,500-mile-long barrier island shoreline extending from Montauk Point on Long Island to the Mexican border would easily allow for higher land elevations to respond naturally, geologically, to the sea rise and become “floating island” cities.x So I chose to center part of “the Cataclysm” in the Gulf of Mexico as a tectonic shift and moved the Yucatan Peninsula, rather than sinking it. Although this was done, admittedly, for mainly aesthetic reasons, there is precedent: Madagascar originally broke free from the megacontinent of Gondwana, which later became Africa.
FIG. 3
I ended up keeping more of the Eastern Seaboard than might be feasible, given the likely effects of the melting Greenland ice shelf, but Panem needed some land for District 12 and District 13.
From there, placing the districts meant taking an anthropological and geoethnographic look at what they each produce. The assumptions used for The Panem Companion are as follows and are based on the text canon of the Hunger Games series. The film’s canon diverts from what is stated in the series in several instances regarding district specialties, most notably for District 11, District 3, and District 2. But given that the original map was made before the movie was released—and because this is an analysis of the Hunger Games novels and not films—those differences in specialties are ignored here.
DISTRICT
SPECIALTY
NOTES
District 1 (D1)
Luxury goods (goldsmithing, silversmithing, diamond mining, gemstones/precious metals)
Specifically stated in the series.
District 2 (D2)
Weaponry and Peacekeepers, some mining
Specifically stated in the series. Given their location in or very near the Rocky Mountains (which we know from the Nut in Mockingjay), I assume their mining is more like railroad blasting—breaking a way through the Rocky Mountains so that supply trains and tribute trains can more easily reach the Capitol, or perhaps even filling in tunnels and causeways that carried over from our own time to better fortify the Capitol’s position—than goods mining, like the diamond mining of D1 or the coal mining of D12
, or even the fictitious graphite mining of D13.
District 3 (D3)
Electronic goods, hardware, software
Specifically stated in the series.
District 4 (D4)
Fishing and luxury seafood, pearls
Specifically stated in the series.
District 5 (D5)
Science (DNA, muttations, experimental sciences)
Extrapolation based on Foxface’s Games strategy, as well as unserved needs of the Capitol.
District 6 (D6)
Drugs and medicine (morphling, tracker jacker venom, medicines)
Extrapolation based on information about the D6 tributes and victors—Titus’ hallucinations and the morphlings’ addiction, in particular—as well as unserved needs of the Capitol.
District 7 (D7)
Lumber, logging, and forestry
Specifically stated in the series.
District 8 (D8)
Textiles
Specifically stated in the series.
District 9 (D9)
Food processing (pasteurization, preservatives, sorting/shipping, rationing; no production of food items)
Long-standing pre-movie fandom interpretation; extrapolation based on unserved needs of the Capitol and description of “smelly factories” in Catching Fire.
District 10 (D10)
Ranching, slaughterhouses, dairy products
Specifically stated in the series.
District 11 (D11)
Agriculture (grain fields, cotton fields, fruit orchards, vegetables)
Specifically stated in the series.
District 12 (D12)
Coal mining, of course!
Specifically stated in the series.
District 13 (D13)
Nuclear power
Specifically stated in the series. Propaganda informed the other districts that D13 existed to mine graphite, however.
So, knowing all of that, the most logical organization for the districts was not straight slices across the continent, which would allot equal land but not necessarily the type or amount of land necessary for each district’s specialty. We chose to arrange the districts based on a phi spiral instead.
Straight slices would arbitrarily force large-scale specialties like agriculture and ranching to fit into the same landmass as indoor/small-scale specialties like electronics or drug chemistry. The phi spiral would allow for varying district sizes, as well as better organize the country for central Capitol control because it would allow for a more controlled flow of communication and travel than if districts were allotted land in randomized cookie-cutter chunks.
Given the immense difference in geography and political landscape in comparison with the present, Panem would most likely not have based its districts on modern state/province/country borders. Katniss’ narrative suggests that the Capitol has had unilateral control of governmental and political decisions since the inception of Panem, which means it would have needed to re-create its entire infrastructure to accommodate its needs. The phi spiral would give each district the unique amount of space it would need to cultivate its specialty, without giving them so much room that pockets of dissent could form in “off-the-grid” communities. (This is also why we did not leave massive amounts of space between the districts. Like Katniss’ forest in District 12, there are clearly fenced-off “forbidden areas” within the districts themselves, not between them—a.k.a., not outside of Capitol jurisdiction. Think of modern-day North America, where all of the land is held accountable to both state and government law, even if it is not inhabited or even inhabitable.)
Just so you don’t think that this organization idea is too crazy, some believe that the phi spiral—also known as the golden spiral because it is based on a ratio called the golden mean—was commonly used in ancient Greek architecture, including in the design of the Acropolis.xi And Richard H. Carson, former regional president of the American Planning Association, a professional organization for city and regional planning, has proposed the use of the phi spiral as a way to alleviate problems with overcrowding and resource disbursement.xii
With the plan all set, it was time to place the districts! We started with the places that Katniss describes most concretely: the locations of District 12 and the Capitol.
In school, they tell us the Capitol was built in a place once called the Rockies. District 12 was a region known as Appalachia. Even hundreds of years ago, they mined coal here. Which is why our miners have to dig so deep.THG41
We placed the Capitol in the Rockies—originally at what is now Denver, Colorado—and created the curve of the phi spiral around it so that, as it fanned out, the outermost curve would reach West Virginia, Virginia, and Pennsylvania (or the general Appalachian Mountains region) for District 12 and Virginia-Maryland for District 13, assuming that it incorporates either Arlington, Virginia, and the former Pentagon site or Three Mile Island, applicable for their specialty of nuclear power.
FIG. 4
This was our first attempt at District 1 through District 7 (and the Capitol). District 7 works well along the former United States-Canada border; it makes sense that national lumber production would require a large district, and this area reaches north towards the boreal forest. However, the issue with this placement of District 7 is that it does not leave room for District 9 to border with District 4—necessary, given that District 4 produces seafood for sale to the Capitol, and that seafood would need fairly immediate processing. This configuration also places District 8 incorrectly in the phi spiral in regard to Katniss’ description of its location in Mockingjay, and it cuts off way too much of the landmass District 10 and District 11 would need for cattle ranching and agriculture, respectively.
Our next attempt:
FIG. 5
Taking landlocked area away from District 4 was a major help. District 9, the district where food processing takes place, now properly borders all food production districts (District 4, District 11, and District 10). District 11 is the largest in landmass (plenty of room for lots of crops!), District 10 has room to raise a nation’s worth of livestock, and District 7 is a more manageable size for Peacekeeping. And everything still lies along the intended phi spiral!
Unfortunately, a few tweaks were needed to make things adhere to canon. It makes more sense for the Nut in District 2 to be at the present-day location of NORAD because it’s a pre-existing military fortress that Suzanne Collins is likely familiar with, given her family’s military background.xiii The Capitol needed a little shift westward, from Denver to Aspen, to be better protected by the mountains.
FIG. 6
There are as many interpretations of Panem as there are Hunger Games fans, and in fact, as of this writing, an officially licensed version is in the works. But the one you see here is the one we’ll be using for this guide. The extrapolated locations of the districts on our map inform some of the anthropological, historical, geoethnographic, and economic assertions made in the rest of the text, although all are also supported by canonical evidence from Katniss’ narrative.
So let’s start by taking a look at those 400–500 years that turned our North America into Panem’s—not physically but politically and culturally.
2
How Panem Came to Be
Although conjectures about geological cataclysm would explain the physical borders—perhaps even the provincial organization—of Panem, its true dystopian horror comes from a cataclysm of a more anthropogenic nature. Panem is post-apocalyptic because of the end of our known world geography, but it is dystopian because of its political, socioeconomic, and cultural collapse and the ways it is dealt with by the Capitol. After all, it isn’t centralized government like the Capitol’s or geographically disparate states that is frightening; it is the operation of the Hunger Games, a system that targets its disenfranchised for death. Although employing the Hunger Games as reparations for civil war is unjust enough, the Games’ enforcement of a society built on institutional classism—and, we can infer from
the text, racism—is truly horrifying. (Racism and classism will be discussed in chapters three and four.) Shifting geography alone could not cause this kind of catastrophic change in ideology—so what happened in Panem to cause so much fear and violence?
One of the most realistic explanations for the strict divisions of the districts and the depth of the Capitol’s institutional prejudice against district citizens would, however, stem from that geological shift. Specifically, a predictable aspect of the downfall of North America as we know it and the rise of Katniss’ Panem would be the reaction of the United States to a massive influx of immigrants as a result of cataclysmic flooding.
Nobel Prize recipient and former vice president Al Gore considered this kind of scenario in his global warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. He used Asia as an example:
The area around Beijing is home to tens of millions of people. Even worse, in the area around Shanghai, there are 40 million people. Worse still, Calcutta and, to the East Bangladesh the area covered includes 50 million people. Think of the impact of a couple hundred thousand refugees when they are displaced by an environmental event and then imagine the impact of a hundred million or more . . . xiv
Adding insult to injury, in many parts of Asia the rice crop will be decimated by rising sea level—a three-foot sea level rise will eliminate half of the rice production in Vietnam—causing a food crisis coincident with the mass migration of people.”xv
It’s a problem that we face here in the United States as well, Gore explains, and one for which we aren’t prepared.