Dystopian stories have taught us to expect certain things when the world falls apart: resource-hoarding governments, militarized borders, poisoned landscapes, and the dangerous myth that survival is something we do alone. We watch these futures unfold in books and on screen and think, thank God that's fiction.
But even these fictional worlds are built from real political realities. The creators of The Last of Us have openly acknowledged drawing inspiration from Israel's occupation of Palestine, particularly its militarized checkpoints, surveillance systems, and containment infrastructure. The architecture of dystopia rarely appears out of nowhere; it's borrowed from systems already being tested on real people in real time.
The shortages, the surveillance, the abandonment of entire communities – these aren't cautionary tales; they're documentation. That's why The Last of Us, in some ways, feels less like a fantasy and more like a mirror.
The Last of Us is a post-apocalyptic series based on the video game of the same name. After a fungal outbreak wipes out humanity, survivors navigate a country controlled by a federal agency called the Federal Disaster Response Agency (FEDRA), unpredictable militias, and the scraps of communities trying to rebuild. But here in the Gulf South, we don't need CGI set pieces or infected hordes to imagine catastrophe. We've lived through enough storms, spills, and state failures to recognize the plot.
The Last of Us gives us collapse as spectacle. The Gulf South gives us collapse as daily life.
Let's be clear: The same pipelines that poison the South also help fuel global oppression. The creators of The Last of Us have openly named Israel's colonial occupation of Palestine as inspiration for the show's quarantine zones and militarized control. That's not subtext – it's a blueprint.
And the connection runs through our backyards.
The Port of Houston has been identified as a major exporter of weapons, fuel, and aircraft components used in Israel's assault on Gaza. Southern politicians vote to send billions in military aid to a settler colony committing genocide, while claiming there's not enough money to keep the lights on after a hurricane in Louisiana.
In July 2025, the global BDS movement won a rare victory when Maersk – one of the largest shipping companies on earth – announced it would end all operations in illegal Israeli settlements. The BDS movement stands for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions and is a Palestinian-led global campaign to pressure Israel to end its occupation and grant full equality to Palestinian citizens. This win with Maersk means one of the biggest players in global shipping is withdrawing support from companies operating on stolen Palestinian land, disrupting part of the economic pipeline that sustains occupation.
But even with that, U.S. ports – including Houston's – remain key transfer points for fighter jet parts and military machinery. The political will to stop the genocide supply chain has yet to emerge.
Climate violence at home and state violence abroad share the same foundations: extraction, profit, impunity, and governments that treat entire populations as disposable.
Disaster capitalism, climate change, and the campaign to sell Black New Orleans
The 2007 'Forever New Orleans' advertising campaign was intended to celebrate the city's rich and diverse culture and history. In reality, it commodified the Black culture bearers who shaped the city for centuries as tourism bait.
Disaster Capitalism Is the Southern Economy
In The Last of Us, FEDRA hoards medicine, rations food, and rules through scarcity. Militias steal resources under the banner of liberation. Ordinary people are told they're on their own.
Swap the cordyceps for crude oil. Spores for refinery flares. The plot aligns.
Corporations swoop in. Developers "revitalize." Politicians facilitate. Frontline communities lose everything.
Our collapse didn't come from a mutation – it came from policy. From profit. From decades of calculated neglect.
We don't need infected cities or quarantine zones to understand devastation. We know it by the blackouts after every storm. By petrochemical leaks that rarely make the news. By heatwaves that leave elders gasping while utility companies rake in record profits. In the Gulf South, survival isn't an emergency. It's an economy. One designed to discard the very people who make this region run.
From Cancer Alley in Louisiana to the coal ash pits of Georgia, this region is a masterclass in environmental racism, complete with a syllabus written by BP, Shell, Entergy, and every governor who's ever uttered "economic development," while sacrificing Black, Indigenous, and working-class communities. Dirty energy is everywhere down here. Not because it's efficient, but because our lives were deemed expendable generations ago.
Pollution is found in the water. The air. The zoning laws. It's disproportionate rates of asthma in Black kids. It's cancer clusters along the river. It's black mold behind unrepaired drywall. It's the lie that "jobs" justify mass poisoning. Look no further than BP's Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2010 that left 11 workers dead, caused ecological devastation, and added up to $60 billion in payouts for corporations, while the communities most affected were gaslit, undercompensated, and left to fend for themselves.
This isn't mismanagement. It's the business model.
Corporations down here no longer pretend they don't wield unchecked power over us. Oil companies write the disaster response plans. Refineries set the air quality standards. Hedge funds buy up land, reroute evacuations, and flip public trauma into private profit.
And utility companies – Entergy, Georgia Power, Florida Power & Light – operate like extraction cartels blessed by regulatory bodies that behave more like shareholders than watchdogs.
During Hurricane Beryl, CenterPoint Energy left Houston residents without power for over a week, including medically vulnerable people who needed electricity to survive. Then they billed customers for it. Rate hikes during storms. Shutoffs during heatwaves. Reconnection fees punish the poor while shareholders celebrate record quarters.
The energy lobby loves to paint nuclear power as a clean, carbon-free silver bullet. But they never mention the radioactive waste, groundwater contamination, and massive cost overruns.
Take Plant Vogtle in Georgia. Its costs have ballooned to over $17 billion above their initial projected budget, it's seven years late, and still not fully operational. While that boondoggle continues, Black families in Atlanta and Macon face record shutoffs and late fees.
This isn't innovation. It's theft.
And now, this model of overbuild, overcharge, and underdeliver is being exported across the country with utility companies lobbying Congress for ratepayer-funded bailouts while they privatize the profits.
Bombing Iran: Crude Oil Gulf Extraction and Gulf South Petro-Devastation
The same logic that organizes the extraction of the Global South organizes the domestic South. The plantation did not disappear, and the Middle Passage lives on.
Trump's Energy Agenda: Drill, Displace, and Deny
Donald Trump's second-term energy plan is a death sentence for the Gulf South and reads like a corporate wishlist:
- Expand Gulf drilling
- Open new oil leases
- Gut the EPA
- Slash disaster aid unless you pledge political loyalty
This is extraction. It's about letting the South burn while Wall Street buys beachfronts.
Who pays the price? Black coastal communities. Indigenous communities. Immigrant families. People who can't evacuate. People they've decided can die.
Building Something Better
If The Last of Us gives us FEDRA and raiders, it also gives us something else: the reminder that survival is a collective project.
In the show, we get Jackson – a multiracial, cooperative, solar-powered commune built on shared labor and shared care. We also get the Fireflies – an organized resistance network built on the understanding that empire will never save the people it harms.
We have both here.
- In Puerto Rico, community groups like Casa Pueblo run towns with solar microgrids.
- In New Orleans, Together New Orleans is constructing "community lighthouses," or solar-powered hubs that stay on during blackouts.
- In Alabama's Black Belt, residents are organizing with Black Belt Citizens to fight for clean energy access and local control.
These aren't charity projects. They're survival infrastructures. They're political strategies. They're the opposite of collapse; they're construction.
And this is where the dystopian narratives fall short: they love the lone hero wandering the ruins, but they ignore the truth Southerners know best: we're not lone heroes in the ruins. We are each other's answer.
Mutual aid networks are our Jackson commune. Tenant unions are our Fireflies. Black moms protesting utility shutoffs are our frontline fighters. Indigenous water protectors are our sentries. Neighbors checking on neighbors after hurricanes are our infrastructure.
And now, with Georgia's Public Service Commission newly flipped, there's a chance to bring that same energy democracy to scale — literally. For the first time, regulators might actually regulate, holding Georgia Power accountable to the people it serves instead of the shareholders it enriches.
It's proof that even in collapse, organizing works. The tide can turn.
We survive because we choose each other.
We survive because we refuse to abandon the future we're already building.