From the outside, Jerry Erwin’s home in the northwestern US state of Oregon is a nondescript house with a manicured front lawn and little to differentiate it from those of his neighbors.

But tucked away out of sight in his backyard are the signs of his preparations for doomsday, a catastrophic societal collapse that Erwin, 45, now believes is likely within his lifetime.

“I’ve got, under an awning, stacks of firewood, rain catching in barrels, I’ve got a shed with barbed concertina wire, like the military uses,” he told AFP.

He and his wife also have also stockpiled thousands of rounds of ammunition and enough food for about six months.

“Several years ago I worked on paying off the house, replacing all the windows, and just very recently, I’m proud to say, we’ve replaced all our exterior doors with more energy-efficient ones, with as much built-in security features as I could get,” he told AFP.

Erwin and others like him in the United States and elsewhere see political upheaval and natural disasters as clear signs that civilization is doomed.

“We’re hitting on all cylinders as far as symptoms that have led other great powers to decline or collapse: resource depletion, damage to the environment, climate change, those are the same things that affected other great societies,” he said.

For Erwin, the decline is irreversible and the best approach is to prepare for the inevitable.

His pessimism is shared by a wide range of people, from left-wing environmentalists who believe climate change and capitalist greed will doom human society to Christian fundamentalists who think sin will do the same.

They label themselves “preppers,” “doomers,” and “survivalists,” and take a variety of different approaches to the same question: How best to prepare for the coming apocalypse?

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