User blog comment:JERealize/What lies beyond Panem?/@comment-92.6.175.86-20131228131515

I'm Louisa. I think that after parts of the USA were flooded and South America was completely wiped out in a natural disaster, many people thought no one in America would survive and so the other parts of the world cut off communications with them and remained relatively unchanged aside from being affected over time (countries moving, wars, disease etc.). Panem was formed when everyone was recovering from the floods and politics were being reinvented, but their technology suffered a huge blow and couldn't recover enough to create reliable air travel. By the time it was advanced enough, nearly everyone had forgotten that such things were possible and that there was land outside of America, so they never tried to find any. The change in the rest of the world led to the belief that America was unlivable due to the diseases and flooding that occured over there when there was a USA. Several centuries after the events of Mockingjay, people re-discovered Panem and the countries joined back up again after a brief war in which the United Nations won.