America: The Eagle Falls

A Global Firestorm

During the last years of the 20th century, a series of ecological disasters also took a huge toll on the infrastructure of the United States. Global warming melted much of the polar icecaps, resulting in higher sea levels. Large parts of the East Coast and the South went underwater or partially became swampland; what remained of New Orleans ended up on stilts and Houston rapidly found itself with a much increased local alligator population. Rising temperatures thawed out much of southern Alaska, northern Canada, and the upper U.S.; these became the new breadbasket areas, producing the verdant fields of bio-engineered "survival grains" that became the basis of much of the U.S. economy. However, these same changes in climate dried up even more areas than they helped. In the Great Plains and Southwest, whole regions became desert in only a few years; unhampered by tree cover, violent winds scoured the land with driving sandstorms. The Pacific Northwest suffered through twenty years of drought-stricken forests and water shortages. This in turn triggered immense forest fires that roared through the tinder-dry forests, covering the entire West in a pall of thick, grey smoke.

Dustbowl Hell

From Seattle to San Francisco and San Diego, the main issue became water: how much, who owned it, and where to get more. In Los Angeles, shifting ocean currents diverted rainfall from the central coast; the result was dense ground fogs mixing with smog to create an acidic, poisonous soup over the LA basin. Only sixty miles away, that same shifting current left San Diego a desert city. Night City, straddling the area between NorCal and SoCal, was left with a mix of everything; sweltering dry summers and cool, dry winters, punctuated by peri- odic acid rainstorms and choking poison ground smog. Things were even worse further east, as rain no longer reached the inland areas of the Great Plains. These areas, save for those maintained by Petrochem for its vast fields of modified corn and wheat for CHOOH² processing, turned into barren dust bowls rivaling those of the late 1930s.

Muck, Mire, and Dead Sea Zones

Sloppy pollution controls in the latter half of the 20th century left permanent environmental scars on America. Massive acid-rain storm fronts battered the Midwest, poisoning drinking water and crops. Two entire regions of the Eastern seaboard were reduced to wasteland as power companies abandoned nuclear reactors during the Collapse and let their contents leak into the water table. Abortive "rock strikes'' from lunar-based mass drivers during the first Orbital War obliterated Tampa and Colorado Springs; the explosive impacts blasted millions of tons of dust and heat into the atmosphere to further aggravate global warming. Toxic spills on both coasts, the dumping of medical wastes from years of the Wasting Plague, all of these have contributed to a steep die-off of ocean life, including marine mammals, food fish, and the phytoplankton necessary to replenish Earth's oxygen supply.

The Wasting Plague

Plagues decimated large sections of the population as the AIDS epidemic of the 1990s escalated into the AIDS II crisis of the early 2000s. Stalling by poli- ticians and academic infighting among researchers delayed a cure so long that in the intervening years, the disease mutated to a more virulent form. Even worse, the Wasting Plague of 1999 further tore through the population, killing hundreds of thousands over the course of only a few years, followed only a decade later by the short-lived Carbon Plague of 2020, which targeted adults but left many younger people alive and orphaned.

L.A. Shakedown

To cap off several decades of ecological and socie- tal disaster, in late 1999 a 10.5 quake shattered Los Angeles, and the Pacific Ocean rushed in to inundate 35% of the city. An estimated 65,000 were killed. But there was more to come.