The Fallen Continent: The Starving Time
The second special entry in the Fallen Continent series, examining the effects of the Nuclear Winter and greatest calamity to befall humanity since the Great Flood.
This is the thing which I have spoken unto Pharaoh: What God is about to do he sheweth unto Pharaoh.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt:
And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt; and the famine shall consume the land;
And the plenty shall not be known in the land by reason of that famine following; for it shall be very grievous.
Introduction
Tens of thousands of nuclear weapons were fired in anger during the Great War, destroying thousands of cities across the world. Most targets were in North America, Europe, East Asia, Australia, South Asia, and the Middle East, but even Africa and South America were selectively bombarded to prevent the possibility of their intervention following the war. Having learned the lessons of the Second World War, modern safety codes generally prevented the firestorms that consumed cities like Hamburg and Tokyo in the 1940s. In more than three hundred cities, however, conflagrations broke out that reached sufficient size to develop their own wind systems, with storm-force gales blowing in all directions. Nearly all of these firestorms occurred in developing countries, with dense, shoddy construction providing ample fuel for the fire without sufficient safety measures.
These firestorms lifted 50,000,000 tons of soot and ash into the lower atmosphere, enough to potentially plunge the world into darkness until all life would freeze and die. Fortunately, such a catastrophic scenario never came to pass. Nuclear war doomsayers like Carl Sagan would do well to remember the lesser-known inversion of Murphy’s Law: If everything must go wrong for something to occur, then don’t count on it happening. Of these 50,000,000 tons of soot, only one million of them rose high enough into the stratosphere to cause lasting effects, preventing the outright end of the world.
The Nuclear Winter
In the meantime, however, things were going to get very bad. The black clouds of soot which covered the earth blocked out the sun’s radiation for over a year, killing the fall harvest before it could be reaped. Late 2029 and 2030 were the “Black Years,” in which the Nuclear Winter reached its nadir. Much of the world really did believe during this time that the sun would never remerge and it was only a matter of time until everyone starved. Such pessimism led to mass unrest and total upheaval in the American frost belt, which reached the lowest recorded temperatures in the history of the contiguous United States.
With the spring of 2031 came the Black Rain, when most of the soot fell back to earth and temperatures began to recover. Agriculture was now possible, but conditions still remained worse than some of the most infamously cold years in the history of the northern hemisphere. The peasants of 1816, Europe’s “Year Without a Summer,” would be thankful for their harvests if they saw the fare their progeny enjoyed two hundred year and fifteen years later. Commercial farming was done for, but subsistence farming returned to the tropics and marginal temperate regions. By 2032, the weather was generally considered “stabilized,” and by 2036 subsistence-level yields returned to the world’s grain and corn belts.
As of 2059, the world has returned to an average temperature within a standard deviation of its prewar value. The worldwide ecosystem, however, is yet to recover and will likely never be fully the same. Countless habitats were destroyed to feed and house billions of refugees, and many species were hunted to extinction. Some say that the greatest toll of the Starving Time was the innocence or the humanity of the people who endured it. At least they can say, however, that they survived. At any rate, humanity was never at any serious risk of extinction.
The Great Famine
Throughout the nuclear winter and beyond, the world entered the direst famine it has ever suffered since the invention of agriculture. The collapse of the global economy alone would have led to the deaths of millions, and even countries untouched by the fires of war still lost countless people to starvation. Countries that should have been able to weather the storm, like Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, and Nigeria, instead collapsed into feuding statelets and rump governments under the strain of starvation, poverty, incoming refugees, and preexisting social unrest. The situation was even worse for the countries who participated in the war, whose institutions were left incapable of preventing the incoming famine. Over the course of only two years, more than two billion people worldwide perished to famine and its related evils, like violence and disease.
In America, this great calamity came to be known under a single name: the Starving Time. Authorities turned to desperate measures to feed people, along all steps of the food-making process: procuring the food, finding the people to procure it, preparing the food, and doling it out to the starving masses. Many factions, especially those out west where government authorities were still fairly strong, originated as local governments who split off in order to hoard food and supplies for themselves. Other factions, such as the State of South Dakota, followed this localist ideology to such extreme lengths that the government only existed as a mechanism to shelter and feed its leaders and immediate dependents, with no regard for the people whatever; any actual governance or rule of law they provided was incidental to the physical needs of the elite.
While leadership bickered over supplies, hoarding it at worst and trying in vain to feed an impossibly high number of people at best, the people took matters into their own hands. Breakaway factions fought over the scant few food supplies, while warlords recruited people with nothing to lose by promising them food and plunder taken from their enemies. By 2031, while the Nuclear Winter was still ongoing, most emergency food reserves were exhausted and the great dying began in earnest. People ate grass, leather, moss, seaweed (for those lucky few living in America’s remaining habitable coastlands), and hunted cats, dogs, and rats for food.
Many were forced to grapple with the question of cannibalism, euphemized as “the Donner Party Option” in memory of the infamous wagon train that suffered the same predicament. East of the Mississippi, “the Jamestown Option” was preferable. Indeed, the darkest days of Jamestown rang clear in people’s minds, as they are the source of the Starving Time moniker. Cannibalism was mostly limited to only the most desperate and those eaten were only the sick and the weak who had already perished. Some particularly cruel or insane warlords, however, began actively hunting men for food, or practiced cannibalism as a fear tactic or to instill loyalty in impressionable young soldiers by making them break a taboo.
In other places, people devoured stocks of seed grain held in reserve for the return of planting season. When that season finally came, there was nothing left to plant, and there were no remaining farmers with the know-how to facilitate a return to agriculture. Thus some regions that were not irradiated and could have supported healthy farmlands in happier times are now desolate and abandoned, white spots on the map.
Some regions recovered relatively quickly, rebounding shortly after the months of black rain. Others took years for hunger to break, as long as the late 2030s. Still others have never returned to some semblance of settled civilization, in the desolate outskirts of the Great Wastes and on the plains of the Badlands.
The Labor Question
More than half of the U.S. population is now employed in the agricultural sector, as it was at the dawn of the 20th Century. Yet not all those who till the soil do so as yeomen or homesteaders, or even as free workers in larger agricultural estates. Where agriculture is practiced, labor is most often provided in the form of neo-serfs or slaves. This is barely concealed by the warlord realms, and some openly acknowledge their actions. The Second American Republic in Bowling Green, Kentucky practices a caste system with different tiers of citizenship, while the Knights of the White Camelia in Greenville, Alabama is the only faction that’s tried an outright return to 19th century African chattel slavery.
Yet even in the largest and most civilized factions, they have ways of keeping laborers in the fields. The United States of America in Dodge City employs the infamous “Displaced Persons” system, depriving much of its population of their constitutional rights and allowing the state to put them to work if they feel so inclined. Other factions might exploit the antebellum prison system and keep a large incarcerated population. The most prolific system is plain and simple debt slavery.
Conclusions
From the combined causes of starvation, radiation poisoning, disease, emigration, and the violence that ensued from these things, the United States population fell from 360,000,000 to below 24,000,000—a level that hasn’t been seen since before the 1850 census. The birth rate finally surpassed the death rate in the 2050s, finally leading to population growth. Now America is experiencing some of its first immigration in decades, as the American diaspora begin trickle in from the far corners of the world and Aztlan facilitates a program of Hispanic colonization. There is a big country to fill in, and when the exclusion zones finally become habitable once more, the room for growth will expand. Yet it will take a very, very long time for the United States to recover from its Great War losses.
Index
Click here to read the master post of the series, with links at the bottom of the page to all other Fallen Continent entries.
How easy is it to travel across the ocean? And do the American diaspora who want to return know the state of America?