The only AAAs that really don't care or actively ravage the environment are S-K and MCT, and MCT's has mostly been focused on Tsimshian. Japan's rise to power was built on cheap, clean energy since the early 2000s. One of the most indispensable corporations in the world is an entirely renewable and clean energy producer, and Shadowrun has also had fusion power plants since 2018.
Logistics isn't really as big as it is IRL. There's no massive stream of shipping from China to the U.S. and Europe and transcontinental shipping in North America because it's not necessary compared to the genuine risks to shippers. No one is getting cheap plastic shit made in China shipped to the UCAS heartland for cheap. It doesn't exist in Shadowrun, in large part because China and the U.S. do not exist in Shadowrun in anything resembling IRL.
There are plenty of reasons why things don't get covered, mostly because that's not the focus of the books. Target: Wastelands came out almost 20 years ago and it presented a bleak picture of the environment that Hazard Pay followed up on. In Shadowbeat, the OOC text describes how any decker could make a realistic deepfake video; by SR4 anyone could. It's just background noise, though. It doesn't really factor in how people run their games much and, frankly, there's nothing 99% of PCs can or will do that is going to change it.
From the last time I posted anything significant to this forum:
From
Target: Wastelands (September 16, 2062).
Page 9:In cities, air may be severely polluted not only by trans- portation but also by burning fossil fuels (oil and coal) in generating stations, factories. office buildings, and homes and by the incineration of garbage. The massive combustion produces tons of ash, soot, and other particulates responsible for the gray smog of cities like New York, along with enormous quantities of sulfur oxides.
Google environmental photos from the '60s and '70s, basically pre-EPA & Clean Water Act, and that's the cities.
Seattle has acid rain and still gets ash and shit from Mt. Rainier, which speaks volumes when you consider the natural geography of the sprawl. Then consider that's just one GGD volcano. Three GGD volcanoes are within line of sight of Cara'Sir (Portland) and also to the east (two are north in Washington/SSC).
> Air pollution can get really bad in some parts of the world. Breathing masks are considered port of your everyday wardrobe in cities like LA. Where a "bad air" day can force nearly everyone to stay Inside and you hear regular reports of people dropping dead just from breathing the air for too long.
> Big Sir
And Tenochtitlán is way worse.
Page 10:Oil spilled accidentally or flushed from tankers and off-shore rigs (over a million metric tons annually) pollutes beaches and smothers birds, fish and plant life. In 2058, the 34 different oil spills reported worldwide Involved a total of 29 million gallons of oil (and those are just the reported ones). In addition to its direct damage to wildlife, oil takes up fat-soluble poisons like DDT. allowing them to be concentrated in organisms that ingest the oil-contaminated water and passed up along the food chain. Both DDT and PCBs are still manufactured in many parts of the world and are now widespread in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. In addition, tarry oil residues are encountered throughout the Atlantic, along with styrofoam and other plastic rubbish. Plastic bits litter sections of the Pacific as far north as Amchitka Island near Athabaska. Garbage, soHd industrial wastes, and sludge formed in sewage treatment are commonly dumped into oceans.
Big Sur is a disaster area on par with the Scottish Fringe Toxic Zone, a totally
dead area of the North Sea, and part of Florida's coast (presumably the gulf coast) is described as comparable.
A survey done in 2058 by the UCAS Environmental Protection Agency found that 60 percent of that nation's lakes, rivers, and estuaries were too polluted for such basic uses as drinking, fishing and swimming. The pollutants found included grit, asbestos, phosphates and nitrates, mercury, lead. caustic soda and other sodium compounds, sulfur and sulfuric add, oils and petrochemicals. Surveys conducted in the Confederation of American States revealed similarly alarming amounts of pollution.
Anyway, all of the valuable parts of Tsimshian have made it a used-up toxic hellhole (Thanks, Mitsuhama!). The Yucatán Protectorate is equally ravaged by over a decade of brutal warfare, which has plenty of mundane toxic contamination, but also tons of toxic and blood magic contamination, and Aztechnology's use of outright chemical weapons. Borinquen's still fucked from Sirrurg and Hurricane Donald. Outside of the Yucatan peninsula situation, Aztlan was basically struck by Pestilence during and after the Dragon Civil War by Sirrurg and just bad karma (*ahem*). T:W doesn't paint a pretty portrait, and things have only gotten worse in the twenty years since. The UCAS's approach to natural resources is reclamation because it's used up everything naturally occurring that isn't tightly controlled by a combination of brutal laws and merciless weaponry. And the CAS is even more ruthlessly capitalist than the UCAS is. The UCAS has serious toxic and/or magical contaminations in Boston, Chicago, DeeCee, and Seattle. Los Angeles was a magical and toxic mess before half of the Los Angeles basin and surrounding mountains sank into the ocean or just vanished. The Mojave is still, AFAIK, teeming with mutants and its own crazy magic. The Central Valley is ... who knows. It can't be pleasant since PCC wants it and IRL agriculture in that region is already a nightmare. T:W touches on that too. Spoiler Alert: agribusiness hasn't gotten any nicer or cleaner in Shadowrun than it is IRL.
Mutants were introduced in the CFS sourcebook, but they're everywhere. T:W goes into toxic waster, nuclear waste (including, maybe especially, the low-grade shit that can't be weaponized but can still cause damage), magical contamination, and even touches on mental contamination. There's also a nice mention of how areas like the Barrens have high incidences of birth defects, deformations, infant mortality, sterility, miscarriages, etc. and how it particularly affects orks.
That's just in the first chapter. It's an interesting book.
I was just wondering how much of the land was still forested or "natural" as opposed to urban or suburban.
More "reclaimed" because it was abandoned for lack of use, lack of resources, or by government policies. The sprawls are where all the people are, which is a result of government and corporate decisions and needs that have occurred through the multiple apocalypse-level events and crisis periods that have struck most before 2050 but also everything that has happened in the game. Unlike the Black Death, which was a huge leveler of the general welfare and standard of living for Europeans after it killed a third to half of the population, people weren't able to spread out as much because subsistence agriculture isn't a thing and only one or two percent of the population will ever be needed. There's no landed peasants, petty nobility, etc. inheriting land and space; the corporations took it all. That was the whole point of the Resource Rush that began in 2002 when the U.S. privatized massive amounts of public and trust lands and it never ended. Just because they own it doesn't mean they have to use it, or use it for anything as trivial as housing. They are all about minimizing costs but not in the way corporations do now in socializing negative externalities like employees needing to commute, eat, and have shelter (although tech companies are starting to follow the cyberpunk model of global capitalism, the one that didn't change like it did IRL in 1973, by building affordable corporate housing – of course, over what was left of L.A. wetlands and worthless shit like nature). Since the megacorps did take on those externalities, they benefit from the arcology model where they can control as much of their employees and even consumers as possible and minimize externalities by keeping commutes down by building up in high-density spaces, automating everything, using landless production methods for agriculture, etc.
There's a lot of "wasted" and undeveloped and underdeveloped lands across the areas IRL that comprise the Seattle Metroplex. The population is the same as it is now (officially), but that just means that the distribution is population islands separated by natural or unnatural barrens and connected by highways – highways controlled by go-gangs that through at least the early 2050s and I think even into the early '60s used to routinely kick the asses of the Metroplex Guardsmen sent out to fight them by the dumbass colonel in charge. It was a 45-minute drive from the city of Seattle to the city of Puyallup IRL 15 years ago. In the 2080 Seattle Metroplex, there's not a lot in between that you would ever need or want to get off the highway for, not just because there's less stuff there; but because much if not the vast majority of what is there will try to rob, kill, and eat you, and not necessarily in that order.
Now, expand that to
THE ENTIRE CONTINENT and factor in all the shit I quoted or posted above. That's how "green" North America is.
With regard to Tír Tairngire, I'm pretty comfortably say from my office in Portland that the population is as or more concentrated than it is now, which is already pretty much the Portland Tri-Met region and
everything else. Add in Salem and Eugene and the suburbs and small communities between the three that comprises the I-5 corridor, Bend in the middle of nowhere, and Newport and Astoria on the coast. That's it. Everything else was to be protected or regrown or exploited in some other fashion. It's super green. There is no one in the eastern third of the state.
Coming from New Mexico, which is over 40% undeveloped federal and state lands (forests, parks, monuments, BLM, military and civilian installations, and that doesn't even include the reservations), it's also an area of uninhabited lands or low habitation and concentrated conurbations like Albuquerque-Rio Rancho and Las Cruces (which is within spitting distance of El Paso, Texas). Arizona's the same way. Same as Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Colorado, and eastern California. Los Angeles is a massive sprawl that would have to be compressed by necessity and force before the PCC came in, and then a bunch the basin sank. So it went east again, but there are functional limits to the sprawl and it still stops before San Bernardino. The CFS, northern and central California, is the same way. There's San Francisco and everything else. Sacramento was mostly an afterthought for decades before Saito, his ouster, Crash 2.0, and other events that shrank the CFS to its current size.
You could legit run a Mad Max campaign across most of North America where it feels like there is no civilization left because in a lot of ways, outside the sprawls, there really isn't. There's a whole chapter on overland smuggling across North America in
Target: Smuggler Havens that was pretty much written with that in mind. There are descriptions that could be summed up as "if you make it across the border alive, stick to these routes, and don't go sightseeing." There's a reason why there are cargo zeppelins and sky pirates in Shadowrun: because they're logistically necessary for stuff that you can't put on autonomous drone-piloted semi-tractor "trains" that tear ass across what's left of the interstate highway system at average speeds of over 100mph (I want to say 180kph) or, maybe,
MAYBE, railroads. Those get robbed and destroyed. Outside the sprawls it really is the wild west.
