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Originally Posted by kato13
HW clearly states that production is only enough for 1/4 of the population so that gets us to around 2-2.5%. I rounded down because 2850 is a little high when people would be starving and I assume there would be some other source of calories somewhere.
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As I said in an earlier post, populations close to the coast (and near the Great Lakes and other major waterways now that I come to think of it) would have more food options than those in inland, modern agriculture-intensive areas. It seems obvious to me that major depopulation would occur in some areas and not others. It may well be that some inland, severely drought-affected states may end up with absolutely catastrophic die-offs. The cultural and societal aftershocks in those areas would likely resonate down through the centuries. Other areas may well find that their populations have stabilised or even be on the increase by late 2001.
In the first decade of the new millenia the start of America's recovery is likely to come from a couple of dozen hubs, spreading out into the depopulated areas as the decades roll by. It may be 50 years or more until some areas regain enough population and infrastructure to be considered even partly "civilised" again. Hence the great campaign possibilities posited by Webstral when he started this thread.
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Originally Posted by Raellus
Granted, some parts of the country were not as badly effected by the '30s drought (Florida actually experienced a net gain in rainfall in 1934). Droughts don't often effect an entire continent equally adversely.
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I touched on this earlier in the thread. At no point does
Howling Wilderness say that the entire CONUS is equally affected by drought. Even in the late '80s/early '90s there was enough general knowledge about climate science in the western world for GDW's writers not to suggest anything so stupid. In fact I regard their drought scenario as quite clever. They didn't jump straight to the cliched nuclear winter scenario that goes with most nuclear war scenarios. They came up with a slightly more unforseen outcome. I know that many of my American friends would be all too familiar with the concept of droughts. Here in Australia that awareness is even stronger. My continent exists in a perpetual state of semi-drought. Really, our good times in terms of rainfall are mostly just the breaks between one drought and the next. Droughts are almost never continent-wide events. Just look at recent news reports. Here in the south-west of the Australian continent we've been experiencing a succession of droughts for years. In the north east of the continent, they're experiencing once-in-a-lifetime floods.
In the same way that the published material describes in many, many instances the efforts of MILGOV, CIVGOV and even New America to identify and gather up military and civilian experts to get remaining infrastructure up and running again, you can be absolutely certain that the remaining authorities would also be exploring all available food options, even those "outside the box". They'd be wracking the brains of a myriad of horticulturalists, biologists, aquaculturalists, you name it, trying to bootstrap any kind of viable food production option into existance. Also, it's just this sort of discussion we're having here that brings into sharp focus how important the meteorological data held in the satellite in
Satellite Down would be.
There would also be massive waves of migration. It's rare for humans to just stay in place and starve to death unless they are constrained from moving elsewhere. All through 2000 and 2001 you have large numbers of people travelling by whatever means they can to areas where more food is available (or unfortunately where there is a perception that more food is available). International borders would mean very little so I'm sure Americans would move into neighbouring parts of Canada where the rains hadn't entirely failed. In fact if Canada was able to maintain higher than subsistance levels of food production, the US would be it's most obvious trading partner. Even with the US in the shocking state it is in 2001, it's still the dominant regional military power, and the Canadians are dealing with a serious French-supported civil war in Quebec.
Look, I'm not above honest self-reflection from time to time. Maybe I'm lazy and too ignorant of life in the USA, resulting in me keeping to the published materials so I don't have to re-write HW from scratch. Maybe I'm hopelessly sentimental and that's why I cling to the published materials as a drowning man might cling to a floating piece of debris. But I think it's most likely that I just enjoy the mental stimulation of making all the existing pieces of the puzzle fit into the outcome that GDW presented for its game universe's future 300 years down the road.