Here is the first chapter (the de facto prolog) to The Brangus Rebellion. I hope you find it helpful as an introduction to the conditions leading to the North American Union.
We brought it on ourselves.
True, humankind survived. This time. But have we learned anything?
The origins of Earth’s Collapse in the late twenty-first century can be traced to more than a hundred years earlier, notably to the remarkable successes of capitalism, consumerism, and mass-marketing techniques that flowered after World War II. These forces, based as they were on notions of perpetual exponential growth, took only a generation to drive human society into an era of shortages: shortage of air to dilute combustion products, shortage of fuel, of fresh water, of arable land, of genetic diversity, of peace and privacy. Attempts to reconcile these shortages with prevailing ideologies led, in turn, to the period we now call the Crazy Years, when public debate was increasingly consumed by the efforts of various power groups to ignore, deny, and distract from the plain truth: untrammeled consumerism applied on a finite planet must, in a brief time, lead to tragedy.
The latent tragedies showed themselves in the decades of the Civil Wars, spanning roughly the last half of the twenty-first century. Systemic governance failures, aggravated by worsening climate change, spawned a worldwide turn to violent and demagogic politics. Old grudges resurfaced, scapegoats were sought and found. Arms for local rebellions became more readily available. Three centuries later, it is pointless to detail who rebelled against whom in those years or with what outcomes. What is clear is that, during that time, almost everywhere on Earth, people warred perpetually with their kin and neighbors. Civil wars tend to be more brutal and destructive than those with strangers; these wars fit that pattern. By 2100, the human population had shrunk by about half from its all-time high in the 2050s. The damage to non-human life on Earth was even worse, with uncounted species driven to extinction.
During the wars, climate warming went from bad to worse. Along with the combat, these changes drove massive refugee movements, mostly away from the equatorial regions. Millions perished in these migrations, but millions more survived, remaking the ethnic mix in the Northern Hemisphere.
Early in the 2100s, as global warfare sputtered out, the climate delivered a deadly surprise. Human forcing had pushed the Earth’s systems of oceanic and atmospheric circulation too far. In a mere decade, these flipped away from the stable, “cool” state that they had occupied for millions of years. Flow patterns broke up and reformed in new configurations, leading to a sudden shift to a hotter stable state. Global land temperatures rose by 5° C virtually overnight. Life on Earth baked. Crop failure, thirst, and starvation became the norm. Social organization foundered, making the terrible conditions worse. Over the next few decades (now called the Bad Days), more than nine-tenths of the Civil Wars’ survivors died, and humankind’s vaunted civilization collapsed into scattered communities of subsistence farmers, each waging a drawn-out but usually losing battle with the elements.
It was in this unpromising soil that the North American Union was planted and grew. In this, it was served by three advantages. By global standards, the climate of North America’s eastern seaboard was benign, being survivable by humans from roughly the Chesapeake Bay northward into what once was Canada. By pure chance, the region surrounding Trenton had suffered little during the Civil Wars. And through foresight and planning, massive digital archives were stored at the University there, along with machinery and materials for many kinds of manufacturing. The staff of the University shrank but survived, propagating a core of essential skills but also a worldview—one scarred by disaster and entirely different from that of the pre-Collapse days. From this little core of practical imagination came Eapy Fox, the “Mother of the Union,” and her egalitarian, collectivist, ecology-attuned system of government. It was Fox who worked out the rules for small interlocking townships (twps), with specialized functions, as the fundamental administrative units in Union governance. Within two decades, by judiciously exploiting their ability to re-create selected technology from the pre-Collapse, the “toop soup” that makes up the North American Union evolved from a clutch of like-minded farmers surrounding the University into a durable nation-state. At the time, it was, and so far as we know, it remains, the only such state in the world.
A century and a half after Eapy Fox, the Union provides security and health, if not wealth or luxury, to its twenty million citizens. Geographically, it has spread up the east coast of North America and far into the old Canada, reaching away from the ocean almost to the boundaries of the Western Waste. But around its edges, both physical and metaphorical, there remain those who do not accept its dominion or its philosophy.
- By Patri twp UniHist Gibbs, from twp UniHist Ph.D. qualifying exam, July 2335.