Amongst the many things a good AH author must keep in mind to produce a good work, we can all probably agree that an eye for detail and a talent for world-building are perhaps the most important. Sometimes these twin pillars of good AH writing may manifest in how the author approaches Culture and Arts within his AH, from looking at what Tolstoi might have written in a Russia where Constantine was Tsar or what The Beatles might have done in a post-fascist Britain, to figuring out what kind of cars Ford sells in a world in which the communists are winning and Kalashnikov Kars are the cheapest option available internationally.
But there's also the big picture, and here's where the topic of The Environment comes up. Now, lots of AH just involves affairs developing on a political or socio-economic plane, so whether Kennedy lives longer or Gorbachev is ousted or the UK goes to war with Turkey over Cyprus doesn't affect things on the macro level of having icebergs melt faster and Venice sinking by 1999.
And yet there's some subsets of AH that should take that sort of thing into consideration. The famous For All Time, for instance, does explore this somewhat, if only as window-dressing, and there are mentions of a mini-Nuclear Winter of sorts by the 1970s, with ice forming around Venice after Korea is nuked to oblivion, as well as mentions of events like droughts and starvation, due to all casual way in which atomic bombs are employed in that world, and the way infrastructure is breaking down in that world.
Looking at AH we have in SLP, we can wonder: does the Socialist British Empire that results from Ed Thomas' Fight and Be Right-verse fuck up the environment as much as the IOTL USSR did, maybe even drying up Lake Victoria just like the Soviets did with the Aral Sea? Does the much earlier development of Imperial China in David Wostyn's With Iron and Fire mean that global warming becomes a problem much earlier? And let's not even begin to talk about Nazi Victory TLs, or super-destructive wars like the Anglo/American-Nazi War of Festung Europa, which devastates large swathes of Europe.
So we have two types of AH in which Environmental Disaster should concern us: the Dystopias and the Utopias, or to put it more accurately, the ones in which things "go better", and we have things like "modernization" and "industrialization" on an earlier and grander scale than IOTL.
In one, we have irresponsible regimes either using nuclear weapons willy-nilly, buiding dangerous infrastructure projects like poorly regulated super-Chernobyls, drying the Mediterranean, flooding the Sahara, building a bridge between Alaska and Siberia without considering the possible damage, etc.
But the alternative could be just as dangerous: imagine a world in which Rome harnesses the power of Steam, or any one in which we have an earlier 18th-19th century style industrialization, or one in which China joins the Europeans in the 19th Century, with all that entails. Because, what does that entail? Factories, pollution, extraction of certain natural resources, perhaps more use of coal and earlier use of oil, development of certain industries, chemical industries, plastics, steel, etc. etc. And if we have certain type of developments, we have to consider what happens with demographic development, with agriculture and cattle raising. Does the increase in population mean more livestock, and thus more deforrestation and more dangerous emissions of methane to the atmosphere?
Finally, there is one issue that we're only beginning to understand in the last few years, and that is the problem of Sperm Count Decline.
If we follow the article's logic -and the science is not 100% certain on this, to be fair-, a world in which China industrializes in the 19th Century could be one in which Global Sperm Count starts declining in the 1950s or 1930s, and a world in which Rome, by some miracle, has some sort of Steampunk Industrial Revolution, might not see a Roman on the Moon by the 9th Century, but rather Human Extinction by the 7th.
Which is, in itself, a fascinating scenario.
But there's also the big picture, and here's where the topic of The Environment comes up. Now, lots of AH just involves affairs developing on a political or socio-economic plane, so whether Kennedy lives longer or Gorbachev is ousted or the UK goes to war with Turkey over Cyprus doesn't affect things on the macro level of having icebergs melt faster and Venice sinking by 1999.
And yet there's some subsets of AH that should take that sort of thing into consideration. The famous For All Time, for instance, does explore this somewhat, if only as window-dressing, and there are mentions of a mini-Nuclear Winter of sorts by the 1970s, with ice forming around Venice after Korea is nuked to oblivion, as well as mentions of events like droughts and starvation, due to all casual way in which atomic bombs are employed in that world, and the way infrastructure is breaking down in that world.
Looking at AH we have in SLP, we can wonder: does the Socialist British Empire that results from Ed Thomas' Fight and Be Right-verse fuck up the environment as much as the IOTL USSR did, maybe even drying up Lake Victoria just like the Soviets did with the Aral Sea? Does the much earlier development of Imperial China in David Wostyn's With Iron and Fire mean that global warming becomes a problem much earlier? And let's not even begin to talk about Nazi Victory TLs, or super-destructive wars like the Anglo/American-Nazi War of Festung Europa, which devastates large swathes of Europe.
So we have two types of AH in which Environmental Disaster should concern us: the Dystopias and the Utopias, or to put it more accurately, the ones in which things "go better", and we have things like "modernization" and "industrialization" on an earlier and grander scale than IOTL.
In one, we have irresponsible regimes either using nuclear weapons willy-nilly, buiding dangerous infrastructure projects like poorly regulated super-Chernobyls, drying the Mediterranean, flooding the Sahara, building a bridge between Alaska and Siberia without considering the possible damage, etc.
But the alternative could be just as dangerous: imagine a world in which Rome harnesses the power of Steam, or any one in which we have an earlier 18th-19th century style industrialization, or one in which China joins the Europeans in the 19th Century, with all that entails. Because, what does that entail? Factories, pollution, extraction of certain natural resources, perhaps more use of coal and earlier use of oil, development of certain industries, chemical industries, plastics, steel, etc. etc. And if we have certain type of developments, we have to consider what happens with demographic development, with agriculture and cattle raising. Does the increase in population mean more livestock, and thus more deforrestation and more dangerous emissions of methane to the atmosphere?
Finally, there is one issue that we're only beginning to understand in the last few years, and that is the problem of Sperm Count Decline.
If we follow the article's logic -and the science is not 100% certain on this, to be fair-, a world in which China industrializes in the 19th Century could be one in which Global Sperm Count starts declining in the 1950s or 1930s, and a world in which Rome, by some miracle, has some sort of Steampunk Industrial Revolution, might not see a Roman on the Moon by the 9th Century, but rather Human Extinction by the 7th.
Which is, in itself, a fascinating scenario.
