Environment
In the immediate aftermath of the war, the Cursed Earth was best described as Hell. Little grew and radiation pits were everywhere. Much of it was lawless with tribes of mutants and renegades. As such, from the war until about 2100, no one crossed the Cursed Earth by land.
After Dredd's mission to MC2, the Cursed Earth seems to have been opened up somewhat with settlement by MC1 colonists and some ground based shipping (at least between Mega-City 1 and Texas City).
In the North there is still areas of forest and woods (the hunting party) and, as of Origins, the Cursed Earth is notably greener than it has been in the past. Given the extended period of time since the war, the Cursed Earth is presumably in the midst of a (very) slow environmental recovery with a desert-like environment.
The Atomic War was once described as the worst disaster since the death of the dinosaurs, and therefore it is likely that any proper recovery will take centuries and the return of bio-diversity, millennia if not millions of years.
In 2100, it possessed a "Death Belt" - a vast field of floating rocks and debris, inhabited by vicious flying rats. At some unknown point, the Death Belt was ended by transporting its central lodestone to Deadworld (Megazine #286). (This story was partly to explain why the Death Belt had ceased to be seen after the early Dredds, with the narrator even saying "What? You don't remember the Death Belt?")
Read more about this topic: Cursed Earth
Famous quotes containing the word environment:
“Autonomy means women defining themselves and the values by which they will live, and beginning to think of institutional arrangements which will order their environment in line with their needs.... Autonomy means moving out from a world in which one is born to marginality, to a past without meaning, and a future determined by others—into a world in which one acts and chooses, aware of a meaningful past and free to shape one’s future.”
—Gerda Lerner (b. 1920)
“Modern man’s capacity for destruction is quixotic evidence of humanity’s capacity for reconstruction. The powerful technological agents we have unleashed against the environment include many of the agents we require for its reconstruction.”
—George F. Will (b. 1941)
“The poorest children in a community now find the beneficent kindergarten open to them from the age of two-and-a-half to six years. Too young heretofore to be eligible to any public school, they have acquired in their babyhood the vicious tendencies of their own depraved neighborhoods; and to their environment at that tender age had been due the loss of decency and self-respect that no after example of education has been able to restore to them.”
—Virginia Thrall Smith (1836–1903)