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| Why don't more GTA V citizens ride bikes? |
In real life, littering does irritate me, especially when the item being tossed is recyclable. Is your life so damn busy you can't hold on to that empty can for bit to drop it into a recycling bin? Or hand it over to a can collector? After some deep thinking, I think the reason it grates on me so much because Los Santos/Blaine County is a closed system. For all we know, it could be a biodome on Mars or trapped in a snow globe on the desk of Tobias Funke. Either way, the boundaries of the world in GTA V are clearly defined and there's a definite "Here be Dragons!" hard edges to the map. (Other countries and nationalities are name-checked but we never see those places.) So the fact that all the characters in GTA V seem to treat littering like it's no big deal is incongruous with what daily life should entail, which is a lot of the three R's: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
If there are no new resources to utilize for manufacturing, there's no chance to import goods to offset that fact. Island nations face this issue continually. Being isolated in the middle of an ocean tends to force that on a population.
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Los Santos' version of recycling is to loaded garbage truck that allows debris to drift all over the road.
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These nations need to import just about everything. It can make for a hardscrabble life, but imagine you live on one of those islands and without warning you're cut-off from rest of the world. Suddenly you're left with having to grow your own food (or catch it), build your own shelter, figure out how to clothe yourself (or decide if you really want to wear clothes because Ginger is a hottie), and a host of other aspects you never considered. In that moment of realization there would necessarily be a focus on making use of every last scrap of material you could lay your hands on. Where an empty water bottle becomes a rain collector, where a bra becomes a sling, and thick prescription glasses become your main method of starting a fire.
Either the characters in GTA V don't care about the fact they're trapped in this bubble or they just haven't realized it yet or they have realized it but make the best of it by assuming roles to while away the rest of their lives without losing their minds. I lean toward the first reason because as I pointed out in my previous comments, some time in GTA V's past kids under 18 years of age suddenly vanished so that should have been the first tip off that something wasn't quite right with the world. And they bloody well should care!
Take a few seconds to look at the overhead map of Blaine County/Los Santos.
Do you see that a good chunk of the habitable area is taken up by an arid desert?
Then look at the sprawling downtown and suburbs of Los Santos. Where do you think the bulk of Los Santos gets it's water?
As evidence, during the course of the events that take place in GTA V, it's likely from the local reservoirs but those are obviously dwindling. Without snow melt from the mountainous areas, there's no way the current rainfall levels will keep those reservoirs filled or feed ground water stores.
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Survival instincts have softly kicked
in for some citizens. These two are
searching for celebrity memorabilia, but it's a start! |
And what happens when a landscape is robbed of water? Well, there's a heavy risk of desertification. If a high percentage of GTA V's island nation is already at the precipice of being a full-blown desert, it wouldn't take much to transform the other parts, especially because drought conditions would exponentially increase the risk of wildfires, obliterating life and property across wide swathes of Los Santos/Blaine County. All the vegetation that holds the soil in place would suddenly be gone and any minor rain shower or breeze could create massive flooding and the kind of dust storms that made Oklahoma a veritable "living Apocalypse" back in the 1930's.
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Zero snow pack means zero snow melt to fill reservoirs and keep the population
from dying of thirst. Rain is great, but it's a poor substitute for a mountain/glacial supply just ask California! |
But no one seems to care. And these are all people that are living in this world. They're clawing over one another for an easy buck or pissing away their last remaining years clogging up the air with CO2 and dumping their garbage where they stand. Would anyone take up the mantle of installing wind farms everywhere to power the electrical grid? Water conservation? New thinking around what's necessary and what's not, like everyone riding bikes instead of driving pell-mell around the city with no particular destination in mind? Have these denizens just accepted their fate and aren't willing to confront what needs to be accomplished to ensure their survival and what dramatic changes need to be undertaken?
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| Don't get started on how Los Santos/Blaine County handle sewage. While touring the coastline in a mini-sub, there are loads of pipes that terminate suddenly... and they ain't spewing rainbows. |
Come to think of it, could the entire game just be Rockstar commenting on real-world socio-political battling that takes place around climate change? That every country wants the rest of the world to go "green" so that they don't have to? That the developing world is told how they must do things to limit CO2 emissions while CO2 emissions from the developed world have never been higher and the Kyoto Protocols lie in tattered pieces? That we should all be demanding our governments stop allowing CO2 to belch into the atmosphere and cancel subsidies and massive tax breaks to oil companies? That we bike and walk more? That this fragile planet of ours is also a closed system and no amount of magical thinking will bring us salvation in outerspace and other planets? That we should better damn well look after things here rather than slowly raise sea levels; spark mass extinction through neglect or satiating greed; force millions or billions from their homes; poison our drinking water, choke the all life from the ocean?
Maybe Rockstar didn't have that in mind when they built the world of GTA V, but it's what I'm thinking every time a GTA V discards a coffee cup with no regard for what effect that might bring.
- Aaron Simmer
Follow @EmpireArmchair
Addendum May 4, 2015: After some more hours of playing GTA V it's worth updating this piece with additional information.
On the radio, there's mention an off-hand reference to oil beneath Los Santos, which was followed closely by a report of a planned cull (by poisoning!) of the deer population.
The ready supply of oil might be why everyone seems so relaxed about the future. "Hey, everything'll be a-okay because, hey, oil! Life as-is, no changes necessary!" The fact all that refining and burning of fossil fuels is warming the environment -- and thereby increasing people's thirst (for water) -- just doesn't stick in anyone's mind. Everyone's running around in this dying world; LARPing through some kind of Crime Utopia.
When apex predators are pushed out of an area, either by the pressures of human expansion or some other naturally-occuriing reason, the populations they kept under control can explode. That very thing has happened in this case. Poisoning the excess deer is a terrible idea for a number of reasons but the chief one is that deer carcasses laden with toxins will only serve to expand a web of death as carrion birds get involved'; the poison leaches in to the soil, affecting plants then honeybees. And without honeybees good damn luck trying to pollinate crops.
Playing as Michael, I've just purchased a dock, which appears to have opened some missions to go try cleaning up toxic waste dumped into the ocean. Of course, in the span of ten minutes, I switched characters a couple of times and came back to Michael just as he throws a coffee cup on on the ground.
