Starfield’s Earth hides a devastating environmentalist lesson

polygon.com:

Visiting Earth in Starfield is a rather sad homecoming. I land my ship in the state of Florida and it looks nothing like the state I know. Rather than seeing the open ocean, twisting mangroves, and lush tropical plants, a desert covers the land as far as the eye can see. I, a Xenobiologist, scan the planet and see there’s no flora or fauna left; only basic Earth minerals remain. The planet is quite literally a husk of its former self.

Earth’s dismal state doesn’t come as a surprise in the game. Before I even go to our solar system or see the planet on the map, a man at a kiosk on a more prosperous planet tells me that people do their best to avoid the system and that no one wants to be assigned to live there. The only occupied planet in the solar system is Mars, and its inhabitants live in a fully contained and sealed industrial facility, like packed fish in a dusty can. Apparently, Mars is preferable to trying to set up shop on Earth, and I can see why.

As I use my spaceship to quickly hop from continent to continent, the landscape looks barren. To walk around, I need to suit up fully because there’s no oxygen anymore. Although I’m aware that a handful of monuments withstood the destruction, every continent looks just as desolate as the next, more or less. If I’m lucky, I might happen upon a meteor crash site or some mud flats, but by and large, it’s nothing but dust and dirt.

Starfield takes place in the year 2330. In the course of the game, players learn the Earth’s magnetosphere collapsed following the invention of the grav drive, a technology that enables spaceships to travel faster than light. Following the collapse of Earth, several nations banded together to start a mass evacuation of the planet. In the world