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{{trope}}
[[File:trashballearth2.png|link=WALL-E|frame|[[Hello, Dolly!|Put on your Sunday clothes...]]]]
{{quote|''In the year 9595''<br />
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On a futuristic Earth, or similar location, plants, animals, and naturally clean water are things of the past. Something terrible has happened -- [[Humans Are Bastards|civilization's negligence]] of the environment, a strange natural disaster, or even a combination of ''both'' -- to turn the world into a wasteland. This isn't (usually) the [[Earth-That-Was]], as the planet is still populated (usually ''overpopulated''), but its on its way there.
[[Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap|Real food]] is a luxury for only the rich while the general populace lives off of [[Future Food Is Artificial|synthetic food]], [[Food Pills]], or a [[Human Resources|new kind of meat]]. Forests are gone, replaced by concrete and steel jungles, more commonly known as cities, which are [[City Noir|dark]] and [[Used Future|dirty]]. If there is any undeveloped land still left, it's a desert wasteland, spoiled beyond recovery. What was once coastline is now underwater. If the story takes place/has a scene in a coastal city, expect to see the tops of skyscrapers sticking out of the water. Sometimes this is ''reversed'': seas become salt deserts, with the remains of beached ships scattered about. The problem of overpopulation may be solved with the legalization of suicide, or [[We Will Have Euthanasia in
The general populace is detached from the natural world, having had no experience with it. However, if a character has the chance to see what is left of the green, or what the world once was, expect it to be a powerful moment. If the world is really far gone, they may simply see it as strange or alien.
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* ''[[Alien]]'': Earth has been reduced to a over-polluted slum, and one character refers it to as a 'shithole.'
* ''[[WALL-E]]'': Earth is left almost completely lifeless after rampant consumerism, forcing humanity to leave on giant ships to the stars.
* ''[[Star Trek IV:
* ''[[Lost in Space]]'': The 1998 film has the family searching for a new home for humanity after Earth has sufferred irreversible ecological damage.
* ''[[The Running Man (
* ''[[
* ''[[Final Fantasy:
* ''[[Blade Runner]]'': Real animals are a luxury, and people are trying to get off of the dying Earth, which is polluted and irradiated.
* ''[[Judge Dredd]]'': A public service robot goes about proclaiming how good [[Squick|recycled food]] is for the environment, or what's left of it.
* ''[[9
* ''[[Avatar (
** The alternate opening from the extended cut shows that most people wear masks while walking outside. There is also a mention on how a species of tiger, which has been extinct outside of captivity, is making a comeback thanks to cloning.
* ''[[
** Random tidbit of information, Thorn's actor, Charlton Heston, really was crying, as Sol's actor Edward G. Robinson was dying of cancer. Only Heston knew.
* ''[[The Terminator]]'': A [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5XWE6Y10sw deleted scene] would have shown Kyle and Sarah, getting into a fight, and rolling into a wooded area. Kyle suffers a bit of a [[Heroic BSOD]], and starts to [[Manly Tears|cry]] when he sees how beautiful the world used to be.
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** They didn't.
* ''[[House of the Scorpion]]'': Somewhat implied. The Rio Grande is so polluted, that Tam Lin berates Matt when he simply just goes near it. The Gulf of California has been drained to a small river, and Matt finds skeletons of whales within it.
* [[Philip K. Dick]]'s ''Do Androids Dream Of Electic Sheep?'', filmed as ''[[Blade Runner]]''.
* Like its movie, ''[[Soylent Green]]'', the book ''Make Room! Make Room!'' (by [[Harry Harrison]]) features much of the features of this trope, sans the human meat part.
* L.E. Modesitt's ''The Forever Hero'' features this heavily. Earth is practically uninhabitable due to massive ecological disaster, and the few survivors are quickly dying off. The main character is one of the (very) surviving outside a city, and he ends up spending his life and career trying to restore the planet.
* In Asimov's short story ''2430 A.D.'' the entire earth's land area is covered by buildings which house the planets 15 ''trillion'' inhabitants. The oceans are empty, except for plankton which provide both food and oxygen. The plot revolves around plans to kill off the last non-human animals on earth.
* Invoked in [[Ursula K. Le Guin|Ursula K. LeGuin]]'s ''Hainish Cycle'' - Earth is described in ''The Dispossessed'' as having been reduced to a less-than-stellar state of existence.
** Supported by another Hainish novel, ''The Telling''. Although the book doesn't take place on Earth, the main character is a Terran, and through her we learn that in her time, Earth was both an ecological and social mess. Yet another early Hanish novella, ''The Word for World is Forest'', has humans stripping the peaceful forested planet Athshe of its valuable wood, having mined the Earth into barrenness.
** The {{spoiler|first incarnation of}} Earth in ''The Lathe of Heaven'' is wildly overpopulated, global warming appears to have disrupted the ecosystem (Mount Hood is said to be permanently snowless), and near-starvation appears to be the norm.
* This also happens at some points in Kim Stanley Robinson's ''[[Red Mars Trilogy]]'' - {{spoiler|the rampant population growth on Earth necessitates mass movement to Mars}}. However, this may not be as severe an example as several others on this page for various reasons, such as the fact that {{spoiler|it gets somewhat better by the end of the trilogy}}.
* Norman Spinrad's Anvilicious ''He Walked Among Us'' basically revolves around whether the future will be this, or Ecotopia. ([[Alternate Character Interpretation|Or both possible futures might just be the ravings of an insane comedian.]])
* In ''Beauty'' by [[Sheri S. Tepper]]. In the section of the book set in the future, the wilderness and all its animal species are wiped out (even the oceans) to make way for crop growing facilities and housing for the rapidly growing population. People live packed on top of each other in tiny appartment 'boxes' and eat artificially processed food.
* Bill McKibben's ''Eaarth'', which describes how we have irreversibly changed our planet with global warming, etc.
* ''[[Oryx and Crake]]'' and its companion novel ''The Year of the Flood'' have the ecosystem devastated by climate change and overpopulation. The near-total lack of any food not either based on soybeans or heavily genetically engineered is frequently mentioned.
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== Live-Action TV ==
* Subverted in the [[Speculative Documentary]] ''[[Life After People]]'', humans disappear suddenly, resulting in ecological disaster when no one repairs hazardous waste storage facilities and the like, but centuries later, there is surprisingly little evidence humans once ravaged the environment.
* In the [[Speculative Documentary]] ''[[
* ''[[Stargate SG
** This happened at least twice, though in the other instance the people on the planet had been kept in stasis to await the planet's recovery and when [[SG 1]] arrived {{spoiler|the planet was habitable but the leader of the planet was keeping this information hidden from everyone else.}}
** Another example would be the Tollan. Their homeworld was ravaged by a disaster caused by sharing technology with the inhabitants of a neighbouring planet (if I recall correctly). And the characters that turned up on earth had never seen any animals before. They move to somewhere nicer.
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== [[Music Videos]] ==
* The video for [[
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** [[Inferred Holocaust|Overpopulation isn't a problem anymore...]] side materials note that the human population after the war is only ''200 million''.
* ''[[Assassin's Creed]]'': Never directly seen, but implied by the emails in the first game.
* ''[[Battlefield (
* ''[[Dystopia (
* ''[[Star Fox 64]]'': The planet Zoness was once beautiful and lush, and served as a vacation spot, but later became a waste dump thanks to Andross's experiments. Also, in the intro, Corneria is mentioned to have been turned into a wasteland by Andross, but has recovered by the start of the game.
** According to the original game's manual, Venom once had "beauty second only to Corneria's" before Andross turned it into "a dark, polluted world".
* ''[[
* ''[[Deus Ex: Invisible War
** ''[[Deus Ex: Human Revolution
* ''[[Sid
* ''[[
** Actually, that's pre-packaged food made by the Combine. The Resistance living outside the cities use alternate food sources: while the Xenian lifeforms wrecked the planet's ecosystem, at least headcrabs and leeches are [[Squick|edible]] to humans and vortigaunts. It's unknown exactly what Combine soldiers and Elites are fed but it's likely they get the same saline solution used by Stalkers.
*** Ironically, both [[Portal (
* In the game ''[[Rogue Trip]]'', the Earth is an irradiated wasteland, and the only green spots left are vacation areas controlled by a thug named Big Daddy.
* In ''[[
* Subverted in ''Cuban Missile Crisis: The Aftermath'': much of the northern hemisphere is left as a nuclear wasteland forcing The Anglo-Americans, Franco-German, USSR, and China to relocate in the Southern Hemisphere. And they bring their monuments with them.
* ''[[
* ''[[Mega Man Zero]]'': the entire world was laid to ruin as a result of the Elf Wars before the start of the series. It isn't until the final game in the series that you see non-artificial nature.
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