How the Weather Can Cause a War: Building Biomes

Everything is connected.

This isn’t just a metaphysical statement, it’s a biological and ecological one.

Say in your world you have a mountain. Lone mountains are very rare; they’re almost always part of a mountain range. Well, when clouds run into mountain ranges, they get pushed up higher into the sky, which makes them drop all of their water on one side of the range, leaving the other side high and dry (this is called a rain shadow, for those who are curious).

Rain shadows can be fairly small or as large as a continent.

One side of the range has an abundance of water, while the other doesn't have enough. Maybe there’s tension between people who live on either side of the mountains. Maybe they’ve developed a healthy trade relationship between ranches on one side and farming on the other. Maybe there’s a migratory species that has to cross the mountains to the wet side to breed every year. How does this journey affect them?

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In this very short example, just the presence of mountains has impacted the politics, economy, and evolution of the surrounding area. Just think how much more impact a fully formed environment would have!

Every location has a biome, or an overarching climate that has similar plants and animals across it. You live in a biome! Go ahead, look it up!

Every biome has two important aspects to it: how much rain there is and what the temperature is like. The species that evolve in each biome are specially adapted to that combination of temperature and water.

You know this intuitively too -- If you took a camel (from a place with high temperature and little water) and put it in a tropical rainforest (a place with high temperature and lots of water) it would seem out of place.

Think about the biome that your story is set in.

• How much water is there? Is it a scarce resource that plants and animals need to preserve? Or do they receive so much that they have to deal with flooding?

• What’s the temperature like? Do animals need to keep their body heat or cool down?

• How will people who have lived in that area for centuries live differently than newcomers?

• Is the biome large or small? Is your culture connected to others from different climates? How does this affect what resources they have?

And as you might imagine, having this huge diversity of biomes on Earth has led to an incredible, nearly unimaginable diversity of plants and animals! So go forth and create! There’s a good chance Nature has come up with something even stranger.