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The inhabitants of this place are known as the Bokuchi, which is the name of one of the original tribes which settled here more than a thousand years ago. The name itself, which means "Clan of the Walnut Trees" is meaningless today; even the trees that gave these people their names and used to thrive here in ancient times have mostly disappeared, displaced by other species.
The Bokuchi culture looks very strange for us dwellers of the last part of the Industrial Age. The Bokuchi have inherited a world that, after centuries of plundering, has been left almost devoid of viable mineral ores and fossil hidrocarbons. Oil and natural gas are no longer accessible to humans, and with them have gone the energy, the heavy machinery and the techniques we used to extract and process massive amounts of resources from the Earth. The Bokuchi have raw solar energy and biomass, iron and some copper, plus a few organic plastic substances and clay; of silver and gold there are barely traces except for what can be salvaged from archaeological sites. The technical savoir faire of the past has not been lost altogether, but has little application. Any Bokuchi electrical engineer knows how to build a telephone network, but you can't have a network stretching over any significant distance when insulated copper wire is worth its weight in (20th century) silver.
How did humanity reach this state? As predicted by some and fully known to a few irresponsible ones, human civilization suffered its first collapse when the world's oil reserves dropped below the 50% mark. The collapse seemed to occur in slow-motion, but it couldn't be stopped without terrible costs once started. By 2015 CE the major economico-political groups of the planet where at each others' throats, fighting for the black lifeblood of industry. Even though the oil reserves were abundant yet, it was increasingly uneconomical to pump them out. The last drop of commercially viable oil was extracted around 2035, somewhere in the Middle East. After that, pumping each barrel became more expensive than its market price could ever be; soon you had to spend more energy extracting oil from the ground than you could obtain by burning it, once at the surface. The major countries needed energy for weapons manufacturing (to protect their energy sources!) and food production. A few decades late, they chose the latter over the former, but control was already lost; Nature itself had taken the matter in its own hands. At the beginning of the 21st century, one fifth of the global population didn't have enough to eat; fifty years later, one third of them were starving, and another third was at the brink. Since the national state had proven inefficient, society reorganized quickly around corporations, the only surviving institutions, managed by a few powerful characters. They gave protection to the luckier 10% of the human population, supporting and protecting them for a while within islands of relative resource wealth, and fiercely keeping the rest of humanity out.
In 2081 CE a stray comet nucleus hit the Earth, unannounced, with the force of a million megatons of TNT. The comet hit the southern coast of Spain, near Cádiz. In a flash of light and fire it erased Cádiz, Huelva, Sevilla, half of Portugal, and Tanger. Its shock wave lay waste to Spain and Morocco. The tsunami entered the Mediterranean and swept over Gibraltar, Sicilly, Corse, Cyprus, Greece, the Middle East; most of it travelled through the Atlantic, and a few hours later it struck the Gulf of Mexico, Central America, Venezuela, Cuba, the Antilles and the United States. At least one hundred million people died that day, but the worst was still to come. For the impact had raised so much dust and ashes that the Sun was blocked for several months, and the fertile lands of America had been sunk or washed away, so food became scarce everywhere, even for the few who could pay for it. Moreover, global climate patterns became chaotic due to the interaction between the effects of the comet impact and the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In a matter of decades, temperate zones became deserts.
Humanity was almost lost, but soon the human spirit of cooperation managed to emerge. National states were long dissolved and the neo-feudal communities founded around corporations had lost their power, but somehow new societies appeared. We know little of these, since they kept no records; they consisted of small towns, sometimes joined in federations, mastered by local rulers. They still clung to the past, and some tried to resurrect the greatness and power of the old nations, but soon they must acknowledge their failure. Human population started to decrease, reaching the levels of late 20th century around 2125, as is reckoned. And this was not all. For some reason, maybe the ecological chaos brought about by the comet impact, climate patterns shifted again, becoming colder and colder; by the middle of the 23rd century, if the Bokuchi paleoclimatologists are right, mean temperatures had decreased about 4ºC. This micro-Ice Age last two hundred years, and during this lapse humanity left the higher latitudes, unable to keep itself warm.
The glaciers receded slowly, and around 2400 CE humanity entered a new phase, where new communities were formed on an ecological basis, to try and manage the scarce resources left. The Bokuchi historians (unaware of the pun) named this period the Green Peace. There was much room in the world, now that the high latitudes were reachable again, and the human race had shrunk and slowed down, as it were, so there were no major conflicts, least of all wars, for a thousand years.
During the last centuries of the Green Peace, the people started to realize that the weather was getting colder again. The scientists, armed with rudimentary instruments but with their methods intact, measured the change for fifty years, and concluded a new Ice Age was coming, of which the previous micro-Age had been just the first timid push. Humanity once again started to retreat.
The Ice Age lasted fourteen thousand years.