Late K Lunacy

Set in a Midwestern American university, apocalyptic environmental events lead us to the 2030s as climate change, the breakdown of systems, and a global pandemic take the world Over the Cliff. Science lends frightening authenticity as the story unfolds, while Bernard challenges readers with a jarring but not hopeless vision of tomorrow. Dr. Stefan Friemanis arrives at Gilligan University of Ohio with a powerful model called Panarchy. As a young professor, his job is to help his students navigate their way through a precarious stage of planetary history known as Late K. He and his students are drawn into a protest movement to halt the university's plan to burn fracked natural gas lying beneath a campus nature reserve. As the world catapults toward the Late-K cliff, the students occupy the university's central quad. This enmeshes them in national and international energy politics and a labyrinth of blackmail, offshore shell schemes, tax evasion, political corruption, and a far reaching iniquity. Things go sideways and their world unravels just as Panarchy and their beloved mentor had predicted. Thirty years later, they regroup in a downsized world stripped of modernity yet brimming with possibility and hope.