In “NASA-Funded Study: Industrial Civilization Headed for ‘Irreversible Collapse’?” Nafeez Ahmed reports for The Guardian on a recent study produced by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center that “highlight[s] the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.” The most striking thing about the report to me is its interdisciplinarity, mixing bleeding edge environmental science, historical perspective, economics, Marxist cultural analysis, etc.: “Elite wealth monopolies mean that they are buffered from the most ‘detrimental effects of the environmental collapse until much later than the Commoners,’ allowing them to ‘continue “business as usual” despite the impending catastrophe.’ The same mechanism, they argue, could explain how ‘historical collapses were allowed to occur by elites who appear to be oblivious to the catastrophic trajectory (most clearly apparent in the Roman and Mayan cases).'” We’re doomed.