"Panarchy invites us to conceive of the world as a vast interlocking set of interactive systems that pass through phases over time. If we can thoroughly understand the implications of panarchy's dynamic, we can perhaps begin to avoid behaviors that quicken the progression of human and ecological systems toward collapse. That is the challenge before us now." -- Katja Nickleby, "Over the Cliff" in Late-K Lunacy

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 far-reaching iniquity. Things go sideways and their world unravels 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.