Dr. Ted Bernard
Geography Professor Emeritus Ted Bernard in an Athens News story headlined “Novel by emeritus prof asks hard questions.”
Ted Bernard’s novel “Late-K Lunacy” opens in a small college town in the foothills of Appalachian Ohio, on the banks of the fictional Shawnee River….
It’s also clear, however, that “Late-K Lunacy” is after bigger quarry than the gossipy pleasures of a college-town roman a clef. It’s a warning about the fragility of this computerized, fossil-fueled world we humans have built, and how soon it could all begin ripping apart at the seams.
…The Late-K of the title refers to a theory called “panarchy,” which explains how complex adaptive systems – ecosystems, economies, societies – can grow so interconnected and short on flexibility that a seemingly tiny shock can send them into a death spin from which recovery is hard or impossible. The concepts of panarchy are presented in excerpts from a book by novel character Katja Nickleby – a scholar who before her death was mentor to one of “Late-K Lunacy”’s main characters, young, Rumi-quoting professor Stefan Friemanis. The theory has a real-world basis, though, in the work of writers such as Lance H. Gunderson, C. S. Holling and Thomas Homer-Dixon.
Read the review in the Athens News.
Read “Bernard Pens Sustainability Novel on ‘Precarious Stage of Planetary History Known as Late-K.'”
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