Collapsitarian

Kunstler resists the doomer label—“I’ve never been a complete collapsitarian,” he says—but the fact that one of his bombs detonates in Washington on “twelve twenty-one” is likely to please superstitious adherents of the Maya calendar, which concludes its first cycle on what is now the Internet’s most popular day of reckoning: December 21, 2012.

According to several self-styled collapsitarians, the world now faces a century of declines, the long emergency, environmental collapse, or peak everything.

Nowhere in the course of this collapsitarian spiel did there seem to be more than a cursory acknowledgment of the misery of mass unemployment and the vertigo that would befall a nation deprived of the foundations of its economy and cultural identity.

The Dark Mountain project offends a lot of people. It gets called defeatist, misanthropic, “collapsitarian.” But surely there is something in the air (and in the soil, and the ocean) these days.