This is a drawing based on one I did with a stick in the sand at the beach this weekend. My cousin, who was standing in the middle, made the playful comment that if I connected the line, she would fall through the Earth. I stopped short and set-up a perilous situation. I immediately thought that this chance drawing presented itself in a timely fashion, illustrating the present human condition on Earth. So I took it to the sketch book to further ponder the many meanings I saw in the sand.

The ecology

"Ecology (from Greek oîkos, "house"; -λογία, -logia, study of) is the scientific study of the distribution, abundance of life and the interactions between organisms and their natural environment."
Ernst Haeckel in 1866, defined it as "the comprehensive science of the relationship of the organism to the environment." --from Wikipedia
My understanding of the ecology is that everything is in relation to everything else. There is an interdependence that everything lives by, and if an organism denies this in any way, it is essentially making barriers between itself and everything else, creating an island. The workings of this act is very complex, and can never be completed, but in the process can be completely destructive to the said organism and many others that are closely related to it. I never read Jared Diamond's Collapse, but I think that I summarized what he writes extensively about in the context of past human societies.
In the context of my drawing, if an organism works towards cutting itself off from the natural relationships and interdependency of life, it risks falling off the Earth.

The economy

In this drawing I also saw a model for collapse in our current business trend. We currently champion the corporation that pursues profits mainly on it's own. It is impossible to say that the corporate structure operates entirely on it's own since everyone uses common infrastructure. This is getting more pronounced with commonly owned internet infrastructure such as webserver software(Apache, which serves a vast majority of all web pages on the internet). However the basic corporate model still resembles something like my drawing; the entity does everything is can to protect itself and it's profits by almost making an island of itself and the connection to the rest of society is a heavily controlled corridor.
The model itself is not necessarily bad, I think it is more in the growth trend and its predominance in the market that I find the harm. We currently grow by consolidation, so that the greater society finds itself herding through fewer and fewer of these corridors of larger and larger corporations. Among other things, I think this creates a dangerous precedent for humans who are subject to this societal order. It creates discontent as more people lose control of their own destiny and are pawns in someone elses game.
I will not try and write too much more about this as I am not an economist. I merely want to record my thought process about our business trends and it's role in the collapse.

Avoidance

In my heart I am an optimist. However, I often have a difficult time being outwardly optimistic(that's an optimistic way of putting it;) I do believe that we need to avoid collapse, and I have spent my years since graduating from college thinking about this problem, deeply. One article I read today termed it nicely; we need to collapse forward. Simply, we need to take care of what we have going right now, while building in a way that will catch that which does fail and fall, and also construct a new foundation. All at the same time. I think that we have to first look at restructuring the way we think about business and it's role in ordering society. We need to look at trends that create more diversity rather than less. And most importantly we need to think of our organizations in the ecological sense of connectedness.