(It has been done.)
When I decided to criticize the paper for that, I meant to suggest specifically that other things can cause the collapse of a civilization—surely, for example, the Eastern Roman Empire is generally regarded as a victim of invasion and political decay rather than resource exhaustion. I guess it requires a very over-broad definition of "civilization", one that includes any adiabatic system of resources... which basically means that the entire world, excluding uncontacted peoples, is now one civilization.