Another Way: Thoughts on the Coming Collapse

By John Louis Martin

Modern industrial society finds itself in a double bind. Multiple environmental issues are reaching a critical stage, while at the same time our democratic institutions are losing the support of the people. Calls for radical change fall on deaf ears. They ring hollow. Ending the use of fossil fuels without an alternative in place sounds like and is in fact a death sentence. In this book John Martin presents Another Way to understand the crisis we will all have to deal with going forward. Pulling from the insights of numerous writers of the 20th century, along with those from ancient traditions, John calls for a return to traditional values of stewardship towards the Earth. For people to wake up from the seductive world of endless growth and again find our place in the universe that 13.8 billion years of evolution has created. The book contains workable policies that could start the long journey to bringing our communities back from the brink and on a path towards sustainability.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781543498868

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Copyright © 2021 by John Louis Martin.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Scripture quotations are taken from the ESV Bible® (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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Rev. date: 01/13/2022

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To those making Earth their home

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1     Not Only, But Also

Chapter 2     Doing More with Less

Chapter 3     Creative Exuberance

Chapter 4     A Few Strategies

Chapter 5     A Short History

Chapter 6     China’s History with The Limits to Growth

Chapter 7     Fun with Words and Eco-Porn

Chapter 8     Recycling

Chapter 9     Futurism

Chapter 10   Four Lessons

Chapter 11   Rich-Man Problems

Chapter 12   A Real Green New Deal

Chapter 13   Railroads: How We Keep the Country Together

Chapter 14   Innovation

Chapter 15   Information

Chapter 16   Village Life

Chapter 17   Wages

Chapter 18   Appropriate Technology

Chapter 19   Exponential Growth

Chapter 20   Hang in There

Postscript

INTRODUCTION

This book is about greed, hubris, poisons, missed opportunities, sins of commission, and sins of omission. It is about the modern world.

A world with one month is a world of equality.

(Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman, 1993)

Life is with people. It is our communities that help define us, give us our sense of right and wrong, our sense of space, our sense of self. It is near impossible to live outside of society. So when society takes a wrong turn, the corrections can be brutal, both mentally and physically. While a few rebels and artists are more comfortable embracing change, living along the edges of conventional norms, the rest of us gain our sense of self mostly through our roles in the existing society. Unlike ants or bees, our identity is not based solely on the job we hold but also includes the religion we practice, the ethic group and gender we identify with, what state we call home, what sports we follow, and what teams are we are fans of. These identities are a source of grounding and pride, but sadly, they are also the main source of social divisiveness and bigotry.

In 1967, the book The Politics of Experience, by R. D. Laing, a Scottish psychiatrist, forwarded the theory that mental illness has at its roots a double bind. You are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. We find ourselves in just such a situation, and because there is no way out, our body politics has been stalled for generations. When it became obvious that the engineered world of bigger and faster had inherent problems and that the society we had all been born into was in fact not sustainable, social evolution slowed to a crawl. We go through life sleepwalking, ignoring the contradictions inherent in our actions. We are faced with a double bind problem in which both apparent options available to society lead to the same disaster: the easily foreseeable collapse of global society and the death of billions of people.

Politicians from our two main political parties have presented two paths to the future, neither of which can lay claim to any mandate from the body politics, because both paths are obviously suicidal. Continue using fossil fuels for energy and we will (if we have not already) change the climate and throw the entire planet into decline. This path, if you can call it a path at all, comes up against a range of physical limits almost beyond imagination. Take a serious look at the degradation our air, sea, forests, and topsoil. Our technologies and our growing populations are driving us toward a worldwide environmental collapse in just a few short years.

There is another view, offered by the politicians who glimpse into the future and are truly afraid. Coming from wealth and privilege, as most politicians do, their prescription runs something like End all use of fossil fuel, you die first. They call it a Green New Deal; it is a rather short proposal, and not much of a deal. They condemn billions of people to starvation and then pretend to not even see the horrors implied in their proposals. One would at least want some acknowledgment that they are counting on their first-world privilege for their own survival while consigning the rest of humanity to quickly and quietly die off. These are not serious prescriptions. The only way out of a double bind is not picking one side or the other but stepping back to find a larger viewpoint.

We now live in an era of global interactions; communities no longer exist separate from one another. This crisis involves all of us, as we are reminded daily by defenders of the status quo. Here in the United States, we could stop using fossil fuels tomorrow, but if India, China, Africa or Europe or do not join us, the effort would all be for nothing. Not wanting to lose an advantage in the global marketplace, power brokers wait for someone else to make the first move. This stalling has gone on for fifty years, and we are no closer to a sustainable future; in fact, we are further away. But even though it has been fifty years, a big part of the problem is that these issues are comparatively new. Billions of people all over the world have, for the first time in history, been lifted out of rural poverty; and now we are asking them to abandon their modern lifestyles and return to a life on the land again. Clearly a hard sell. Meanwhile in the West, we still dream of lives of the rich and famous. Electric cars, solar cells, and windmills are not solutions. At best, they are honest but naive attempts to bring society into harmony with the earth; at worst, they are deceitful attempts by a few elites to save their own lifestyles of comfort and plenty. Attempts that even a rudimental investigation would show are destined to fail.

One of the first books to question the effects of industrial society was Man and Nature, by George Perkins Marsh, published in 1864. The book was well received and is credited with starting the conservation movement. Marsh theorized that the fall of ancient societies involved the lack of attention to resource depletion. His warnings were correct, but not acted on. Society has been developing in a very destructive manner for well over a hundred years, and