Surviving Progress
DIRECTED BY MATHIEU ROY & HAROLD CROOKS
Despite glossy production values and eye-catching cinematography that calls to mind the mesmerizing films of Ron Fricke (Baraka, Samsara), Surviving Progress offers grim tidings for the future of humanity. The NFB co-production is adapted from Ronald Wright’s non-fiction bestseller (and Massey Lecture series), A Short History of Progress, and retains Wright’s basic thesis that technological and economic advancement aren’t the inherently positive forces we typically take them to be.
Rather, as Wright himself explains, because the pace of human innovation has vastly outstripped the pace of human evolution, we’ve achieved the technological capacity to irreversibly deplete the Earth’s natural resources, but haven’t transcended our ingrained biological impulses toward selfishness and short-termism. So the theory goes, the aggressive capitalism prevalent in Western societies is rooted in the same rationale exhibited by Paleolithic hunters, who discovered that they could kill entire herds of mammoth by driving them off cliffs, and proceeded to do so until the animals became extinct.
Innovations of this nature are what Wright terms “progress traps”—alluring but unsustainable developments that ultimately do more harm than good. Surviving Progress asserts that these traps have occasioned the downfall of a number of history’s once-great civilizations, including the Romans and the Mayans. But where these civilizations remained relatively contained, and were supplanted by new civilizations emerging elsewhere, globalization means contemporary progress traps are planet-wide, and the civilization at risk is humanity itself.
Wright is joined by an illustrious roster of intelligent and articulate talking heads—including Margaret Atwood, Jane Goodall, Stephen Hawking, and David Suzuki—the vast majority of whom are legitimately, if ominously, compelling. But the film’s sprawling scope also gives rise to some slightly tenuous generalities, and a significant segment devoted to debt forgiveness that doesn’t feel particularly well-integrated, though it will rightly resonate with proponents of the Occupy movement.
Surviving Progress isn’t all doom and gloom, though, and does offer some crumbs of comfort in the shape of advancements in synthetic biology and even in the notion that we might yet make a go of interstellar colonization. As far-fetched as such initiatives might initially seem, relative to alternative solutions that entail Westerners urgently reducing their resource consumption they’re probably the best hopes we’ve got.