#surviving progress

[annoyingthemesong]

SUBLIME CINEMA #396 - SURVIVING PROGRESS

Martin Scorsese and Mark Achbar produced this prescient documentary which is both frightening and beautiful together - it pulls no punches and it demands a reflection on the reality we are living in. Each year that has passed since it was released has only reinforced its message, which is that we have lived beyond our means, the myth of progress has turned against itself, and its simple message to scale back will remain unheeded. 

[designingprogress]

SURVIVING PROGRESS Humanity's ascent is often measured by the speed of progress. But what if progress is actually spiraling us downwards, towards collapse? Ronald Wright, whose best-seller, A Short History Of Progress inspired SURVIVING PROGRESS, shows how past civilizations were destroyed by "progress traps" - alluring technologies and belief systems that serve immediate needs, but ransom the future. As pressure on the world's resources accelerates and financial elites bankrupt nations, can our globally-entwined civilization escape a final, catastrophic progress trap? With potent images and illuminating insights from thinkers who have probed our genes, our brains, and our social behavior, this requiem to progress-as-usual also poses a challenge: to prove that making apes smarter isn't an evolutionary dead-end. "If we can avoid disaster in the next two centuries, we should be safe," says Stephen Hawking in "Surviving Progress."That bit of best-case-scenario wistfulness is about as persuasively hopeful as things get in this truly disturbing documentary, which pretty much argues that human beings are hard-wired to self-destruct.

Drawing a connection over many millennia between our hirsute, spear-wielding ancestors wiping out yummy mastodons and our modern, rapacious appetite for finite natural resources, "Surviving Progress" says the relentless exploiter in us is bred in the bone. Filmmakers Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks, building out from grim themes in Ronald Wright's book "A Short History of Progress," cover an enormous amount of ground in this globe-trotting production, including the impact of overpopulation, synthetic biology (creating new life-forms), overconsumption, predatory banking, environmental devastation and the seemingly unstoppable 200-year-old Industrial Revolution that is ratcheting up in developing countries. Roy and Crooks work hard to tie all these things together into one complicated but cogent vision of profit-driven, blind progress as an enemy of survival. It can be difficult at times to keep up with them, but it helps to have some of the heavy lifting done by interviewees including author Margaret Atwood and anthropologist Jane Goodall. Martin Scorsese is one of the film's executive producers, and somehow that makes sense given his films on the subject of wayward ambition and self-destruction. In this case, though, the tragedy is in ourselves. Tom Keogh WATCH TRAILER

© Cover image by Marc Kandalaft

[z3r0kewl]

The epitaph on our gravestone is going to say 'why'

[itzjusme]

_"There are so many things which we could do. Not to surrender our standard of living. Not to kind of live in a gutterly right. But we don't need 1.5 ton car to go from red light to red light in a city area. People are not willing to go back on these things. Most of them simply aren't because they've been totally hijacked by this material culture. **Let's not underestimate the persuasion. The power of this material culture is immense.** It's just immense._ _When I've seen so many people being so genuinely unhappy that they cannot afford a $50,000 bathroom remodeling, I mean, there's something wrong with that value set."_ -Global energy expert, **Vaclav Samil** from the [_Surviving Progress_](http://survivingprogress.com/) documentary.

[lookatthatotp]

We always have been the initiators of this experiment, we've unleashed it but we've never really controlled it but now it's more likely that we're going to come to grief because of environmental problems. If we do, then that is really nature saying, "The experiment of civilisation is a failed evolutionary experiment." That making apes smarter is a dead end. So it's up to us to prove nature wrong in a sense, to show that we can take control of our own destinies and behave in a wise way that will ensure the continuation of the experiment of civilisation.

Ronald Wright, historian, novelist, and essayist.

[thisisrabbit]

this documentary is teaching me so much

[crop100]

Surviving Progress

MICHAEL: During the holidays I saw “Surviving Progress”. This might be the most important - and scary - documentary of our time. This also sums up quite nicely a lot of my reasoning behind #crop100. I’ve always thought “It’s just me, I can’t do much” but when I saw the quote “No water drop thinks it’s responsible for the flood” I realized that “even if it’s just me, I can do my part”.

And so are you if you’re part of #crop100.