Surviving Progress

2011

English

7.4

71%

79%

based on novel or book

Mathieu Roy Director

Margaret Atwood as Self - Author, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

Simon Johnson as Self - Former Chief Economist, International Monetary Fund

Jane Goodall as Self - Primatologist

Stephen Hawking as Self - Theoretical Physicist

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 behaviour, this requiem to progress-as-usual also poses a challenge: to prove that making apes smarter isn’t an evolutionary dead-end.

Surviving Progress

480p.DVD