Breaking Free of the “Progress Trap”

Our species is inventing and developing its way to an early grave, warns a new film with a grim take on human civilization. Surviving Progress (view the trailer here), produced by Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks, incorporates interviews with a multitude of world-renowned experts who all conclude that humanity is in trouble.

“We’re now reaching a point at which technological progress and the increase in our economies and in our numbers threaten the very existence of humanity,” says one interviewee, behavioral scientist Daniel Povinelli.

Viewers will readily recognize some names and faces: chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall and astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, for example. Other interviewees aren’t household names but still carry much weight in their respective fields: Vaclav Smil, University of Manitoba environmental scientist and author; Marina Silva, former Brazilian minister of the environment; David Suzuki, environmentalist who co-founded the David Suzuki Foundation; and J. Craig Venter, geneticist who made history by sequencing the human genome and producing a living cell with a computer-generated genome; among other greats.

Their 80-minute production melds together environmental crises, the 2008 financial crash, poverty in developing countries, and the decline and fall of ancient Rome and Babylonia. The ancient empires tie in because, according to a few interviewees, they collapsed due to problems that afflict our own societies today: over-concentration of wealth at the top and profligate consumption of natural resources. Resource consumption, in particular, will only worsen, other interviewees indicate, due to growing consumer demands in China, India, and the developing world.

The film opens with two laboratory chimpanzees, one of them clearly puzzled over a pair of oddly shaped building blocks. Next scene is an astronaut floating outside the International Space Station. The contrast is stark, and obvious: A huge gulf of achievement separates us from our ape-like hominid ancestors. We could be proud—except that unlike the apes, we are capable of ruining our planet and endangering our own long-term survival through exploitation of the Earth and each other.

“It’s very important to make a distinction between good progress and bad progress,” says interviewee Ronald Wright, the author whose book A Short History of Progress was the original inspiration for the film.

So then, what is good progress? On that, the interviewees are silent—literally. Two in a row draw a total blank when asked to define what progress is.

But they generally agree that humanity’s progress has been primarily the bad kind. Wright sets the tone when he says that the human race has been caught for eons in a “progress trap” of unsustainable behaviors that initially seemed good but which lead to disaster down the road. For example, basic weapons that early humans used to kill mammoths for food advanced to the point where they drove untold numbers of animal species to extinction.

Unsustainability grew to a huge new dimension in the Industrial Revolution, whereby manufacturing and living standards took to constantly growing bigger and costlier. The expansion continues unabated.

The filmmakers leap from continent to continent and from historical era to present and back to make their point. Excavated ruins of Babylonia and Rome get coverage alongside present-day deforestation in Brazil, industrial pollution in China, and rural poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. Even far-future travel to other planets and star systems gets a brief—and somewhat non sequitor—mention, when Hawking states that humanity’s future lies in space.

“If we can avoid disaster for the next two centuries, our species should be safe. We have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years,” he says (contradicting everyone else on set, inadvertently or not). “Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward looking on planet earth, but to spread out into space.”

Amid all the visual and historical razzle-dazzle, the movie’s premise and supporting arguments do get blurry. The film meanders to the chimpanzee species, during which author Gary Marcus claims that “the human mind is not that fundamentally different from, say, the brain of a chimpanzee.” Following this, Povinelli expounds upon the gulf of “fundamental difference” between human thinking and chimp thinking.

A few mandates for getting humanity back on course are sprinkled intermittently along the way. We will have to learn to live with less and to slow our drive for economic growth everywhere, several speakers urge. We will also need to constrain the power of the “oligarchs” who direct world economic activity, and to cut the world population by one-third to one-half.

“Unlimited economic progress in a world of finite natural resources doesn’t make sense. It’s bound to collapse,” says Goodall.

Viewers may find Surviving Progress confusing and disjointed from time to time, and bleak pretty much all the time. That said, the quantity of material and number of respected voices that the producers work into this one 80-minute film is in itself an achievement.

So is the cinematically striking visual presentation, which enthralls the viewers with picturesque images of landscapes, ancient temples, and the like even while the film smacks those same viewers with harsh tropes on the evils of human ingenuity. The film is a visually compelling presentation of what unsustainability looks like, and a persuasive conversation on the need for an alternative way of living.

No interviewee, however, says clearly what that alternative might be. They condemn the status quo but leave the debate open on what might replace it. Surviving Progress is evidently meant to raise more questions, not to answer them.