Surviving Progress
2011 · 86 MIN · IMDB 7.4 · 1,909 VOTES · DIR. Mathieu Roy, Harold Crooks
Overview
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.
Dialogue Timeline — 649 lines
A SAMPLE ACROSS THE RUNTIME — EVERY LINE IS SEARCHABLE
00:00:08 Surviving progress
00:07:25 One example would be going right back to the old stone age
00:10:11 And so most of what we do, we do with hardware components
00:12:35 That's the fundamental, core difference, I belive, between humans and chimps
00:15:39 'Why?'
00:18:04 The other side of this problem
00:27:01 natural capital, the capital that nature provides
00:30:01 in a next week or two
00:33:21 the effect was to make a clean slate so that society would begin all over again
00:35:33 during the middle ages for fertility in Italy to rebuild
00:38:12 It's in their DNA, in DNA of their organizations to take massive risks, to pay themselves ridiculous salaries
00:40:37 The oligarchy is running things.
00:43:32 You have moved forward economicaly, you have estabilished unity in your country
00:47:07 you can sell off your water rights, your forests, your subsoil mineral resources, you can sell us your oil rights
00:56:19 But if you ask the economist in that equation where do you put the ozone layer
00:59:01 All the civilizations of the past and, I think our own, only seem to be doing well
01:02:26 We have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years
01:05:20 Instead of writing software for computers, we can now write software for life
01:08:01 the life doesn't work like that.
01:10:17 If we're gonna feed the upcoming nine billion people
01:12:14 and one of the journalists asks him: "but your cars are still so heavy", and he says: "yes, we are working on it"
01:15:46 you people, you know, blaming the culture for its consumption
01:18:09 but brains are begining to get together around the planet to find solutions to some
01:21:48 But now it’s more likely that we’re going to come to grief because of environmental problems.