Surviving Progress (CA/2011)

“Every time history repeats itself the price goes up.”

Featuring some of the world’s great contemporary thinkers, this compelling film explores the concept of progress in our modern world and, more specifically, the idea of “progress traps.” Simply put, these are innovations that seem like smart moves forward but inadvertently cause new problems. Making connections between economics, the environment, history and science, Surving Progress raises critical questions about the pivotal mistakes society has made and does so from a remarkable big-picture perspective. The question of how we escape the traps leads to even deeper concerns about the potential fixes.

With intersecting stories from a Chinese car-driving club, a Wall Street insider who exposes an out-of-control, environmentally rapacious financial elite, and eco-cops defending a scorched Amazon, the film lays stark evidence before us. In the past, we could use up a region’s resources and move on. But if today’s global civilization collapses from over-consumption, that’s it. We have no back-up planet. With that in mind this film leaves us with a challenge: To prove that making apes smarter was not an evolutionary dead-end.

presented by agit.DOC

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