Screening: Surviving Progress

What is Progress? Does it by definition mean improvement? Is it possible to continue growing at the same rate? These are questions directors Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks address in their elaborate docu-essay Surviving Progress.

Based on the 2004 best selling book What is Progress? by Ronald Wright, the film includes interviews with scientists, philosophers and cultural critics who tackle Wright’s central thesis that, although progress sounds seductive, we are caught in a "progress trap".

Human culture has become detached from the pace of natural evolution in a world where technological innovations succeed one another at such speed that our footprint is threatening to become too large.

Surviving Progress makes connections between economics, the environment, history and science to argue that the rules the world currently lives by are unsustainable. A wide range of contemporary thinkers both amplify or argue against Wright’s warnings. Among them are chimpanzee expert Jane Goodall, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking and DNA mapper J. Craig Venter.

Directed by: Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks

Year: 2011

Duration: 87′