First Run Features

The documentary Surviving Progress illustrates its arguments on the sustainability of human behavior in the context of environmental degradation with striking images of life in cities like Sao Paulo.

Surviving Progress

Not rated

Not every human advance is a snare, according to Ronald Wright, author of A Short History of Progress. But some new techniques can lead to something the Canadian author calls a "progress trap" a development that's ultimately more harmful than helpful.

Wright's book, based on a 2004 lecture series, is the foundation for Surviving Progress, a provocative if scattershot documentary from directors Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks, who wander off topic more than once as they introduce myriad other voices. These include chimpanzee expert Jane Goodall, astrophysicist and author Stephen Hawking and DNA mapper J. Craig Venter. Sometimes, these people don't seem to be part of the conversation Wright began.

Also on hand is Margaret Atwood, who participated in the same lecture program four years later. Her talks led to Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, another book that inspired a documentary. (It's due later this month.) Among the other Canadian commentators are environment professor Vaclav Smil and ecologist and science journalist David Suzuki.

The movie begins with chimpanzees and their problem-solving abilities. A chimp struggles to balance an L-shaped block that looks just like another one, but is weighted differently. Chimps, we're informed, don't ask, "Why?"

Humans do, Wright says, or at least can, yet human technology has outstripped mankind's "hunter-gatherer mentality." The quandary is illustrated, if not always illuminated, by fast-mo footage of cities, traffic and construction.

Environmental degradation is the film's primary concern. The directors undertake field trips to the Congo, where colonialism and war led to plunder; Brazil, where sawmill workers clash with deforestation activists; and China, where a new bourgeoisie, ominously, wants the same toys Europeans and North Americans already enjoy.

Go here to read the rest:
'Surviving Progress': Taking Overdevelopment To Task