Too Much Progress?

I was recently introduced to a brilliant book and lecture series, A Short History of Progress. Published in 2004 in conjunction with the Massey Lectures, Ronald Wright examines how history inevitably repeats itself, costing humankind enormously. The book’s main premise is that each time history repeats itself, the price goes up.

Wright looks at four historical civilizations: Sumer, Easter Island, Rome, and the Maya. Each civilization seems to have been destructed due to over-use, over-population, and lack of foresight. The lecture I found most interesting was that of Easter Island.

Easter Island, famous for its moai, the huge stone faces that line it’s coast, has carried with it similar mystery as that of Stonehenge. How these statues were created and moved in a place that, today, is entirely covered by grassland remains a mystery. Wright speculates that for a generation or so, "there was enough old lumber to haul the great stones and still keep a few canoes seaworthy for deep water". The people of Easter Island exhausted all possible resources, including eating their own dogs and all nesting birds when finally there was absolutely nothing left, eventually resorting to cannibalism. All that was left were the stone giants who symbolized the devouring of a whole island. By the end, there were more than a thousand moai, which was one for every ten islanders. When the Europeans arrived in the eighteenth century, the worst was over and they only found one or two living souls per statue.

My question then, is the same as Wright’s: How much progress is too much? When will humankind learn that this huge overuse of resources will not result in the loss of one civilization, but of our entire civilization? When will we stop depleting our forests? Our oil reserves? Our water supply?

Wright eloquently comments on this path of self-destruction on page 7: “The most immediate threat, however, may be nothing more glamorous than our own waste. Like most problems with technology, pollution is a problem of scale. The biosphere may have been able to tolerate our dirty old friends coal and oil if we’d burned them gradually, but how long can it withstand a blaze of consumption so frenzied that the dark side of this planet glows like a fanned ember in the night of space?”

This is of particular concern as Prime Minister Harper recently predicted that Canada is headed to be 50 per cent above its Kyoto target in 2012, and that the government’s approach will not include meeting Canada’s international targets under the Kyoto Protocol. As the opposition NDP leader, Jack Layton states: “such a commentary suggests he's accepting a kind of inevitability.”

As Wright again, unfortunately predicts correctly: “Steady warming will be bad enough, but the worst outcome would be the sudden overturning of earth’s climatic balance – back to its old regime of sweats and chills. If that happens, crops will fail everywhere and the great experiment of civilization will come to a catastrophic end.” (p.53)

The question remains: Will it be in our lifetime?