'Surviving Progress '

[Voyageur]

Had a chance to watch this National Film Board documentary last night produced by Martin Scorsese. The film in some ways meshes with topics here in the forum, although there is the usual CO2 scapegoat distractions when it comes to climate. Also, people like Hudson are speaking of Psychopathology in very couched terms, nobody comes out and says what needs to be said and there is no historical relationships to astronomical events - there was much else missing too. The film has many commentators of literary, philosophical and scientific learnings making appearances; have added a few quotes:

A FILM BY MATHIEU ROY & HAROLD CROOKS
INSPIRED BY THE BEST-SELLER A SHORT HISTORY OF PROGRESS OF RONALD WRIGHT
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS MARTIN SCORSESE MARK ACHBAR BETSY CARSON EMMA TILLINGER KOSKOFF
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER NFB SILVA BASMAJIAN PRODUCER NFB GERRY FLAHIVE ASSOCIATE PRODUCER FRANÇOIS GIRARD
PRODUCED BY DANIEL LOUIS DENISE ROBERT

Documentary Trailer _http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3DuampumYoc

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

Surviving Progress presents the story of human advancement as awe-inspiring and double-edged. It reveals the grave risk of running the 21st century’s software — our know-how — on the ancient hardware of our primate brain which hasn’t been upgraded in 50,000 years. With rich imagery and immersive soundtrack, filmmakers Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks launch us on journey to contemplate our evolution from cave-dwellers to space explorers.

Ronald Wright, whose best-seller, “A Short History Of Progress” inspired this film, reveals how civilizations are repeatedly destroyed by “progress traps” — alluring technologies serve immediate needs, but ransom the future. 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.

Surviving Progress brings us thinkers who have probed our primate past, our brains, and our societies. Some amplify Wright’s urgent warning, while others have faith that the very progress which has put us in jeopardy is also the key to our salvation. Cosmologist Stephen Hawking looks to homes on other planets. Biologist Craig Venter, whose team decoded the human genome, designs synthetic organisms he hopes will create artificial food and fuel for all.

Distinguished Professor of Environment Vaclav Smil counters that five billion “have-nots” aspire to our affluent lifestyle and, without limits on the energy and resource-consumption of the “haves”, we face certain catastrophe. Others — including primatologist Jane Goodall, author Margaret Atwood, and activists from the Congo, Canada, and USA — place their hope in our ingenuity and moral evolution.
Surviving Progress leaves us with a challenge: To prove that making apes smarter was not an evolutionary dead-end.

Here is the films complete 'Transcript' with a few quotes snipped below:

_http://survivingprogress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/SP_transcription.pdf

“… we are running 21st century software, our knowledge, on hardware that hasn’t been upgraded for 50,000 years, and this lies at the core of many of our problems.”

“Progress has meant: ”You will never get back what we take from you”. That’s what brought on the Dark Ages and that’s what’s threateting to bring in the Dark Ages again.”

[course he does not equate any of this to comets - but he seems on the mark as follows: note - added these two paragraphs first from there position in the transcript end]

Well, my job on Wall Street was to be Balance of Payment Economist for the Chase Manhattan Bank in
the 1960's. My first job there was to calculate how much debt could Third World countries pay. And the
answer was, 'Well, how much do they earn?' And whatever they earn, that's what they can afford to pay
in interest, [band our objective was to take the entire earnings of a Third World country[/b] and say, ideally,
that would be all paid as interest to us.

You can relate the destruction of the rain forest in Brazil directly to the Wall Street and London financial
sector. The story begins in 1982, when countries couldn’t pay their debt anymore. And the result is that
the Latin American countries, generally, stopped paying, because they said, 'We’re already paying all of
the balance of payment surplus we have to the banks. We don’t have any money to import to sustain
living standards, we don’t have money to import to build new factories and to pay the debt'. So the
International Monetary Fund, at that point, said, 'Don’t go bankrupt, you have an option. You can begin to
sell off the public domain; you have plenty of assets to sell to pay us. You can sell off your water rights,
your forests, your subsoil mineral resources, you can sell us your oil rights.
And so, Brazil, Argentina, and other countries began to sell off their resources to private investors. And
the private investors bought these resources on credit.

Written records go back about 4,000 years, and from 2,000 BC to the time of Jesus, it was normal for all
of the countries in the world to periodically cancel the debts when they became too large to pay.
So you have Sumer, Babylonia, Egypt, other regions all proclaiming these debt cancellations and the
effect was to make a clean slate so that society would begin all over again.

This was easy to do in a society where most debts were owed to the State. It became much harder to
do, when enterprise and credit passed out of the hands of the state into private hands, into the hands of
an oligarchy. And the last thing they wanted was to have a king that would actually cancel the debts and
restore equality.

Rome was the first country of the world not to cancel the debts. It went to war in Sparta, in Greece, to
overthrow the governments and the kings that wanted to cancel the debts.

The wars of the first century BC ended up stripping these countries of everything they had, not only did it
strip the temples of gold, it stripped the public buildings, it stripped the economies of their reproductive
capacity, it stripped them of their waterworks, it made a desert out of the land. And it said a debt is a
debt.

What was absolutely new in the Roman Empire was irreversible concentration of wealth at the top of the
economic pyramid, and that's what progress has meant ever since. Progress has meant: 'You will never
get back what we take from you'. That's what brought on the Dark Age and that's what's threatening to
bring in the Dark Age again, if society doesn't realize that if it lets the wealth concentrate in the hand of a
financial class, this class is not going to be anymore intelligent in the long-term in disposing of the wealth
than their predecessors were in Rome or in other countries.

Every society in history, for the last 4,000 years has found that the debts grow more rapidly than people
can pay. The problem is a small oligarchy of 10% of the population at the top to whom all of these net
debts are owed to. You want to annul the debts to the top 10%. That's what they're not going to do. The
oligarchy is running things. They would rather annul the bottom 90% right to live than to annul the money
that's due to them. They would rather strip the planet and shrink the population and be paid rather than
give up their claims. That's the political fight of the XXIst Century.

“The bankers can’t stop themselves. It’s in their DNA, in the DNA of their organizations, to take massive risks, to pay themselves ridiculous salaries and to collapse…”

“By changing and taking over evolution, changing the time course of evolution, and going into deliberate design of species for our own survival at least gives us some points of optimism that we have a chance to control our destiny.”

[have a hard time with some of Craig's thinking in this documentary]

The economists say if you clear-cut the forest, take the money and put it in the bank, you could make 6
or 7 percent. If you clear-cut the forest and put it into Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, you can make 30 or
40 percent. So who cares whether you keep the forest, cut it down, put the money somewhere else.
When those forests are gone, put it in fish. When the fish are gone put it in computers. Money doesn’t
stand for anything and money now grows faster than the real world. Conventional economics is a form of
brain damage.

Economics is so fundamentally disconnected from the real world it is destructive. If you take an
introductory course in economics, the professor, in the first lecture, will show a slide of the economy, and
it looks very impressive, you know, raw materials, extraction process, manufacturer, wholesale, retail,
with arrows going back and forth. And they try to impress you because they think, and they know damn
well, economics is not a science, but they’re trying to fool us into thinking that it’s a real science, it’s not.
Economics is a set of values that they, then, try to use mathematical equations and all that stuff, and
pretend that it’s a science. But if you ask the economist: in that equation, where do you put the ozone
layer, where do you put the deep underground aquifer as a fossil water, where do you put topsoil, or
biodiversity? Their answer is, 'Oh, those are externalities'. Well, then you might as well be on Mars: that
economy is not based in anything like the real world. It’s life, the web of life that filters water in the
hydrologic cycle, it’s microorganisms in the soil that create the soil that we can grow our food in. Nature
performs all kinds of services, insects fertilize all of the flowering plants, these services are vital to the
health of the planet. Economists call these externalities … that’s nuts!