Book Review

A Short History of Progress
by Ronald Wright. 2004. Carroll & Graf, paper. $14.95

by Carol Van Strum

You won't find a major motion picture version of A Short History of Progress at your local theatre or Blockbuster. In distant galaxies, the time-lapse film of Earth's three-million-year hominid experiment might feature in courses like Suicidal Population Dynamics 101, but it would be a hard sell on location. For the first 179 minutes very little happens except the infinitesimally slow diffusion of tiny glowing dots as our clever, tool-using ancestors lug their knowledge from one land mass to another.

Only in the last minute does it become an action film. Shared knowledge of tools, fire, and food cultivation rapidly supports ever larger populations, with leisure time for invention of ever more ingenious devices. In rapid succession, the glowing dots coalesce into brilliant civilizations that spread briefly like algal blooms. One by one, each fades abruptly to black as reckless progress consumes and destroys the last resources needed to support it.

The final second of the film begins with the Industrial Revolution and bursts into the Technological Age. A global bloom suddenly flares over the entire planet. In less than a film-time second, the hominid population explodes from scattered millions to more than six billion, covering the Earth like a Sherwin-Williams ad. The atmosphere dims with their fetid effluence; vibrant signatures of life fade from oceans and continents. Just as this global civilization teeters on the brink of self-induced oblivion, the unfinished reel ends. No one can doubt the final outcome.

No market exists for such a planetary snuff flick, of course, but Ronald Wright's lively, concise history needs no visuals. In an extraordinary feat of title fulfillment, he distills three million years of human progress into 132 pages of crystalline text. Sifting through the debris of crashed civilizations, he exposes a repeating pattern of progress, prosperity, overpopulation, and pollution, building toward a final phase of messianic denial and suicidal consumption. Invariably, the process is accelerated by the inexorable concentration of wealth and power; when certain disaster looms, these vested interests become the fiercest opponents of preventive action. The desperate hostility to change exhibited by industry and government today, Wright concludes, "is typical of failed societies at the zenith of their greed and arrogance."

From Mesopotamia to Easter Island, from the Roman to the Mayan empires, one thriving civilization after another has blindly waltzed the same steps to extinction. As each failed, others sprang up to exploit new environments. The difference today, Wright warns, is that the civilization on the precipice is global; there are no new environments left to exploit. "The great advantage we have, our best chance for avoiding the fate of past societies, is that we know about those past societies. We can see how and why they went wrong."

Now is our last chance to use that knowledge, to get our future right. The reform Wright urges is neither anti-capitalist nor anti-American: "it is simply the transition from short-term to long-term thinking. From recklessness and excess to moderation and the precautionary principle."

Thank you, Ronald Wright! For those who have so long fought isolated, never-ending battles against disparate elements of environmental degradation, Wright's small, powerful book places our struggles clearly in their larger context: nothing less than the fate of civilization itself.

 

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