Surviving Progress

Watching TV the other night, an ad came on for a car company. The voice over said,

 "Nothing is more valued in Canada than the promise of something new."

The same could be said for any Western country. But what kind of world are we living in when this statement is used to SELL MORE STUFF rather than as a DIRE WARNING about how wrong we have got it?

I understand that it's good to want to  move forward, and that change is exciting. New things are shiny. But when does it stop?

Some may call it an ad campaign, I call it everything that is wrong with capitalism.

The next night I watched a movie called Surviving Progress. Produced by Martin Scorcese, it looks at concepts such as progress traps - ideas and technologies which may seem to be progressing us as a society but are in fact leading us right over the edge of a cliff - and examines the idea of good and bad progress.

In the film Margaret Atwood says: "Nature is not this endless credit card that we can keep drawing on."

Anthropologist Jane Goodall says: "Unlimited economic progress in a world of finite resources is bound to collapse."

I think they should show this in every school.