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Traps of progress

Ronald Wright and food in the trap line
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He's Canadian, a Gulf Islander and something of a philosopher king, or at least one we wish would be so. Jan Morris calls him "an historical philosopher with a profound understanding of other cultures." That, of course, stems from a wise understanding of our own, an understanding gained as insider/outsider in time, as much as in culture.

I see him as some modern-day Janus, a comparison I don't think he'd mind. Janus — the Roman god, usually sculpted in stone with two faces, one looking forward and one looking back, standing solidly in the here and now.

Historian, fantasy philosopher king, cultural analyst and commentator, writer (of 19 books, and no sign of slowing). However you think of him, Ronald Wright is likely best known in this, his adopted country (he was born in London), for his book and CBC Massey Lectures of the same title, A Short History of Progress — the most popular book ever in the Massey series.

He followed that with another in the same vein, What is America? A Short History of the New World Order. The title says it all. Lately, he's on about "the traps of progress," a term he coined in the 2004 A Short History Of Progress and the topic of lectures he's been delivering, most recently at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver last week.

Traps of progress are the messes we humans inadvertently cause as we apply our ingenuity in what seems to be a good way (that's the progress part), but one that ultimately leads to disaster because we don't have the resources or will — political will — to solve subsequent problems and get ourselves, or anything else caught in the trap, out of the glue.

Progress traps kill whole living systems, human and otherwise. "A very bad smell of extinctions follows humans around the world," said Wright at the Emily Carr lecture. A whole stinkload of progress traps have evolved around the sourcing of food — no surprise. We always want to get our good eats easier, faster, bigger.

Take the wooly mammoth. Our ancestors got good at using stone tools to kill them. It was real progress when hunters could kill two mammoths instead of one in a hunt. But when they got too good at it by figuring out they could kill an entire herd of 200 mammoths in one swoop by driving them off a cliff, hunting was destroyed as a sustainable way of life. Overkill of big game in the Stone Age: progress trap.

The patterns of over-consumption continued into agrarian times, when soil and seed were harnessed and turned into the muscle power of tamed animals.

Around 3000 BC the Sumerians living in what is now southern Iraq learned that irrigation systems were wonderful for growing crops. Progress. The irrigated areas got bigger and bigger and the water kept flowing. Then around 2000 BC something went awfully wrong.

The soil started turning white and crops failed. Soon the area wasn't productive at all, and what were once highly productive fields morphed into huge, white salt pans. Remember the wastelands in the footage from the war in Iraq? The constant irrigation of the Sumerians caused the mineral salts in the soils to become so concentrated that productivity ended. Progress trap.

Then there are the progress traps created when what was ingenuous at the time turns into disaster as things are magnified by scale.

Centuries ago it made sense — good progress — to locate small villages on flatlands, river deltas and valley bottoms near the most productive farmland. Fast forward hundreds or thousands of years, and those once tiny villages have grown into massive urban sprawl on the best and most productive soil. Think progress trap, and in B.C. pray that the Agricultural Land Reserve continues to hold safe what good farmland remains in our mountain-riddled province.

Conversely, traps of progress can arise when forests are levelled and crops planted on steep slopes to increase arable areas. Seemed like a good idea at the time. However, Pliny the Elder wanted to ban farming on steep slopes as early as 590 BC. But the will wasn't there and so much soil washed away that the harbours of ancient Rome silted up. Progress trap.

Faith can make progress traps. Wright holds up the example of the ancient Polynesian people of Easter Island. Until the 1400s, this now barren island was covered in trees. But their faith dictated that this vital resource had to be cut down and carved into the huge idols Easter Island is famous for.

Today, says Wright, our blind faith in materialism and the market forces that drive it (that would be the neoliberalism and neoconservatism of the Chicago school of economics, Thatcherism, Reaganism and Harperism) are driving us into unparalleled traps of progress, ones riddled with unsustainability in so many forms you can barely inventory them. The biggest trap of all: climate change.

These traps are especially scary when you consider that food technology has flat-lined. It's essentially the same as it was in Neolithic times — the same staple crops grown by a dozen ancient peoples still feed the seven-plus billion people on Earth today; not one new staple crop has been developed.

These crops evolved over the last 10,000 to 12,000 years, when our climate has been — unusually, productively, mercifully — stable. Only in the last 100 years or so of that climate-stable period have oil and coal seemed like a "good" idea.

"Look at the way we are letting oil and gas exploration rip when we know that expanding the carbon economy is suicidal for our children and grandchildren," Wright said in a recent interview with Chris Hedges in Truthdig. "The results can already be felt. When it gets to the point where large parts of the Earth experience crop failure at the same time then we will have mass starvation and a breakdown in order. That is what lies ahead if we do not deal with climate change."

History repeats itself.

And each time history repeats itself, so the saying goes, the price goes up. You can quote Ronald Wright on that.

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning journalist who agrees with Ronald Wright that the way to change political will in Canada is to have left-of-centre parties cooperate.