In a world increasingly inclined to measure progress in terms of technological and economic growth and speed, Surviving Progress (2011) offers a vital pause. In 86 minutes, directors Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks compact the claims of Ronald Wright’s bestselling book A Short History of Progress (2004) – the resounding recommendation of which is to change our definitions of progress or else, suffer future charges of our failure to confront climate change. Roy and Crooks’ documentary is the latest addition to a hefty canon of environmental activist films in which Western society’s production and consumption habits are viewed through a hyper critical lens: the West is sharply implicated as the prime culprit and exporter of unsustainable habits. Surviving Progress’ assumes its angle in the crowded discourse on climate change by using the definition of progress as the starting point for navigating the wide-ranging discourse on what it means to move forward in society.

The first step of the film is to dismantle the widely accepted definition of progress. A series of experts and intellectuals are shown grappling with the definition of progress, each rendered flustered at the task of defining a term that has become so bound up in contradictions. In the Western, capitalist conception, progress is commonly defined in terms of technological and economic growth, mechanization, standardization – all unfolding at an unrelenting speed. In the context of the film, progress is described as humans’ will and ability to wield their mastery over nature and increasingly, to destructive ends. Author Ronald Wright states that it is vital to distinguish between “good and bad progress” as the latter springs from a neoliberal agenda that promotes the exploitation of labor and resources at the cost of environmental sustainability. The result is the effective masking of the capitalist intent underlying the widespread rhetoric of progress, and the surge of “progress traps”, in which the West finds itself now: while our shopping malls and accompanying possessions are plenty, our ability to provide for future generations is becoming decisively limited.

The statistics cited that would hypothetically reverse the effects of such progress traps are sobering: the world population would have to decrease by one half if Western consumption habits are to be maintained. With 5 billion people on Earth currently not experiencing the wealth, education and other benefits largely enjoyed by the affluent West, efforts to equalize this imbalance would significantly destabilize the planet’s resources. To give a sense of the current imbalance, it is said that the average European and American consumes 50 times more than the average factory worker in Bangladesh. And as Canadian author Margaret Atwood reminds the viewer: there will be no economic growth on a dead planet.

Commendable in Surviving Progress is its challenging of the dominant discourse about progress and the sense of global causality that it presents: Roy and Crooks traverse China, the Congo and Brazil to show the complexities of climate change and how it is linked to a host of factors. In the case of Brazil, for example, international debt is cited as a key source which has led to environmental degradation of the country. Saddled with outstanding external debt, Brazil has suffered intense pressure to sell off its resources, including whole sections of the Amazon Rainforest. As the Brazilian Agricultural Minister Marina Silva states, the rainforest is often perceived as “a symbol of backwardness that contravened the idea of progress”, showing how a debilitating discourse on growth has permeated Brazilian borders. Despite its barrage of depressing statistics, the film uses them to masterful ends: to effectively subvert the dominant conception of “progress”, while stressing how the exportation of this conception wields severe global repercussions.

Where the film lacks is in its failure to offer practical, graspable solutions to the issue of climate change, leaving its viewers feeling disempowered to re-route the path of “progress”. While it does good to debunk the rhetoric of politicians and bankers, it falls short of showing the viewer, as an assumed everyday man or woman, how they can proceed beyond these discursive limits, re-creating the original exclusion created by this corporate discourse. If climate change is a matter discussed and handled exclusively among the experts, including the above named culprits of “progress” as the film would imply, how can the viewer assert themselves in this matter? How can we collectively revamp our definitions of progress by defining it as a matter not of speed but steadiness or balance – a process of sustainability, and a commitment to modest, eco-conscious living? Progress must be re-framed as a pattern of sustainable social habits, not a mere economic matter. Progress must be re-framed as a matter of community and of care – for each other and the environment. Such an understanding is lost in the political and economic rhetoric of the film, which avoids showing the everyday reality of navigating “progress traps”, as well as the potential to create environmental change in the everyday.

The challenge that Surviving Progress leaves us with thus remains: how can we channel discourse into dialogue, ideas into implementation, critiques into creativity? In 86 minutes, Roy and Crooks show how the accumulation of centuries of environmentally destructive habits has lead us to where we are now, left considering how backwards our conception of moving forward has become.

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