File consists of an interview with Ronald Wright titled "Seeing the future in the ruins of the past." The interview was conducted by Silver Donald Cameron as part of The Green Interview. File includes video of the interview, printed transcript, sound recording, and closed captioning file.
From the interview: "Of course, progress can be defined in many different ways. Until relatively modern times, until really the beginning of the Enlightenment of the Industrial Revolution, people thought of progress in a moral sense or a spiritual sense. But then when the pace of technological change began to accelerate and became noticeable, then you got this sense of material progress. Each generation of steam engines is better than the last, for example. Agriculture, machinery and farming practices became more productive, so the idea took hold that-and this was defined by the British economist, Sidney Pollard, in his book called The Idea of Progress, and I am just paraphrasing here, but essentially he said, the assumption is that there's a pattern of change in history, and that these consist of changes in one direction only, and that that direction is towards improvement.
"And of course, if you look in the short term, and you look at the experience of the wealthy, industrialized countries of Europe and North America and a few other places, that is true. Myths are not necessarily untrue; they're usually partly true. The danger lies in the part that isn't true. And so it's partly true: we have noticed people living longer, eating better and so forth, and having more opportunities and more money and more leisure. The idea that this can go on forever is where the myth of progress gets dangerous, because there have been many times and places in the human past-not even necessarily in our own cultural tradition, but among other civilizations-where there have been great periods of expansion and prosperity, and everybody started to get the idea that life was getting better and better. But usually those periods of rapid expansion are done on "nature pays the bills for that." And the typical pattern of a civilization is to find a new way to exploit natural resources that makes human wealth, or makes a big population expansion and therefore an expansion in political power and the power to build things and so forth, in the short run. But there's a cost for that, and the cost is being paid by nature in the long run."
