dan

About me:

Website: www.progresstrap.org

why this book? The 'Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer' was adopted by the UN in 1989. However, the general public did not seem inspired to act. The UN held the Rio Summit on Environment and Development in 1992, which set a voluntary agenda for governments to achieve sustainable development in the 21st century, known as Agenda 21. The Kyoto Protocol on climate change was adopted by most nations in 1997. Nonetheless there was little enthusiasm among governments, businessmen or the public to make reforms.

So I was determined to find out why people were not more enthusiastic about making reforms. It looked like a behaviour issue to me but I could not find an explanation for why people became less motivated as the threat loomed larger. It seemed that overdevelopment and overspecialisation were likely factors, preventing people from seeing the "big picture". But those were the symptoms, not the cause. By coincidence, I was reading a book called "Drawing on the right side of the brain", which was required reading in the fine arts degree course my wife was taking. The inactivity of the right side of the brain, leading to a lack of creativity in the average person in modern society, seemed to me to be closely related to the lack of popular inspiration where environmental threats are concerned. I wrote a paper titled "The progress trap" in 1989, arguing that industry, science and technology lead us into a trap of overdevelopment and also cause creative atrophy, which makes escaping this trap even more difficult.

If you want to find out why the clash between man and the environment came about, this is the book to read.

Investigating history and decades of neurological research by Damasio, Goleman and many others, I identify the genesis of our blindness to industrial excess.

Thankfully, the same research provides compelling strategies for how we live and learn - and for avoiding the pitfalls of progress.

"Escaping the progress trap" (available at www.amazon.com)
printed on Enviro100 recycled paper

"The roads by which men arrive at their insights into celestial matters seem to me almost as worthy of wonder as those matters in themselves." -Johannes Kepler

NURTURING GENIUS (excerpt)
The heroism and imagination that drove Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, Nightingale, Pasteur, the Curies, Einstein and many others are in short supply. The conformist nature of research facilities, be they corporate, government or educational discourages the rebellious spirit that inspired so many scientific innovators. In what may be the most bizarre and least scientific effort to address this, the Pentagon, concerned about long-term security, is tackling the grave scarcity of American science grads by sending its own rocket scientists, nanotechnologists, and geneticists to Hollywood to learn how to write screenplays that show scientists in an appealing light. The belief is that if TV and movies show scientists in flattering ways, more young people will be encouraged to follow in their footsteps, or fly in their airstream. The core dilemma is that defence laboratory jobs require American citizenship while the line of eager applicants for science positions is made up mostly of immigrants.
A more effective way of attracting keen young people would be to let the public know that it is faced with daunting problems and that it will take heroic dedication to solve them. There is no shortage of risk-takers. Take skateboarders for example; consider how many are willing to break every bone in their body to master new moves and gain fame! How many youngsters ruin their eyesight pursuing the 'next level' in video games? When President Kennedy said of the moon mission, "we do this...not because it is easy but because it is hard" he inspired a generation of wizards. There are countless young people capable of taking up the challenge of finding a better way than the "death by ecology" we seem to have chosen. Their imaginations must be fired. And long-term security will no doubt involve avoiding vulnerability and dependence. It’s not rocket science.

"..if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature." - Charles Darwin

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The progress trap, and how to avoid it
http://www.progresstrap.org/node/

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