Escaping the progress trap

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If you have seen Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth you will have noticed the frog in hot water illustration. You may have wondered why people can be something like that frog - it jumps out of the water if it is too hot, but remains there until the bitter end if it is slowly heated.
A look at environmental landmarks over the last 50 years will show how slow we are to act, even as things warm up:
- Rachel Carson's Silent Springwas published in 1962
- Limits to Growth by Dennis Meadows and colleagues appeared in 1972
- the Montreal Ozone Protocol was formalized in 1989
- the Earth Summit was held in Rio in 1992
- Beyond the Limits by Dennis Meadows and colleagues was published in 1993
- and the Kyoto Protocol on climate change was adopted (by most nations) in 1997,
yet the global community is slow to halt the effects of environmental degradation.

Escaping the progress trap investigates how industry, science and technology often create problems that they can not solve.

Societies that are past their peak exclude creative ingenuity that is essential for solving problems, when they over-invest in technical solution-finding. Examining neurological and behavioral research in the areas of specialization and creativity, the author illustrates not only that this trend is enabled by our mental wiring, but also that society has ample means for avoiding it.

Readers of this provocative book will find compelling reasons for revising traditional views on progress and for ending our adversarial relationship with the environment.