"A powerful analysis of our situation"

This book shows how societies and individuals can be victims of their own success, often unconscious of the effects of ingenuity on their environment. When changes are man-made and harmful, a downward spiral begins: development that excludes solutions to problems that arise from development.

A leading academic publisher noted that the "work does in fact promise to provide a powerful analysis of our situation and what may be a fruitful way of resolving the dilemma which that analysis exposes."

Dr. Sheila Mason, professor of Environmental Ethics with Concordia University's philosophy department observed: "two chapters ... fit in well as I like to use Damasio and Ledoux to make the point about emotion, which fits very well with Virtue Theory - the basis of this course...The writing is very beautiful: clear and measured."

The project began in 1990 as a Global Ecopolitics presentation at Concordia University, Montreal: The Progress Trap – Science, humanity and the environment. It proposed that industrial development can result in “an escalating quantity of technical treatments of man-made problems…creating a burden that results in new problems such as funding shortages for research…and environmental mysteries such as nuclear waste disposal. This situation is the progress trap.” A historical pattern of deviation from a ‘norm’ of natural interdependence with nature was identified. This deviation often results in a failing state where creative, problem-solving abilities that ought to emerge under environmental threats, are absent.

Incidentally, the commonly used definition of progress traps, used in the Wikipedia article ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_trap ) is derived from this book's cover text ".. the condition in which we find ourselves when innovation creates more problems than it can solve, often inadvertently."

Find out more about Escaping the progress trap -