Progress - How One Idea Shaped Our Past and Puts Our Future At Risk

This is a wise book, and hopefully its wisdom will rub off. We need somehow to take the human traits that fixated on ''more'' and turn them towards ''better'''' Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature Progress is power. But the modern story of progress is a very dangerous fiction. In the pursuit of progress, of growth and expansion, we have levelled cities, flattened mountains, charted the globe and ushered in a new geological epoch unique in our planet''s 4.5-billion-year history. The idea of progress has compelled societies toward exploration, invention, and grandiosity on one hand, and on the other, genocide, slavery, ecocide, and conquest: it is the root of our civilization''s success, as well as its looming demise. Geographer Samuel Miller McDonald offers a radical new perspective on the myth upon which the modern world is built, illuminating its blood-strewn lineage and suggesting an urgent alternative. He traces the history of how human societies broke from their pasts, broke from their environments, and broke from longstanding egalitarian values that sustained them, supplanting these with one imperative to rule all others: progress. If humanity is to have any chance of a future, then we must fundamentally change the way we think about one of our most basic political ideas. This landmark work shows us where to begin.

Product details

• Authors: Samuel Miller McDonald
• Publisher: William Collins
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 14.08.2025
• EAN: 9780008462475
• ISBN: 978-0-00-846247-5
• Dimensions: 159 mm x 240 mm x 24 mm
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > General, dictionaries; Non-fiction book; Globalization, Nature / Environmental Conservation & Protection, NATURE / Ecology, Political Ideologies, PHILOSOPHY / Political, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Ideologies / General, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Globalization, Applied ecology, Social & political philosophy, social and political philosophy, Conservation of the environment, Political ideologies and movements