Tom Wessels - The Myth of Progress

I grew up during the 1950s in a suburban development spawned by American optimism following World War II. Like so many of these developments, similar looking houses were evenly spaced on tidy one-half acre lots. Luckily for me, across the street from our house was an intact forest probably 70 acres in size. From my current ecological perspective, 70 acres doesnt seem like much, but back then it was an extensive wilderness. At the age of five, I started to walk to school through those woods, and for the next seven years the majority of my free time was spent in that forest building forts, climbing trees and cliffs, exploring boulder caves, and watching fat pollywogs grow into frogs. My early roots as an ecologist and natural historian were put down in those woods. My first experience of development occurred there too.

It was during the spring of my sixth-grade year, just as the leaves were opening on the maples, that two of my close friends and I were walking home from an after-school baseball game late in the afternoon. About five minutes into the woods we stumbled upon a brand new bulldozed road that had been punched right into the center of the forest. Shocked by this intrusion into our sanctuary, we followed the road a short distance and to our dismay found that the bulldozer had run right over one of our forts. Without saying a word we became of one mind and started to run down this new gash farther into the forest. The road ended in a clearing where the bulldozer had toppled a number of hoary-barked, old red maples and pushed them to one side. In the middle of the clearing sat the unattended bulldozerits operator apparently having finished work for the day.

We were outraged; without discussing it we started hurling stones at the dozers windows. Once we had cracked all the windows, we got some sharp sticks and punched holes throughout the leather seat cover and pulled out chunks of foam. Then into every gear that we could reach we jammed rocks, and with stout branches we pried off some hydraulic hoses. Finally we poured dirt, exposed by the dozers tracks, into its gas tank. We never questioned what we were doing, and it is the only time in my life that I vandalized someone elses property. But to the three of us, those woods were our home. The bulldozer had invaded the sanctity of that home, and we fought back.

Just about every person I have met who is close to my age has a similar experience of the loss of a special childhood place. Prior to the nineteenth century, the vast majority of human beings lived in landscapes where their ancestors had existed for generation after generation. In this way, people were intimately tied to their place. Its a very recent phenomenon that landscapes to which people were once connected have become smothered by developmentgrowth that we are told is a sign of progress. But is progress truly possible if its wake continually generates lossloss of connections to place and community, loss of clean air and water, loss of other species who are truly part of our ancestral family tree?

Although we probably did some serious damage to the dozer, within a few short months the entire forest was gone and soon replaced by a hundred new homes. Since that time I have learned that violence doesnt accomplish anything. So my efforts today are focused on educating people about the wonders of the natural world, hoping that this will foster stronger connections, stewardship, and care of our biological heritagea heritage that has taken more than three billion years to develop and on which our existence is completely dependent.

Now I am taking my experience as educator, ecologist, and natural historian and applying it to an examination of our notions of progress. I hope that just as I have helped people to see and experience natural history in a new way, I can offer an alternative view of our current socioeconomic system. I am not an experienced economist, political scientist, or sociologist. But as an ecologist I am well versed in the foundational laws that govern all complex systems, and a socioeconomic system is a complex one. It is within this context that I believe I can offer a sobering view of our current march toward progress.

Because my critique of our reigning notions of progress is scientifically based, scientific terms are used in this book. Those terms are listed in the glossary and appear in italics when first introduced in the text.