Each time history repeats itself, so it's said, the cost goes up. The twentieth century, while at once a time of unprecedented economic, technological, and social progress, has produced a tremendous strain on the very elements that comprise life itself: our most basic natural resources. Which of course raises the key question of the twenty-first century: How much longer can this go on? With enormously persuasive wit and erudition, Ronald Wright lays out an all-too-convincing case that history has always provided an answer to that question, whether we care to notice or not. From Neanderthal man to the Sumerians to the Roman Empire, A Short History of Progress brilliantly dissects the cyclical nature of humanity's development and demise, the 10,000-year-old experiment that we've unleashed but have yet to control. It is Wright's contention that only by understanding, and ultimately breaking from, the very patterns of progress and disaster that humanity has repeated around the world since the Stone Age can we avoid the onset of a new Dark Age. In engaging and absorbing prose, Wright illustrates how various cultures throughout history have literally manufactured their own demise by producing an overabundance of innovation and stripping bare the very elements that allowed them to advance in the first place. A Short History of Progress is a brilliant, sobering, highly readable, and utterly fascinating rumination on the hubris at the heart of human development and the pitfalls we still may have time to avoid.