As I look around Vancouver I see projects that suggest progress: a new condo tower beside other new condo towers; a 500 million dollar project to put a new roof on BC Place; a 3.3 billion dollar project to build a new Port Mann bridge. All of this is exciting to watch and means more and more people will be able to live and work in the “most livable city in the world.” Is this progress? Humans have been given the ability to reason and the power to create. We must reason well and learn to create that which is good.
Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he’s been given. But up to now he hasn’t been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life’s become extinct, the climate’s ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day. [Uncle Vanya, 1897]
– Anton Chekhov