Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is one of Canada\'s most successful and prolific contemporary writers having won both the Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction.Atwood and Moyers discuss how the imagination of the creative mind can help cross the boundaries between faith and reason and to see the best and worst of human possibilities.For more of the interviews, and a chance to share what you find important on matters of Faith & Reason, visit the program\'s website and watch the broadcasts on PBS.

Margaret Atwood’s visionary work Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth is the basis for this riveting and poetic documentary on "debt" in its various forms - societal, personal, environmental, spiritual, criminal, and of course, economic. Filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal (Manufactured Landscapes) strikingly interweaves these (sometimes surprising) debtor/creditor relationships: two families in a years-long Albanian blood feud; the BP oil spill vs. the Earth; mistreated Florida tomato farm workers and their bosses; imprisoned media mogul Conrad Black and the U.S. justice system. With stunning cinematography and insightful commentary from renowned thinkers Raj Patel, Louise Arbour and Atwood herself, Payback is a brilliant, game-changing rumination on the subject.

Technological advancement, economic development, population increase - are they signs of a thriving society? Or too much of a good thing? Based on the best-selling book A Short History of Progress, this provocative documentary explores the concept of progress in our modern world, guiding us through a sweeping but detailed survey of the major 'progress traps' facing our civilization in the arenas of technology, economics, consumption, and the environment. Featuring powerful arguments from such visionaries as Jane Goodall, Margaret Atwood, Stephen Hawking, Craig Venter, Robert Wright, Michael Hudson, and Ronald Wright, this enlightening and visually spectacular film invites us to contemplate the progress traps that destroyed past civilizations and that lie treacherously embedded in our own. Leading critics of Wall Street, cognitive psychologists, and ecologists lay bare the consequences of progress-as-usual as the film travels around the world - from a burgeoning China to the disappearing rainforests of Brazil to a chimp research lab in New Iberia, Louisiana - to construct a shocking overview of the way our global economic system is eating away at our planet's resources and shackling entire populations with poverty. Providing an honest look at the risks and pitfalls of running 21st Century 'software' (our accumulated knowledge) on 50,000-year-old 'hardware' (our primate brains), Surviving Progress offers a challenge: to prove making apes smarter was not an evolutionary dead end.

In a world where religion poisons some lives but gives profound purpose to others, how do we learn to live togther? Join veteran journalist Bill Moyers (Jospeh Campbell and the Power of Myth, Bill Moyers' Journal) as he sits down with 12 noted writers and thinkers from a wide spectrum of beliefs to discuss their search for meaning.