Source: seattletimes.nwsource.com


"If we can avoid disaster in the next two centuries, we should be safe," says Stephen Hawking in "Surviving Progress."

That bit of best-case-scenario wistfulness is about as persuasively hopeful as things get in this truly disturbing documentary, which pretty much argues that human beings are hard-wired to self-destruct.

Drawing a connection over many millennia between our hirsute, spear-wielding ancestors wiping out yummy mastodons and our modern, rapacious appetite for finite natural resources, "Surviving Progress" says the relentless exploiter in us is bred in the bone.

Filmmakers Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks, building out from grim themes in Ronald Wright's book "A Short History of Progress," cover an enormous amount of ground in this globe-trotting production, including the impact of overpopulation, synthetic biology (creating new life-forms), overconsumption, predatory banking, environmental devastation and the seemingly unstoppable 200-year-old Industrial Revolution that is ratcheting up in developing countries.

Roy and Crooks work hard to tie all these things together into one complicated but cogent vision of profit-driven, blind progress as an enemy of survival. It can be difficult at times to keep up with them, but it helps to have some of the heavy lifting done by interviewees including author Margaret Atwood and anthropologist Jane Goodall.

Martin Scorsese is one of the film's executive producers, and somehow that makes sense given his films on the subject of wayward ambition and self-destruction. In this case, though, the tragedy is in ourselves.

Tom Keogh: tomwkeogh@gmail.com

The movie: Surviving Progress