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Sixth Iteration: Control
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Jurassic Park, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Chaos, Change, and Control
Sight and Insight
Flawed Human Nature
Technology
Summary
Analysis
As Harding and the others move Malcolm to a clean bed, Hammond perks up. At least, he says, disaster has been averted; the dinosaurs won’t escape the island and “destroy the planet.” Malcolm judges Hammond’s fear as yet another example of his arrogance. Humanity might destroy itself, but despite its capacity for visiting extreme disruption and destruction on earth’s ecosystems, evolutionary history suggests that some form of life will survive to start the process of diversification again. When some plants started exhaling oxygen into the atmosphere three billion years ago, they created a mass extinction event for anerobic bacteria, but opened the door for other creatures to thrive and develop. Malcolm feels confident that just humans, not the planet, “are in jeopardy.” People can’t save or destroy the earth, only themselves.
As the survivors restore order (at least somewhat) to the park, this revives Hammond’s confidence in humankind’s control over nature. He believes in humanity’s dominion over nature—and by extension his own capacity to control nature for good (creating the park) or ill (destroying the world by unleashing new apex predators on an unsuspecting population). As evidence for human power, he points to deforestation and climate change. But Malcolm, as always looking at things from a very different perspective, challenges this view. Humans may be rendering the planet uninhabitable for themselves and countless other modern species. But from the point of view of life generally—from an evolutionary point of view, in other words—humans can’t destroy the planet. They can only destroy themselves through their arrogance, short-sightedness, and greed.
Themes
