Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Short History of Nearly Everything, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Science, Discovery, and Mystery
Writing, Wonder, and Inspiration
Progress, Sexism, and Dogma
Existence, Awe, and Survival
Summary
Analysis
Bryson explains that the dodo becomes extinct before 1700, entirely as a result of humans killing dodos for recreation. Humans even destroyed the last remaining evidence of dodos, meaning that we have little information about what they actually looked like. Wherever humans exist, Bryson says, species go extinct. Depending on the continent, the rise of humans coincides with the extinction of 50-95 percent of large animal species. Bryson thinks that humans have destroyed may wondrous species, such as ground sloths the size of a house and turtles the size of cars, leaving the planet severely “diminished” because of our activities. Today, scientists even estimate that human-caused extinction runs 120,000 times higher than it ever has in history.
Bryson emphasizes how bizarre it is that humans treat other species with such carelessness. We are the trigger for an unimaginable amount of extinctions—up to 95 percent of land species in some continents—and our killing rates are only increasing. This is especially troubling considering that all life is interrelated, meaning that our actions not only have disastrous consequences for other species, but can also impact our own ability to survive as a species.
Themes
In the 1990s, Australian naturalist Tim Flannery, along with his artist friend Peter Schouten, embarks on a question to find out more about the species that have gone extinct in the time of humans, resulting in a “moving” book called A Gap in Nature. Flannery and Schouten show that some extinctions (like the dodo’s) are the result of human cruelty, while others happen because humans are “majestically foolish.” For example, a lighthouse worker’s pet cat unwittingly kills the only known species of flightless perching birds. Similarly, the Carolina parakeet is hunted to extinction because it’s considered a pest; the last surviving one dies in captivity, but the zoo loses its carcass.
Another problematic aspect of the “foolish” activities of humans beyond extinctions themselves is the way we ourselves get in the way of scientific progress. The careless ways that humans treat important scientific artifacts (such as the last dodo and the Carolina parakeet bodies) directly impinge scientific research, meaning that our sabotaging will result in ever-more work for scientists to do. Bryson also discusses Flanner and Schouten’s book to illustrate what good, engaging science writing looks like. Bryson thus argues that the need to engage humans with good writing is even more important when science deals with matters of literal life and death—especially the survival of entire species.
Themes
Two 19th-century collectors named Lionel Walter Rothschild and Hugh Canning independently amass huge collections of taxidermy animals, but also end up making some species go extinct through their collecting efforts, including the koa finch of Hawaii. Another collector named Alanson Bryan similarly kills the last black mamos birds, which he’s curiously happy about. In the early 20th century, many institutions even pay handsomely for the bodies of rare animals, further exacerbating extinction rates.
Bryson has already argued that humans recklessly endanger our environments, such as the oceans and the atmosphere, with pollution. Now, he discusses Rothschild, Canning, and Bryan to stress how carelessly humans also treat other species on the planet. All this could a have devastating impact on life’s ability to thrive.
Themes
All this considered, Bryson says, nobody in their right mind would choose humans to be the caretakers of life on Earth. Yet somehow, that’s what humans are. In some ways, we’re life’s “worst nightmare.” We don’t even know how many species we’ve killed. Bryson says that life is such a rare achievement in the harsh conditions of the universe that we are extremely lucky to be here—and even luckier to be intelligent enough to reflect on our luck and appreciate our existence. So far, humans have survived on the basis of “lucky breaks,” but we’ll need more than that if we want to keep life going—even for our own species.
Bryson closes his book with a cautionary tale: he has argued throughout that human existence is extremely rare, terrifyingly perilous, and extraordinarily lucky. The last thing humans should be doing, then, is undermining our own survival or the survival of other species. Bryson aims to leave his readers with a sense of awe for the planet and its many life forms, so that they will be motivated to take better care of the only home humans have and strive not to destroy ourselves, but to keep life going.
Themes
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