1788

Starfish and Sextants

by
Scope Correspondent

Every day in San Diego began the same way. I stood packed with other students in a tight lattice of ribs, elbows, and kneecaps, swaying as our rickety shuttle rumbled over the freeway, past a couple malls, and up a eucalyptus-lined hill to the university. The bus ride, just over a mile long, was almost always the most menial nine minutes of my day.

But one morning, the shuttle got stuck in traffic, jittering to a halt in the middle of the freeway overpass. Looking out the window, I found myself staring at the eight lanes of cars below. I was suddenly struck by how many there were—hundreds of hot metal vessels, crawling south to downtown and whizzing north towards Los Angeles. And all around us, there were more cars, patiently humming in three stopped lanes, jammed into parking lots by the road. These cars, I realized, were full of people I had never met and never would meet, each with their own concerns and stories, their own reason for rushing somewhere at 9:15 on a Tuesday morning. And these nameless people around me were barely scratching the surface.

There are over 7.2 billion human beings on Earth. It’s a number that’s almost impossible to truly grasp. If every person on this planet were a millimeter on a ruler, we could line up from Portland, Oregon, all the way across the United States to Boston, Massachusetts, and then push another 1,300 miles out into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

We’ve never had so much company from our own species. Less than 250 years ago, there were less than a billion of us on this planet; when my own grandmother was born, less than two billion. We seem eager to connect to our swelling species as much as we can. We’ve evolved ways to reach out across the globe with phones and emails, to store more and more acquaintances in various forms of social media. Last month I met someone who told me that it was an honor to be added to his retinue of Facebook friends, as he was nearing his allotted 5,000 person limit, and every new addition was a calculated commitment.

His predicament intrigued me. As the number of people he could choose to “connect” with decreased, the importance of each seemed to increase in his eyes. I began to wonder about the comparative value of being one of 5,000 friends. Surely, the thousands of other people in his virtual friend collection must have diluted, somewhat, the significance of my own presence. Mathematically speaking, 1/5,000 is much less substantial than say, 1/500, or 1/50. So it seems valid to wonder…what’s the relative value of being 1/7,200,000,000?

It’s not just a social concern. In a way, it’s biological, as well. In small populations of animals, there is a high risk of “genetic drift,” or the chance that a random change affecting one organism will have some sort of profound impact on the whole species. Evolutionarily speaking, our large population is an advantage. We’re less likely to be besieged by some new, unfortunate genetic disease, or wiped out all at once by a volcanic eruption or a sudden forest fire. But the fact that each of us has a reduced individual influence over the other people on our planet also seems a rather lonely truth.

There is always that slim chance, of course, to become something more—a synecdoche for a human value, a symbol of a movement, a catalyst for progress. There are those people—those single units among our seven billion—who somehow seem to snag more than their mathematical fair share of importance to our race. Anybody may begin life as an average baby in an average family, and through some combination of talent, tenacity, or timing, unfurl into Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Margaret Thatcher, Tiger Woods. They are like those golden poppies that pushed up in the lupine fields where I grew up, pinpoints of orange in a sea of blue. No matter how large the void we scream into feels, their example still offers the possibility that somehow, your fellow humans might just hear you shouting.

But the odds are long. Few of us end up sitting at a president’s desk, or walking across the Nobel Prize stage in Oslo. The rest of us must figure out how not to get lost in the crowd.

The ancient sailors who stood on their decks at night and pointed their sextants to the sky had thousands of visible stars at their disposal. But they needed and wanted only a single star at a time to find their way. I wonder if this is still our best hope for orientation. Seven billion may be too big to comprehend. But I can easily count every person who has taught me to be a human being. The majority of humanity will probably never know the names of my family, friends, and mentors. Yet these are the people who guided me, protected me, showed me how to think critically, create, and love. From the standpoint of our human race, their contribution may be negligible. But their profound impact on me eclipses that of the famous and revered. And perhaps my own existence might someday impact someone else in the same, invaluable way.

An ecologist can watch a rabbit roam around its environment, interacting with its fellow rabbits and the world around it. She can define these rabbits not only as a species, but also as populations, as communities, and even as individuals. A single rabbit is a small contribution to Kingdom Animalia, to the vast collection of warm-blooded mammals or small, furred rodents that cover the Earth. But by eating that sprig of grass or by feeding that hungry coyote, one rabbit just slightly alters the fabric of the world around it. And perhaps that is enough.

When I was young, my father told me Loren Eiseley’s story of the boy and the starfish. Walking along a beach, an old man sees a boy picking up stranded starfish and throwing them back into the ocean. The old man asks what the boy is doing, and when the boy explains that he is saving the starfish, the old man scoffs. There are far too many on the beach to save, he says, and for every one the boy throws in, another will wash up. How, he asks, could the boy’s efforts possibly even matter? The boy thinks about this for a moment, and then picks up another starfish. “Well,” he says, “It matters to this one.” And he throws it into the sea.

It’s a sweet fable on those days when the freeway is full of strangers. Some of us may become famous, wealthy, successful, even profoundly memorable to mankind at large. But for the rest of us, there will be other victories—our names in the mouths of our children, on the minds of our friends. And at least for them—our starfish—we will have mattered.

Seven months ago, one unarmed man was shot to death in a quiet Midwestern town of 20,000 people. Three months later, twelve people decided not to indict the man who shot him. And 1,800 miles away, fifty college students decided that they had something to say about this, and they needed to be heard. They got up early and went for a walk.

I saw the footage on the news that night. I recognized the location right away, but I had never seen anything like this before. Fifty individuals, standing together, arms linked, blocking four lanes of San Diego freeway asphalt. And behind them, hundreds upon hundreds of cars, sitting in two miles of immobile gridlock, drawn to a complete standstill by these few people on the road.

Comments

0 Comments