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In the first podcast of 2025, we look at the essay by Loren Eiseley, “The Star Thrower”, first published in his book The Unexpected Universe (1969). This essay has been paraphrased in numerous ways over the years, telling a simple story of a man encountering another person throwing Sea Stars into the ocean after they’d been heaved onto a beach by a storm. The man usually says something to the effect of “but there are so many, your efforts won’t matter.” No matter how the essay is paraphrased, it ends with the thrower telling the man that “it mattered to this one!”
While many fond the little story thus paraphrased useful, the essay is so much more than that – in fact the phrase “it mattered to this one” isn’t even in the orirginal text. Rather the essay is about the natural and proper work of beating back against the odds and loving the world. Eiseley writes of coming to realize that compassion, which in his time was considered anti-science, is as much a part of human nature as the fierce competitive aspect of living in the actual world which has been the presumption since Darwin. It’s a magnificent and deeply reasoned piece of writing. You can listen to it here, in the latest edition of New Wild Review.
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