The starfish anti-parable: It didn't make a difference to that one (as far as I could tell)

Up in Maine with my parents for a few days, I was heading out to the boat with my mother. We were walking along the pier when we spotted a starfish drying out on the wooden planks. We stopped for a moment to gaze at it, marveling at how beautiful and perfectly formed it was, medium-sized, dark pink in color, wonderfully symmetrical. “Should I toss it back?” I asked my mother. “And then do I get to say ‘It mattered to that one’?”

I lifted the starfish with my thumb and forefinger, just a little bit squeamishly, and dropped it over the side. My mother and I watched it slowly sink in the shallow saltwater below the dock. “I actually don’t think it mattered to that one,” my mother said. “I think that one was already dead.”

Still, I couldn’t help but relish the irony. I’ve gone on more than one tirade about how tired I am of the Starfish Parable that has been making the rounds through motivational speeches, Sunday school classes and commencement addresses for the past five years or more – and here I was, reenacting the very same parable, sort of. Except unlike in the fable of the child who sees an expanse of beach covered with hundreds of stranded and doomed starfish and throws one back, responding to the doubter with him who says “There are hundreds; it won’t make any difference if you throw one back” with “It made a difference to that one,” I had only one starfish to save, not hundreds, and according to my mother, it appeared likely that I failed.

Ha, I muttered to myself. I’ve always known that was a silly parable. Now I know it can’t even be replicated. How long would a starfish live out of water, anyway? How does the child in the parable know that it did in fact matter to the one he threw back? For all we know, he was too late, too. It’s just that he was tossing into the pounding surf rather than the shallow and sunlit depths that I dropped my starfish into, so I could witness my own failure, whereas Parable Boy was free to assume his starfish went on to thrive.

I first heard the starfish parable at the Massachusetts Governor’s Conference for Women in Boston in December of 2006, as told by keynote speaker Attorney General Martha Coakley. Then, as tends to happen with these little tales, especially in the Internet and YouTube era, I heard it again a week later at church. And again at an awards ceremony, and the next year at a talk by a well-known children’s author (who claims his mother told him the story when he was 12, which would have been about 1964, making it a much older fable than I had thought. But I don’t necessarily believe this particular author).

My problem with it is this: many apparent disruptions in the natural world actually happen for a reason. Most of us have heard that forest fires are actually good for forests because they consume all the extra detritus on the forest floor. If hundreds of starfish ever really did beach themselves at one time, unfortunate as it may be for each of those starfish, my guess is that there was a greater purpose served in the biosystem. For example, maybe that apparent disaster corrected a population explosion among starfish that year. Maybe plankton (or whatever starfish eat) prospered that season, with some positive effect on the ecosystem underwater. Maybe seals (or whatever eat starfish) were having an overpopulation problem of their own that year, and a diminution in the starfish supply resulted in the seal population evening out.

Far be it from me to want starfish to die, but I always wonder if anyone else has the same suspicions about this particular tale. Is there possibly a reason that starfish stranded themselves on a beach? Not that it really matters, of course. Maybe it did “matter to that one,” in the case of the one the boy tossed back, but his decision to throw one back probably didn’t change whatever effect on the biosystem a mass stranding of starfish was going to have.

I’ve thought about this parable a lot. So not only was it fascinating to see a perfectly formed starfish on the pier yesterday morning; it also seemed a little bit like a sign to me. Like maybe a reminder that I’m right and that parable is silly; maybe you can’t fix some things just by making one small gesture and just maybe, you shouldn’t even have the hubris to try. Nature seldom needs correcting.

That pretty starfish appeared to sink to the bottom, dead from its stay in the sun. But it’s always possible a bottom-dwelling creature ate it anyway and prospered as a result. And maybe that’s what was meant to happen in the natural order of things all along.