"How Flowers Changed the World" Reflection

For our class on September 12th, the class was assigned readings from Loren Eiseley, Rachel Carson, and Paul Ehrlich. I ended up reading through the Loren Eiseley passage twice because I was so fascinated with his essay, "How Flowers Changed the World."

To me, there is something beautiful and poetic about the way flowers have led to the existence of humans, of me in particular. Eiseley says that once upon a time, there were no flowers at all. What a dull world that must have been. He specifically states that without flowers, man himself would never have existed. One quote in particular stood out to me. Eiseley quoted Francis Thompson and said, "one could not pluck a flower without troubling a star."

Having grown up not even knowing what evolution was, I was dumbfounded when I finally started intensely studying about it in my freshman year biology class. I developed a fascination for the subject, and every once in a while, something like this essay takes me back to the way I felt during that biology class, small.

The entire human race owes its existence to flowers and so many other seemingly insignificant things in this world. When the earth was born, there was such a low probability that humans or even flowers would come into existence that it is, in every sense of the word, a miracle that I am alive today.

Eiseley has a way of writing that invokes fascination and wonder in the reader and gives him or her the ability to relate to his shared experiences. He finds the perfect balance of science and story-telling. If I learned one thing from his essay, it is that everything is connected in some way, and I should be thankful for flowers, and nature as a whole, for giving me the chance to live.