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Friday, September 01, 2017

The Star Thrower and Nature's Way

A friend has discussed the famous The Starfish Thrower story on Facebook. This story has moved thousands of people.
I want to show him an interesting sort-of-related story which I read the Chinese translation a long time ago. As my friend does not read Chinese, I try to search for the original English version. It turns out that the Chinese translation is very famous, it is used as a Chinese textbook article in mainland China, but the original English is hard to find online. It turns out that many Chinese students have searched for it but failed. As a result, they even question the authenticity of the article.
It seems to be a New York Times article Humans, All Too Human by Michael Blumenthal on 23 July 1989. The only English website I found related to it is a response posted on New York Times one month later. Then there is a condensed version titled Nature's Way in 1990, which I can found only on Chinese websites.
If you are interested, you can find the original version and the Chinese version of Nature's Way, and the frustrations of Chinese students on this website.
What is Nature's Way about? It is a story that several men interwind with nature to save a baby turtle, which in turns led to the death of many baby turtles.

The Starfish Thrower literally tells about saving one starfish to make a difference, Nature's Way reminds us that we have to be careful such that our good deed may not be a wishy-washy thinking.