February 08, 2010

Adapted by Nicholas Young from Shi-Wei Lu's Essay太魯閣族還我土地運動2010年1月花蓮陳情小記

Hu Wenhsien, a plaintiff in our case against Asia Cement, passed away just a few days before our recent trip to Hualien. Mr. Hu had been divorced from his land for over forty years, though all that separated him from it was a narrow dirt road and a barbed wire fence. From his residence you can hear the rumble and crack of the Asia Cement mining project just a few meters up the hill. His family's home is literally hemmed in on all sides by Asia Cement's Taroko mining operation.

When we arrived at his home, Mr. Hu's family emerged holding his funerary photo, which we had hoped they would bring to our earlier demonstration in front of the Hualien County Government. Unfortunately, they never made it to the demonstration. At their home, we explained the legal process being undertaken, and asked them to help obtaining signatures from all of Mr. Hu's living descendants. How many will do so remains to be seen. Dispossessed of their land, his family is scattered around the island. Like many native peoples across the globe, they have been forced from their traditional domain and made to assimilate into the mainstream culture and economy.

February 05, 2010

To: The National Energy Conference
From: Robin Winkler
Taiwan Wild at Heart Legal Defense Association
wildatheart.org.tw
21 June 2005

Time to Question Assumptions (2): Energy

Against the background of developments in “cold fusion” several decades ago there was talk of “energy too cheap to meter,” a phrase that seems to come up in the context of nuclear energy time and again. An unlimited supply of cheap, clean and stable energy - everyone’s dream, and especially attractive to the imported energy dependent Taiwanese as we conclude these two days of discussions on global warming, responses to Kyoto, keeping a balance between the environment and the economy, and jump-starting a host of new business opportunities.

Allow me to digress. Humans first inhabited Taiwan about 15,000 years ago. Paleolithic, Neolithic peoples flourished throughout the island over these millennia and today Taiwan is graced with traces of these original human inhabitants, the approximately 2% of our population comprised of twelve recognized tribes and a number of asyet unrecognized indigenous peoples.

Digressing even further to about 2.5 million years ago, the land mass we know as Taiwan, for what was probably the third time, emerged from the Pacific Ocean through the collision of Philippine and Eurasian continental plates. That uplifting continues today, as does the gradual northeasterly drift of Taiwan, both phenomena explaining in part Taiwan’s high mountains and geologic unpredictability. In this environment of severe instability over four thousand plants and at least 400,000 insects and other animal species developed such that Taiwan is said to be second in the world in terms of diversity based on land mass of a country.

While records of Chinese visits to the island go back to the 11th century, outside contact really began with the Dutch and Portugese in the 17th century, followed by the Chinese migrations, Japanese invasions, and other incursions by a wide range of other opportunists and adventurers, including the author. Without exception, these visitors, upon arrival in Taiwan, were struck with the island’s natural abundance andbeauty.

We could thus say that these indigenous plants, people and other animals managed very well in Taiwan for quite some time.

So, in the space of 400 years, the western and eastern cultures have taught the native Taiwanese some serious lessons about civilization, technology and, of course, about energy. All this within a period that amounts to about .016% of the time Taiwan has existed as an island, or less than 3% of the time that Taiwan was “managed” by indigenous peoples using low or no technology andminimum amounts of energy, at least in the senses of those words “technology” and “energy” that we use today.

We have had what has amounted to an island-wide, 400 year-long energy blowout party during which the “new Taiwanese” (Europeans, Chinese, Japanese) have shown the natives how things can be with no holds barred on the burdens we place on the global environment, and with no limits to what we can achieve when “energy” is cheap and technology is abundant.

The scorecard today? Half of Taiwan’s rivers are seriously polluted, nearly all are dammed or are threatened with numerous water diversion projects (dams, irrigation, etc.), we have the highest population density in the world if the inhabitable mountainous areas are excluded, the world’s highest density of nuclear power plants, second highest use of cement per capita, one of the highest levels of species extirpation in the world due to over-building and habitat destruction, over 30 percent of our ocean shore is covered in cement or by one of the 240 fishing ports, and in the meantime, suicide, divorce, crime, cancer and mental illness are rapidly rising.

Any connection between these unfortunate attributes of modern society and our excessive use of “energy” and “technology”?

When humans have had access to limitless amounts of the kinds of “energy” that have propelled industrial revolution and the conquest and assimilation of indigenous peoples around the world, the record has not been good. Of course establishing a “cause and effect” relationship between the “unmetered” energy that Taipower gives to the Tao people of Orchid Island so that they can keep their air-conditioners running day and night – regardless of whether anyone is at home – and the demise of their culture, is not easy to do. But other than because some company’s public relations department tells us so, or because some government official being paid off by that company supports the company’s PR, why should we continue to believe the message implicit in every government and business utterance that the more energy we have, the happier we will be, or the better it will be for society?

The Tao of Orchid Island suffered near complete devastation of their traditional culture when their original homes were bulldozed at the insistence of Madame Chiang Kaishek so that they could live in what she believed were “decent” homes made of concrete and rebar. Further blows came with the storage of Taipower’s nuclear waste on the island in what was supposed to have been a canning factory. One wonders what is next for the Tao people after a few years of “free energy.”

So we ask the sponsors and the presenters of the National Energy Conference: Based on the record of Europeans, Americans, Chinese and Japanese to date, do we really want more of this stuff in cheap and unlimited quantities?

If we were to tap cheap, inexhaustible energy, … it would be “like giving a machine gun to an idiot child”.

A First for Taiwan: Supreme Administrative Court Upholds Decision to Void Central Science Park EIA – Farmers, Lawyers Associations, Social Groups Petition Control Yuan to Investigate EPA Officials’ Misconduct, Demand Minister’s Resignation

On 22 January 2010 Taiwan’s Supreme Administrative Court rocked Taiwan’s Executive by upholding a lower court’s ruling that the environmental impact assessment approval issued by the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) for a major high-tech industry construction project was void. The decision strikes a blow against one of Taiwan’s sacred cows, the expansion and development of what are euphemistically called “science parks.”

However, despite the decision, and in an extension of its nearly four year epic of ignoring calls from farmers, academics, environmentalists and the courts, the EPA seems to have “gone rogue”; instead of looking at the issues on which the courts based their decisions, public health threats for example, the EPA has engaged in what appears to be a drug-induced orgy of self denial, legal fantasy and political blame shifting, prompting some observers to ask, “what are they smoking down there on Chunghua Road?”

A number of social advocacy groups will be holding several activities tomorrow (Feb. 4, 2010):

December 30, 2009

Everyday I ask the same questions over and over again: why are people doing this? Why are persons with education, money, intelligence, position, power, good intentions and other attributes that we consider "positive" allowing, and often enabling, the quality of our economy, society and non-human natural environment to deteriorate to such a devastating extent?

The answers that I generally come up with, answers that differ from the often heard "human nature", "greed", "Taiwanese" and so on, are that we lack the information and the means to process that information into viable action.

My first answer is that the information about how bad things really are has the potential to start a violent revolution. Few individuals with economic, social or political power want us to know too much about the connections between their wealth, status and power and the increasing misery of people, starvation, war, rich poor gap, climate destabilization and all the environmental conflagration that portends. The reasons are obvious. They have families, reputations and their own perceived needs to protect and maintain.