Two years after the onslaught of Typhoon Morakot, the predictions in the book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein are unfortunately being played out. The state, business, charities and other social control organizations are using this “opportunity” to force Aborigines down from the mountains, taking them away from their homes in order to get their hands on their traditional territory.
By contrast, the Aboriginal filmmaker Maywa Biho’s film Light up My Life shows how Aborigines are working hard to turn their situation around, with young Aborigines returning to the Kanakanavu tribe to start growing millet and other traditional crops again.
This is a most astonishing example of how people can adapt to the disasters brought by climate change. What is now no more than a flicker of light at the end of a very long tunnel may well grow ever bigger, ever stronger and ever brighter.
The Kanakanavu tribe, on the banks of Dakanuwa Creek in Greater Kaohsiung’s Namasiya District (那瑪夏), was not damaged by Morakot, but the film shows how the truncated roads are causing serious problems. Some may sigh and say “man cannot conquer nature” and that the mountains must simply be sealed off, but those living in the mountains are also people, and it is important to maintain risk evaluations of the communications, development and ecological situation.
Some of the traditional tribal areas that Aborigines want to return to or rebuild have, for technical reasons, been designated as dangerous areas. If the same stringent standards were applied to the illegal hotels dotting the hillsides around Cingjing Farm (清境農場) in Nantou County, one can only wonder if the reissuing of legal permits would even be discussed, not to mention the nuclear waste storage area in Taitung County’s Daren Township (達仁), where the rock is so soft that even a three-year-old could crush it.
This is not really a question of what is good for the goose, it is more an example of how technical expertise always gets distorted by political and commercial interests.
Look at the reconstruction of the roads connecting this tribe to the outside world. Given that the government had decided that improvements to the Suhua Freeway did not present any real technical problems, there should not be any reason why these far less ambitious road reconstruction projects cannot be completed. The government is building Freeway No. 5, a long cement corridor, just so that tourists will be able to reach Sun Moon Lake faster, making it look environmentally friendly through ecological engineering. If it can do this, of course it can also lower the environmental impact of a small industrial access road to meet safety requirements.
The crux of the problem is cost-efficient analysis and resource distribution. In order to attract Chinese tourism, billions of New Taiwan dollars were spent on improving the Alishan road so that it could accommodate large tour buses.
The road to the tribe, however, was postponed for two years, making it impossible to transport local produce by small trucks and avoid losses. People with chronic illnesses would not go to the hospital because it was so inconvenient to do so, and of course there were delays that put people’s lives at risk.
The Aborigines that have left the mountain areas following the exhortations of government, business and charity organizations have come to identify with the “disaster victim” label given to them by the government. They have been swallowed up by the machine that is global capitalism, leaving behind the land of their ancestors and the diverse lives they had led there, forced to specialize in a single salable skill such as sculpting, singing or dancing.
Worst of all, they have gone from farming in tune with nature and the seasons to working to the clock, perhaps the only farmers in Taiwan, and perhaps the world, to have to do this. This has alienated them from their land and in effect made slaves of them, in what is essentially a return to serf labor.
The film does not contrast life on the mountain with life in the lowlands, as the director focuses on the stories of the women returning to their homes. Other documentaries do exist, which can help us make the comparison.
Millet will disappear from these tribal areas for a variety of complex and multifaceted structural factors. If these women are once again going to have cultural and economic autonomy, they will have to find a way to cultivate food again, and the only way to do this is to remain on the mountain. Academics interested in abstract concepts like germplasm conservation and US “slow food” adherents could learn a lot from them.
Disasters caused by climate change do not affect those who were responsible for it in the first place and the victims equally. It is often the case that the small group of capitalists who are polluting the world benefit, while the people who live on the fragile ecological frontline suffer the most. This is patently unfair and the greatest environmental injustice of the modern world. Taiwan’s Aborigines have found a way to deal with environmental disasters and they are working hard on implementing it. The way they are taking advantage of such crises as a way to start out anew is truly inspiring.
Pan Han-shen is the spokesman of the Taiwan Green Party.
TRANSLATED BY PERRY SVENSSON
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