It’s time once again to get out the brooms, rakes, dustpans, rubber gloves, hipwaders and trash bags and hit the streets, beaches, parks, hiking trails and train stations — today is the 10th annual “Clean Up the World” day in Taiwan and the 19th worldwide.
Held annually on the third weekend in September, the campaign was the brainchild of Australian yachtsman Ian Kiernan, who was so appalled by the amount of trash he saw littering the oceans on a round-the-world voyage in 1987 that he founded a “Clean Up Australia” program after returning home.
With the help of friends, he organized a “Clean Up Sydney Harbour Day” in 1989 that attracted 40,000 people. The next year they took the idea national and about 300,000 volunteers showed up to help clean and fix up towns, cities and rivers across Australia. In 1993, the event went global under the auspices of the UN Environment Programme, and the “Clean Up the World” Web site estimates that more than 35 million people now participate each year in more than 130 nations. It has become one of the biggest community-based environmental campaigns on the planet, even though its headquarters remain in Sydney.
Taiwan’s participation has come through the efforts of the Good Neighbor Foundation, an NGO established in September 1999 with funding from President Chain Store Co. The company continues to play a prominent role, with its 7-Eleven stores nationwide serving as registration points for “Clean Up the World” activities. And that is in part what is so great about the “Clean Up the World” activities — they bring together individuals, community groups and schools, as well as private businesses and governments, to work toward improving the local environment.
The Good Neighbor Foundation has set its sights this weekend on cleaning up 18 major train stations, as well as local parks, mountain sites and other recreational areas such as beaches. Foundation officials are hoping more than 30,000 people will turn out for today’s efforts, building on the 300,000 who have worked over the past decade.
It’s important to remember that no matter where you live or how long you have lived there, you can help save the environment. “Clean Up the World” stresses thinking globally, while acting locally, and many expatriates and travelers the world over have pitched in to help wherever they might be.
In Taiwan, the Australian Commerce and Industry Office got a jumpstart on this year’s efforts by returning for another year to the Guandu Nature Park yesterday to help park volunteers clean algae out of one of the park’s freshwater ponds, while the Taipei European School and the European Chamber of Commerce Taipei have teamed up with the Society of Wilderness for a beach clean-up next Saturday morning at the Linshanbi Recreation Area in New Taipei City (新北市).
As those groups demonstrate, there is no need to be calendar-centric about clean-up efforts. They can be done anytime, anywhere, and indeed many of the activities supported by the annual global weekend are local projects, such as tree planting, recycling efforts, energy and water conservation and others conducted throughout the year.
The theme of this year’s global clean-up is “Our Place. Our Planet. Our Responsibility,” shining a spotlight on people as agents of change.
Pondering the amount of pollution sullying this planet and the effort needed to clean it up and repair the damage can sometimes make it look like Hercules got off easily just having to clean out the Augean stables. However, you don’t have to be a superhero or even a Greek one to help out.
Every single person can make a contribution to cleaning up cities, forests, rivers and oceans, and help make the world a healthier place for every living thing. Just look at what one committed Australian, Ian Kiernan, has achieved.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs