Greener and wiser

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Tomorrow marks 10 years to the day that Taiwan was devastated by the 921 Earthquake, a magnitude 7.3 tremor that reduced tens of thousands buildings to rubble and claimed more than 2,400 lives.

But that catastrophic day also spawned a new beginning for the residents of Taomi Village (桃米村), located near the earthquake’s epicenter in Nantou County’s Puli Township.

“I couldn’t make money at home [before the quake], so I left this place,” says Guan Yu-fu (官裕富), a 43-year-old from Taomi who spent much of his 20s doing factory work and odd jobs throughout Taiwan.

Guan has since found work as an eco-tour guide and runs an idyllic guesthouse in the hills outside the village.

“Now, living here today, I feel a big sense of achievement.”

The quake destroyed more than half of Taomi’s buildings, but left one of its assets unscathed — its natural resources. The area’s unique ecosystem of wetlands, creeks and forests hosts a diversity of wildlife, including more than half of Taiwan’s 32 frog species and more than a third of its dragonfly and bird species.

The town is also the new home of the Paper Dome, a temporary church built in Kobe, Japan, after that city’s deadly earthquake in 1995. The structure opened to the public on Sept. 21 last year and is now a major tourist attraction.

Before 921, Taomi was a poor farming village, a mere dot on the map for tourists on their way to Sun Moon Lake (日月潭). Many of the village’s 1,200 residents farmed bamboo shoots for a living, but that business was already going downhill as post-processing factories moved to China.

Now, Taomi has reinvented itself as a popular eco-tourism destination, with nearly a dozen conservation areas and a cadre of 30 certified tour guides specializing in wildlife and botany.

The village is an example of a community whose residents managed to recover from one of the country’s worst natural disasters and are thriving thanks to an environmentally minded vision for the future.

LEARNING TO LOVE FROGS

It took a while for Guan to buy into that vision. He used to see nature as just “trees in the mountains.”

Back home and unemployed after the quake, he joined a government-funded work relief program where “volunteers” earned NT$600 a day helping to clean up the village.

There was a catch: To join the program, participants had to agree to spend weekends attending classes on Taomi’s ecology and wildlife.

“We got kidnapped,” laughed Guan. “But we had to do it — it was all for that NT$600.”

The carrot-and-stick approach to getting Taomi residents to attend classes came from the New Homeland Foundation (新故鄉文教基金會), which ran the work relief program under a government contract and was searching for a way to create sustainable jobs in Taomi after the quake. The Puli-based NGO initially saw conventional tourism as a possible option for redevelopment.

Then a survey of the area by the Council of Agriculture’s Taiwan Endemic Species Research Institute (TESRI) found an abundance of frog species, suggesting a rich and diverse ecosystem. This prompted the two organizations to broach the idea of eco-tourism with residents and led to the creation of a curriculum and licensing system for tour guides in 2000.

One year and an exam later, Guan was among a group of nine who received certification to lead

eco-tours at Taomi’s frog-watching sites.