The Yilan Green Expo has been taking place for over a decade and has become one of the most recognized environmental awareness activities in the country. This year, the event is back at the Wulaokeng Scenic Area (武荖坑風景區) where it will play host to a huge range of family activities for a total of 51 days. The expo, which opens tomorrow, combines tourism, food, entertainment and education in a single massive event that has greatly raised awareness of Yilan’s efforts to establish itself as a new Eden, an escape back to nature for residents of Taiwan’s overdeveloped west coast.
The 2013 Green Expo has adopted the theme of Return to the Forest, and promises visitors to Wulaokeng Scenic Area not just the beautiful scenery and warm welcome for which Yilan is already famous, but also a chance to reflect on issues such as bringing back a balance between the drive for production and the need to establish a quality of life. Finding a sustainable solution to preserving our modern lifestyles and conserving Taiwan’s increasingly threatened natural habitat tops the agenda, though you probably wouldn’t guess it from the host of fun activities, lucky draws, performances and DIY workshops to be found there.
Yilan County commissioner Lin Tsung-hsien (林聰賢) said that “natural agriculture, tourism, LOHAS lifestyle and healthy living, and experience and learning about nature” would be the keystones of this year’s event. Natural agriculture is an issue of growing importance given that Taiwan, according to a recent report based on the World Economic Forum’s Environmental Sustainability Index published by the Kuanshu Educational Foundation (觀樹教育基金會), is reported as being the heaviest user of chemical fertilizers and pesticides in the world. LOHAS is an acronym for Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability, a buzzword that has caught on in Taiwan through its linking of environmental issues with personal health. While it will take much more than Yilan’s Green Expo to change Taiwan’s agricultural habits, which for the large part continue to favor the use of chemicals to boost yields, Lin said that this year’s event, with the creation of an “organic lifestyle area,” would be an important milestone in pushing forward the policy of the “organic new Yilan.”
Photo Courtesy of the Lanyang Agricultural Development Foundation
Photo Courtesy of the Lanyang Agricultural Development Foundation
Photo Courtesy of the Lanyang Agricultural Development Foundation
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ!). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is