He even chased a scooter producing a huge cloud of black smoke that drove past his home. When he caught up with the driver, he told him to send his scooter to a repair shop.
“Tolerance is a good thing, but I think the people in Taiwan are too tolerant,” Gufler said. “When you tolerate injustice, you become an accomplice.”
For Gufler, protecting the environment is a lifestyle.
“Can you believe that I haven’t left Hsinchu — except for a few trips to Taipei to take care of some official business — for 10 years?” he said.
“I think all means of traveling produce pollution, and I want to minimize it,” he said, adding that since he believed air travel to be the most polluting means of travel, he hasn’t been back to Austria for more than a decade.
Gufler has been a vegetarian since 1978 and has been promoting vegetarianism because he believes it is a healthier, more environmentally friendly way of life.
“It’s ridiculous that you have to waste so much food resources to feed animals just to eat them,” he said, adding that food animals’ gastric excretions “are actually big pollutants to the environment too.”
Gufler has seemingly boundless energy. At the moment, he is making plans with some friends to improve education for Aboriginal children in nearby mountain regions.
“Why am I doing this? Well, I have no family of my own in Taiwan, so everyone in Taiwan is like my family,” he said. “So this is my way of giving back to the society.”
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