Controversy marks plans for new park

A controversy over the establishment of the Makao Chinese Cypress National Park (馬告檜木國家公園) erupted this past week as two different voices clamored to make their point.

While more than 600 Atayal Aborigines, led by independent Aboriginal legislator May Chin (高金素梅), took to the streets on Friday to demand that the area in question be made into an Atayal autonomous region instead of a park, conservationists staged a sit-in on the very same day to show their support for the park.

Not the first controversy

It wasn't the first time there's been controversy concerning the Makao National Park, a proposed park that is to cover 53,000 hectares of sprawling mature forest in northern Taiwan, encompassing four Atayal Aboriginal villages in Wulai township, Taipei County; Fuhsing township in Taoyuan County; Chienshih township in Hsinchu County; and Tatung township in Ilan County.

According to Tien Chiu-chin (田秋菫), secretary-general of the Taiwan Cypress Woods Protection Association, the controversy over the establishment of the park first emerged four years ago when environmentalists grew upset with the government's logging.

Purporting to be clearing unhealthy and dead trees, the Forest Protection Department under the Vocational Assistance Commission for Retired Servicemen (VACRS, 退輔會) have logged 6,000 hectares of primitive cypress forest over the past 40 years in the Chilan Mountain region, the location of water-supply sources for half of Taiwan's population, Tien said.

"Noting such, we [conservationists] called for the preservation of trees," Li Ken-cheng (李根政), convener of the Environmental Educational Committee under the National Teachers' Association, told the Taipei Times.

And it was through a lot of work and effort -- including three large-scale demonstrations and a petition with more than 100,000 signatures -- that the VACRS was finally banned from cutting down the forests on Makao Mountain in 1999, Lee said.

Primary landmark

According to Chen Yueh-fong (陳玉峰), professor of the ecology department at Providence University's Graduate Institution, Makao National Park, with Chilan Mountain (棲蘭山) in Ilan County as its primary landmark, has Asia's only virgin cypress forest and rare natural ecology

"The area has the only extensive and homogenous Taiwanese red cypress (紅檜) and yellow cypress (扁柏) forest left in the world," Chen said. "We should preserve natural resources for future generations."

The government has promised that the Makao National Park will be managed under joint management mechanisms between the government and Aborigines, with the protection of the interests of local Aborigines and conservation of their culture as the principal aim.

Protesters led by Chin, however, questioned whether such mechanisms offered Aborigines a true chance to have a say in the park's management.

Chin also argued that the establishment of the proposed national park would only bring gain to special-interest groups, while the area's Aborigines would remain impoverished.

Autonomous region

Anti-park protesters called for the return of tribal areas to their traditional owners and proposed that the park be turned into an autonomous region for Aborigines instead.

"We don't want a 53,000-hectare national park but an autonomous region of our own," Chin said.

But Chen disagreed with the protesters' claims.