The Society of Wilderness (SOW), a civic group dedicated to the protection of Taiwan’s environment, is calling on the public to take part in a series of coastal cleanup activities to be staged around the country starting this weekend.
Environmentalists in 152 countries and areas, including Taiwan, plan to hold similar coastal cleanup events on tomorrow to mark International Coastal Clean-up Day and protect marine biodiversity, the SOW said in a statement.
Each year, an estimated 200,000 young albatrosses on the Midway Islands in the Central Pacific die as a result of marine pollution, the statement said.
Citing the findings of site surveys, the SOW said that many young albatrosses die after eating plastic trash washed up on the beaches of the Midway Islands. Studies show that a mere 20g of plastic waste can be fatal to juvenile seabirds, it added.
According to the SOW, Shigeru Fujieda, a professor at Kagoshima University in Japan, once examined the corpses of 1,400 albatrosses that had died from eating plastic cigarette lighters.
The study shows that 48 percent of the discarded lighters came from Japan and 14 percent from Taiwan.
The findings indicate that plastic trash not only threatens Taiwan’s environment but also endangers wildlife in the entire Pacific Ocean and its islands, the SOW said.
Apart from albatrosses, many other forms of marine life such as fish, dolphins and sea turtles die after consuming plastic pollution, the organization said.
From 2005 through last year, discarded plastic bottles picked up during annual ICC Day activities could create a 4,281m high pile — 8.4 times the height of the Taipei 101 building, the SOW said.
It urged local people to avoid using disposable plastic products to help reduce plastic consumption.
In addition to plastic trash, large quantities of cigarette butts, glass bottles, glow sticks, lightbulbs, styrofoam and colored pens are also common sources of marine pollution, the SOW said.
From Saturday, the SOW plans to organize 25 coastal cleanup events. SOW Secretary-General Jenner Lin (林金保) said that 7,000 volunteers from 45 businesses and social groups have been invited to help clean up 60km of the country’s coastline. Anyone else who is interested in taking part is welcome, he added.
More information on the activity can be found at http://icc2012.sow.org.tw
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read: