The Chiayi County Government’s large-scale monoculture forestry has harmed the biodiversity of Alishan’s (阿里山) forests and pushed out animal life, the Taiwan Tree Conservationists Alliance said.
The alliance made the remarks on Facebook on Sunday, saying Alishan’s forests are devoid of wildlife as a result of misguided policies, and citing a survey of the area by alliance president and Tainan Community University researcher Wu Jen-pang (吳仁邦), who was quoted as saying that the region was “oppressively silent” and the situation “most terrifying.”
The alliance also accused authorities of cutting down and replacing natural forests with artificial forests consisting of a single species of tree, which deprived forest-dwelling animals of food sources and destroyed indigenous ecologies.
“Would the Forestry Bureau please stop this so-called forest planting?” the alliance said.
In response, Chiayi Forest District Office Deputy Director Yang Jui-fen (楊瑞芬) said monoculture forestry was rendered obsolete by advances in forest management over the past 20 years, adding that what Wu saw was likely a leftover along the Alishan Forest Railway’s discontinued Shanshui Line.
The Forestry Bureau zones national forests for the purposes of nature reserves, national security, recreation and lumbering by taking into consideration soil type, slope gradient, climate, ecology and other factors, Yang said, adding that monoculture is among its methods for planting forests.
National Chung Hsing University associate professor of forestry Tseng Yen-hsieh (曾彥學) said an artificially created monospecific forest is capable of sustaining an ecosystem, and that the silence Wu described was not common in his experience.
Although the ecology of monospecific forests tends to be less diverse, it is incorrect to compare industrial forest plantations artificially created for periodic harvests with natural forest reserves, Tseng added.
While monospecific forestry in mountainous areas has already been discontinued, the forests it created cannot be improved, and restoring the natural composition of the forests would require that the government allow logging in artificial forests so that they could be replanted with various other tree species, Tseng said.
Yang acknowledged that monoculture Japanese cedar forests were created by past policies, but said that the government plans to introduce other tree species into those forests after limited logging to preserve ecological stability and diversity.
Wu later removed the post from the group’s Facebook page, saying the survey was meant for a year-long collaborative research project and was not ready for publication.
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:
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