A Hsinchu District Court judge has rendered an unusual verdict in an illegal logging case, saying an Atayal man surnamed Chen (陳) “would be punished by ancestral spirits” for harming ancient trees and trespassing land boundaries.
Chen, a resident of Hsinchu County’s Jianshi Township (尖石), was convicted of illegally harvesting burls from the ancient Jhensibao (鎮西堡) cypress forest in the township in 2014 for sales to outsiders, court documents said.
The judge gave Chen a three-year prison sentence commutable to a fine of NT$660,000 (US$21,713).
The fact that Chen carried out further illegal logging activities while on release was cited by the court as an aggravating factor.
Chen’s 2013 illegal logging conviction resulted in a sentence of nine months in prison, commutable to a fine of NT$370,000.
The Jhensibao forest is the country’s largest ancient cypress forest and it has spiritual and ritual significance to Jianshi’s Atayal community in addition to being protected by law, the judge said in the verdict.
For the Atayal people, land ownership is delineated by tribal bloodlines and woodlands not claimed by a tribe are considered common land, but trespassing or logging of common trees are forbidden by Atayal customary law, known as gaya, the judge said.
Violations of gaya are said to be punished by ancestral spirits, but merchants outside of the community offering money have eroded Atayal traditions, the judge said.
The removal of burls is potentially lethal to the centuries-old trees and thus causes irreparable harm to the forest, the judge said.
Township Mayor Yun Tien-pao (雲天寶), an Atayal, said his people believe all trees are blessed by ancestral spirits and all trees more than 100 years old are considered divine.
“The ancient law proscribes cutting down a big tree. If we must cut down a tree, sacrifices to ancestral spirits must be performed. An Atayal who harms a divine tree that is hundreds or thousands of years old would surely be punished by ancestral spirits,” Yun said.
The Forestry Bureau said it has investigated more than 2,000 illegal logging cases over the past five years and confiscated more than 5,900m3 of lumber worth about NT$1.78 billion.
It is difficult to gauge the actual level of illegal logging, but in recent years signs of illegal logging have decreased, sparking hopes that the bureau has the problem under control, Deputy Director of Forestry Yang Hung-chih (楊宏志) said.
The theft of precious wood is punishable by a maximum sentence of 10 years and six months in prison, and a concurrent fine between 10 and 20 times the value of the illegally obtained wood, Yang said.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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