A new exhibition with the title River Cruise in the Plum Tree Creek, which depicts the story of how the Plum Tree Creek (樹梅坑溪) in New Taipei City (新北市) has been polluted, opened at the National Taiwan Science Education Center yesterday.
“Plum Tree Creek located in New Taipei City’s Zhuwei (竹圍) is a stinking sewer that makes people want to cover their nose. However, 40 years ago it used to be a beautiful river,” the exhibition’s introduction says.
Displaying installation art, the exhibition simulates the appearance of the river, showing how the creek’s environment has been polluted and arbitrarily destroyed by humans throughout the years, in an effort to make visitors think more about how they can take actions to protect river environments.
At the exhibition’s entrance, 130 recycled elementary-school wooden desks and chairs are used to create the image of a culvert at the downstream sections of rivers. Visitors can explore toward the upstream section by passing through the middle stream section, which is now seriously polluted by wastewater from pig farms, factories and nearby households.
The center said exhibition director Wu Mali had initiated a series of activities, called “Environmental Art Movement at Plum Tree Creek,” that gathered many residents of Zhuwei to take part in events to get to understand the pollution history of the creek and also come up with ideal blueprints for a better living environment.
The center passed on a story by a resident surnamed Chen (陳) who has lived in Zhuwei for about 40 years, which tells how he remembers people catching shrimps or crabs in the creek when he moved to Zhuwei when he was 16 years old, but now many parts of the river are covered by cement slabs. Under the cement covering is stinky water polluted by pig farm wastewater, household wastewater and pedestrians’ trash.
Center director Chu Nan-shyan (朱楠賢) said that the center, in cooperation with civic NGOs, hopes the exhibition can help promote environmental education by triggering visitors to think about our living environment through three related aspects — people and water, people and the land, and people and people.
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
US climber Alex Honnold is to attempt to scale Taipei 101 without a rope and harness in a live Netflix special on Jan. 24, the streaming platform announced on Wednesday. Accounting for the time difference, the two-hour broadcast of Honnold’s climb, called Skyscraper Live, is to air on Jan. 23 in the US, Netflix said in a statement. Honnold, 40, was the first person ever to free solo climb the 900m El Capitan rock formation in Yosemite National Park — a feat that was recorded and later made into the 2018 documentary film Free Solo. Netflix previewed Skyscraper Live in October, after videos
Starting on Jan. 1, YouBike riders must have insurance to use the service, and a six-month trial of NT$5 coupons under certain conditions would be implemented to balance bike shortages, a joint statement from transportation departments across Taipei, New Taipei City and Taoyuan announced yesterday. The rental bike system operator said that coupons would be offered to riders to rent bikes from full stations, for riders who take out an electric-assisted bike from a full station, and for riders who return a bike to an empty station. All riders with YouBike accounts are automatically eligible for the program, and each membership account
A classified Pentagon-produced, multiyear assessment — the Overmatch brief — highlighted unreported Chinese capabilities to destroy US military assets and identified US supply chain choke points, painting a disturbing picture of waning US military might, a New York Times editorial published on Monday said. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comments in November last year that “we lose every time” in Pentagon-conducted war games pitting the US against China further highlighted the uncertainty about the US’ capability to intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically
RSS