Earth Charter Taiwan (ECT) was formally established on Thursday evening, with Earth Charter International Council (ECI) co-chair Brendan Mackey and ECI Secretariat member Alicia Jimenez in attendance.
The establishment of the ECT is a major boost for efforts to promote environmental education and awareness in Taiwan and should help integrate forces advocating sustainable development in Taiwan with the global environmental movement.
The ECT aims to educate Taiwanese about the Earth Charter and its values. Immediately after its establishment, the ECT held a two-day conference called “Earth Charter and Local Action,” followed by a three-day field trip, giving participants a chance to see first-hand local activities that promote sustainable development.
Reading through the 16 principles laid out in the Earth Charter, one becomes more intensely aware of just how closely the fate of humankind is bound with that of the Earth. What humankind does today will decide what happens to the Earth tomorrow.
The Earth Charter is a strategy for global sustainable development. Starting out from the perspective of respect for life, it calls for preserving the global ecology, as well as establishing social and economic justice through democratic, peaceful and non-violent means.
The Earth today could be viewed as a museum of natural history. Hopefully, future generations visiting this museum will have something better to see than the rubble left by generations of actions that destroyed the ecological balance.
If we take action now to protect the ecosystem and cherish life, we will leave to future generations a living natural history museum recording our generation’s conscience and good deeds.
The struggle to save the Earth faces many challenges, including climate change and natural disasters. It involves issues of cultural and ethnic diversity and national identity. The problems may be global, but they have to be considered and dealt with at the local level.
In another 100 years, when our descendants visit the natural history museum that is Taiwan, will they only see specimens of extinct species? If we want them to see living things rather than stuffed animals and desiccated plants, we will have to take action, such as collaborating with national parks and other civic environmental groups and redouble efforts to educate the public about the environment.
The natural history museum we would like to leave for future generations is not a row of specimens in glass cases, but a living eco-museum. We need to bring nature back into the cities and industries we have been building for the past 200 years or so, to make them ecologically sound, to make them green. That is the living legacy our generation should seek to leave.
Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao is a research fellow at the Institute of Sociology at Academia Sinica.
TRANSLATED BY JULIAN CLEGG
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