Demonic possession, typhoid, infantile convulsions and impotence. These are some of the ailments traditional Chinese medical practitioners in Taiwan and China believed ground rhinoceros horn could cure, which helped push the animal to the brink of extinction in the 1980s.
At the time, Taiwanese officials and doctors ignored calls from the international community to ban the sale of rhinoceros horns, using as an excuse the fact that Taiwan wasn’t a member of the international organization calling for its prohibition.
For Calvin Wen (溫炳原), a member of Green Party Taiwan’s central executive committee, the above example is useful as an analogy when discussing climate change.
“Most of global society has a target [to reduce climate change]. Because Taiwan is not a UN member it is very common for government officials and even some scholars to say they don’t have to take any measures to reduce [carbon] emissions,” he said.
Taiwan’s refusal to eliminate the importation of rhinoceros horns led the Clinton administration to impose sanctions on Taiwan — the first time the US had used trade sanctions to protect the environment. Wen fears that if Taiwan’s business and political leaders don’t act to reduce the island’s carbon emissions, a similar scenario might play out.
A group of civic organizations including the Green Party are organizing a march and festival tomorrow to highlight the need for Taiwan to reduce carbon emissions. The march begins at 1:30pm at Taiwan Democracy Hall’s Liberty Square (自由廣場) and will proceed first to the Presidential Office and then to Da-an Forest Park (大安森林公園), where a music concert is scheduled to start at 3pm.
“Civil society has done a lot to cut carbon emissions,” he said. “But we still think that the government should do more with their policy.”
Taiwan’s Environmental Protection Agency, meanwhile, has sent a delegation to Poznan, Poland, to take part in an intergovernmental meeting for drawing up a new agreement to reduce global warming to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.
Wen, however, remains skeptical. He cites a litany of examples that illustrate how the government puts business interests before the environment, with the Suhua Highway project, Formosa Plastics steel plant and, most recently, the consumer voucher scheme being the most glaring examples.
“They could have at least encouraged green consumption,” he said of the vouchers.
The Climate Change, Taiwan Cares march and festival (對抗地球暖化－台灣行動) begins tomorrow at 1:30pm at Taiwan Democracy Hall’s Liberty Square (自由廣場) and will proceed first to the Presidential Office and then to Da-an Forest Park (大安森林公園) where a concert will be held. For more information, visit tw-climatecampaign.blogspot.com.
Jan. 6 to Jan. 12 Perhaps hoping to gain the blessing of the stone-age hunter-gatherers that dwelt along the east coast 30,000 years ago, visitors to the Baxian Caves (八仙洞) during the 1970s would grab a handful of soil to bring home. In January 1969, the nation was captivated by the excavation of pre-ceramic artifacts and other traces of human habitation in several caves atop a sea cliff in Taitung County. The majority of the unearthed objects were single-faced, unpolished flake tools fashioned from natural pebbles collected by the shore. While archaeologists had found plenty of neolithic (7,000 BC to 1,700
Famed Chinese demographer Yi Fuxian (易富賢) recently wrote for The Diplomat on the effects of a cross-strait war on demography. He contended that one way to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is by putting the demographic issue front and center — last year total births in the PRC, he said, receded to levels not seen since 1762. Yi observes that Taiwan’s current fertility rate is already lower than Ukraine’s — a nation at war that is refusing to send its young into battle — and that its “demographic crisis suggests that Taiwan’s technological importance will rapidly decline, and
In 1990, Amy Chen (陳怡美) was beginning third grade in Calhoun County, Texas, as the youngest of six and the only one in her family of Taiwanese immigrants to be born in the US. She recalls, “my father gave me a stack of typed manuscript pages and a pen and asked me to find typos, missing punctuation, and extra spaces.” The manuscript was for an English-learning book to be sold in Taiwan. “I was copy editing as a child,” she says. Now a 42-year-old freelance writer in Santa Barbara, California, Amy Chen has only recently realized that her father, Chen Po-jung (陳伯榕), who
When the weather is too cold to enjoy the white beaches and blue waters of Pingtung County’s Kenting (墾丁), it’s the perfect time to head up into the hills and enjoy a different part of the national park. In the highlands above the bustling beach resorts, a simple set of trails treats visitors to lush forest, rocky peaks, billowing grassland and a spectacular bird’s-eye view of the coast. The rolling hills beyond Hengchun Township (恆春) in Pingtung County offer a two-hour through-hike of sweeping views from the mighty peak of Dajianshih Mountain (大尖石山) to Eluanbi Lighthouse (鵝鑾鼻燈塔) on the coast, or
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