Book Review

Conceiving the Environment

• Byline:JUNE TEUFEL DREYER
• Publication Date:09/01/2008

A "forest shower" in Hsinchu County. Under the Japanese, exercising in forest showers departed from Western ideals of preserving nature for its own sake. (Photo by Huang Chung-hsin)

While the influence of globalization has shaped environmental thinking in mainland China and Taiwan, the outcomes on the ground have been very different.

Anthropologist Robert Weller's inspiration for this volume began when, in the late 1980s, he returned to Taiwan after an absence of 10 years to find large changes in environmental awareness. During his earlier stay in the late 1970s, interest in nature apart from the immediate demands of farming had been virtually non-existent. The streets of Sansia, Taipei County, where Weller did his fieldwork, reeked of rotting tangerines. Thirteen of the island's 16 major rivers were seriously polluted in their lower reaches, the other three moderately so. Only one percent of sewage water received even primary waste treatment. Apart from a noise meter in one of the busiest sections of Taipei, there was little visible evidence of government concern for the environment. And no one appeared very interested in the appreciation of nature for its own sake.

When he returned in the 1980s, the situation had completely changed. Weller could hardly pick up a newspaper without finding a report of some environmental demonstration. Perhaps the most famous of these occurred during 1986 and 1987, and eventually forced the powerful multinational DuPont Corp. to cancel plans for a titanium oxide plant in Lugang, central Taiwan. In Sansia, the streets still smelled bad, but for a different reason: a citizen blockade of the town dump meant that trash remained uncollected. Variations on this incident had occurred in so many places that the phenomenon now had a name--"garbage wars." There were four national parks, none of which had existed on his earlier visit. All were impressive and well-attended, with facilities and exhibitions rivaling those of the United States. At these and at privately owned facilities, nature tourism was booming. So were the sales of magazines on the environment, with Nature, by virtue of its gorgeous color photography, being particularly eye-catching.

These prominent changes in Taiwan, as well as what Weller refers to as "related changes" in mainland China, prompted the author to undertake a study of the causes and effects of environmental interest in each country. He finds that there are two intertwined influences: the forces of globalization and common culture.

Concepts of Nature

Weller says that, until the 20th century, Mandarin Chinese had no word for nature per se; zihran, like many other words to describe Western concepts, was borrowed from the Japanese in the earlier part of the century. Before that, he suggests that the Mandarin word for heaven, tian, served as the closest equivalent. But even though they did not then possess the vocabulary to fully describe their connection to the natural world, Mandarin-speaking people nonetheless conceptualized their relationship to the environment in various ways, which Weller divides into three categories. The first, anthropomorphic resonance, is a fundamentally humanist view. Although ultimately concerned with the establishment of a mutual relationship between humanity and the cosmic order of heaven, in which each part resonates sympathetically with all the others, it is nonetheless comfortable with human use of the natural world and its energies. Qi, or vital energy, permeates all things, and does not differentiate humanity from the rest of the natural world.

The second environmental concept is the Buddhist-inspired view that holds that all living things, from insects to deities, are fundamentally connected to one other. Our treatment of other creatures affects our personal karma, and hence our future reincarnations. Humanity has no special privileges in the Buddhist conceptualization of the environment.

The third view, which Weller describes as the power of the center and the margins, saw the emperor as the linchpin of the universe. His proper performance of annual rituals kept the world in harmony. At the same time, marginal spaces existed at the periphery and served a complementary function. Weller illustrates this with regard to food, where rice is the centerpiece of the meal but side dishes are esteemed as well, and also with reference to the architecture of official buildings. The design thereof features a center hall, where the magistrate sits, surrounded by secondary rooms extending outward with the occupants' status correlated to their closeness to the center.

Cultural Resources

Weller concludes that, although the Chinese did not have a unitary way of thinking about nature, Chinese tradition developed a different set of cultural resources for thinking about it than the West. To be sure, different concepts about man's relationship to the environment existed among Europeans as well. Whereas Germanic tribes saw the wilderness as the focus of self-assertion against a Roman empire of stone and steel, Britons might have regarded it as the place where the king displayed his power, such as in the royal hunt. Additionally, notions of nature evolved over time. Elizabethan-era Europeans believed that God had given humans primacy over the landscape and all creatures that dwelt therein, and that this bounty was to be used for their benefit. Romantics, by contrast, idealized the wild and untamed, decrying humanity's penchant for spoiling it. With the advent of the industrial revolution, it became difficult to imagine a return to the primitive life, and people began to seek a harmony between natural and man-made milieus.

Hence, Weller says, mainland China and Taiwan encountered at least three major streams of Western thinking on the environment. The first sees nature as primarily an object for human use; the second regards non-human nature as an important end in itself, and the third, pastoralism, is a compromise that sees people and nature living in happy equilibrium as a corrective for the ills of modern life.

Foreign Influences

The less philosophically oriented will be relieved when Weller abandons theorizing about the meaning of nature and expatiating on the original meaning of Chinese characters in order to more directly address the title of the book. Taiwan's national parks were founded on the design of their American counterparts: dedicated to the preservation of unsullied wilderness with minimal human presence. Weller refers to this as the Yosemite model.

There has also been significant Japanese influence. For example, the Full Moon Forest Recreation Area near Sansia, which until the 1990s was run by the Forestry Bureau of the provincial government, featured a "forest shower," a type of exercise course popular in Japan in which a visitor does sit-ups at one pine-shaded station, then walks to the next station for chin-ups, and so on. This of course changes the idea of preserving nature for its own sake. Even so the parks functioned in ways that were quite different from their Japanese and American models. Whereas indulging in water sports, removing objects from the premises, and the presence of private food vendors are strictly forbidden in the United States, they occur regularly in Taiwan's parks despite being illegal. One of the more amusing anecdotes Weller recounts is being told by a guide at Kenting National Park that grazing livestock is not allowed, as they waited patiently for someone's herd of about 50 cows to stroll across their path. The Japanese model, too, has been altered: the forest shower course proved unpopular and fell into disuse, as did the "boot camp" programs for corporate executives that are a regular feature of Japanese parks.

Nonetheless, a Japanese influence remains noticeable in other areas. In Dongshan River Park in Yilan County, large rocks have been arranged not in the Chinese style but in the shape of Mount Fuji. Perhaps not coincidentally, the park's architects were Japanese.

Melange Tourism

Nature tourism tended to evolve into what Weller terms melange tourism. Most people arrived with their families and small children and had limited interest in pristine landscapes. Water slides and amusement parks with rides were added for them; karaoke facilities proved popular with adults. Frustrated guides told Weller that most visitors had little interest in the natural history they had been trained to explain. Some came for the renao, or lively atmosphere, while others had a more practical turn of mind. Lectures on the importance of plant ecology would be greeted with questions like "Can you eat it?" or "Does it have any medicinal value?"

 

The architects of Dongshan River Park in Yilan County incorporated Japanese conceptions of the environment rather than Chinese ones. (Photo by Chiu Rui-chin)

Mainland China founded its first nature reserve in 1956, though it would be scarcely recognizable under this name in the United States or Japan. Because the government's idea was that a better understanding of ecosystems would lead to increases in production, the emphasis of the reserve and others that were subsequently founded was on scientific research rather than conservation, tourism or education. The social upheavals of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution meant that the reserves became dysfunctional. No new ones were founded until the 1980s, under the influence of former Chinese Communist Party general secretary Deng Xiaoping's command that mainland China be opened to the outside world. More than 1,000 reserves had been founded by the turn of the 21st century, though county governments managed most. They tended to be poorly funded, with some having no administrative structure at all.

Regulatory adjustments began in the mid-1990s; unlike Taiwan's parks, mainland China's drew less on American and Japanese experiences than on the United Nations and International Union for Conservation of Nature models. Basically, the difference is the latter models allow for greater human use. The aim is to reconcile human needs with those of the environment, providing working examples of sustainable development. Because, at least in theory, mainland China's government owns all the nation's land, the government's presence is more noticeable in parks there than the presence of the Republic of China government in Taiwan's parks.

Garbage War

Weller's investigation into environmental protests has turned up interesting insights. In Sansia's garbage war, what at first appeared to be a village protesting against state-sponsored pollution of its land, air and water turned out to be a feud between two factions. One group had two representatives on the local assembly, while the other included the township magistrate and the village warden. The garbage dump was their battleground. While the residents disliked the dump, they did not feel that they had a stake in the outcome.

In another case involving state-owned China Petrochemical Development Corp.'s plan to build a naphtha cracker plant in the Houjing neighborhood of Kaohsiung, gangsters allegedly hired by the company were reported to have intimidated protest leaders and bribed ordinary citizens. Weller, surprised because a top protest organizer did not seem particularly concerned, asked why. He was told that, although the thugs had wrecked the protestor's business office, they were local people who had gone to school and served in the army with the protestors. The problem could be solved by going to talk to them. It was. After more than two years, the blockade ended, with the protestors receiving a large compensation package. This is why Weller cautions against creating a dichotomy between state and local power, pointing out that there are crosscutting hierarchies at all levels.

Alliances with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) at either central government or international levels can be helpful, but only within limits, since their goals are not necessarily completely compatible with those of people at local levels. Here again one sees the influence of crosscutting hierarchies.

Study in Contrasts

In mainland China, Weller found sharp contrasts between rural and urban areas. He was told that, according to a survey, a 1 percent increase in education yielded a 2 percent increase in complaints about the environment. Large cities such as Tianjin in northeast mainland China are eager to promote themselves as attractive to foreign investors, and will therefore make efforts to present themselves as environmentally clean places to do business. Beginning in the 1980s, the municipality began to install a natural gas infrastructure to replace the highly polluting charcoal briquettes that most people used for cooking and heating. Sadly, unintended consequences intervened when increasing prosperity led to a large increase in the number of street vendors, who cook on portable coal-burning stoves. It also brought large numbers of migrants from the countryside. Lacking official residence permits, they tend to live in substandard housing without gas hookups and must use coal instead.

Although Tianjin's relatively well-educated and affluent population cared a great deal about the pollution that could be seen and smelled, people showed little awareness of environmental problems like greenhouse gases that were not immediately obvious to the senses. In rural Anqing in Anhui province, mainland China, awareness was still lower. Sixty-three percent of those polled did not recognize the Mandarin Chinese word huanjing baohu, or environmental protection, and only 36 percent saw burning rice stalks in their fields after harvests as harmful, even though the resulting smoke sometimes forced the regional airport to close. This was in spite of several major campaigns to promote environmental awareness.

In both urban and rural areas, people found ways to circumvent environmental rules that affected their finances. Weller found that some neighborhood committees, which were ostensibly charged with ensuring government control, were actually profiting from polluters. They charged factories in their area to store coal ash, which then blew away, damaging the area's air quality. Nor were the committees willing to fine street vendors who polluted, since the vendors paid licensing fees to the committees.

Globalization and Culture

Weller returns repeatedly to the theme of similarities between Taiwan and mainland China, citing the twin influences of globalization on the one hand and the common culture of the two countries on the other. The first is undeniable, but the second is problematic, even based on many of Weller's own examples. The veneer of Chinese culture sat very lightly on Taiwan for the several centuries when it was nominally under control of the Qing (Manchu) dynasty; its inhabitants were regarded as wild savages. Only after Japan annexed Taiwan in 1895 did the island receive modern roads and buildings and a universal educational system. The latter was, not surprisingly, geared toward making Taiwanese loyal subjects of Japan's emperor and included increasing instruction in the Japanese language, culture and mores as time went on.

After Japan's defeat in 1945, former Republic of China President Chiang Kai-shek made strenuous efforts to Sinicize the island, although his actions were somewhat tempered by a strong American presence. Moreover, thousands of young Taiwanese studied at Japanese and American universities, bringing back very un-Chinese notions of art, religion and the appropriate relationships between rulers and those they ruled.

In mainland China, Soviet influence left a mark, but even more influential was Mao Zedong's vigorous effort to extirpate traditional culture, with particular emphasis on religion. The fact that both mainland China and Taiwan have religious tourism today may have more to do with temples occupying scenic areas than shared cultural characteristics or the level of devotion of those who visit. Weller's contention that the governments of both nations have been committed to modernization ignores their very different conceptions of modernization, as well as the very different strategies through which those governments have sought to achieve it.

Although both mainland China and Taiwan have experienced a turn toward melange tourism, this is apt to reflect the profit motive more than shared cultural characteristics--the greater range of tastes the proprietors can cater to, the greater the revenues accrued. That both have modified the models on which their parks were based is probably a universal trait: If Zimbabwe and Chile open parks based on similar designs, one should not be surprised to find out that they adapt those designs to their respective local tastes.

The book is most interesting when Weller allows the material he has collected to speak for itself. His eminently sound conclusion is that successful environmental policy depends on more than creating rules and agencies to enforce the rules. Planners must pay attention to the situation on the ground, where divergent interests and assumptions about the world--influenced to a greater or lesser extent by the forces of globalization--interact to shape the environment.

Copyright © 2008 by June Teufel Dreyer