Taiwan Today

Environmentalists were treated to an encouraging sight in March of this year when two hundred young delegates from Taiwan's grade schools met for a two-day conference to discuss the current status of the island's conservation practices. Extreme youth did not dissuade the group from discussing tough issues, including the importance of reducing the amount of garbage, strengthening antipollution regulations, improving environmental education, and cutting back on the release of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) into the atmosphere.

Although most of the science behind such topics as the impact of CFCs on ozone depletion is too technical for most grade school students to grasp, they have no trouble understanding the importance of conservation to their daily lives. As a result, the conference, which was sponsored by the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA), was an unqualified success. The kids learned about the destruction of their surround­ings, and enthusiastically supported steps to do something about it.

Because the concept of environmen­tal protection in Taiwan is still in its infancy (the EPA was established only three years ago), kids are not far behind adults in their understanding of the dangers to public health from such problems as high levels of air and water pollution and heavy use of pesticides on fruits and vegetables. The widespread lack of knowledge about Taiwan's environmental problems serves to make them worse. And in this case, Chinese tradition is not a great help.

One reason that adults and kids alike unwittingly contribute to environmental degradation is a centuries-old attitude that sets the boundary of people's responsibility for their surroundings at their doorstep. From earliest times in China, there has been no developed concept of public spaces that "belong" in common to the members of a community or larger social unit and should therefore be managed and protected by all. (In the West, there is a lengthy tradition of public space, extending from the agora of ancient Greece to the New England public square.)

Today, political leaders as much as environmental activists are trying to change this tradition, and they are starting with the youngest generation. They say that In order to raise environmental awareness and thereby prevent further environmental deterioration, it is crucial to help children develop a respect for their natural surroundings. Such at­tempts are geared to develop civic consciousness. In order to reach as many kids as possible, EPA officials, school teachers, journalists, and even some foreign environmentalists have become actively involved in making adjustments to school curricula.

In recent decades, students have received relatively little information or guidance on conservation matters, in­side or outside the classroom. All adults, not just curriculum planners, can be blamed for the omission. "Have we been showing children that there are some of us who care about cleaning up?" asks Tseng Yung-li, vice president of the Homemakers' Union and Foundation. "No," she says. "We adults have been poor models."

The Homemakers' Foundation has become an influential public-interest group, and it has an impact in both urban and rural communities. The or­ganization is made up primarily of non-­employed women and was established in 1987. It has taken on charity projects, parent education, consumer protection, and pornography censorship, and it is now wrestling with public indifference to environmental issues. "Building a more secure and prosperous life was all that used to matter," Tseng says. "People were so caught up with working and saving that they failed to notice they were also building a life-threatening environment. "

The astounding economic success of the last three decades was achieved at high cost to the environment. For exam­ple, there has been a dramatic increase in the per capita production of trash and garbage. Industrialization and moderni­zation have produced another "throw-away" society. As Tseng explains, the adult view that economic life is a free­-for-all is now shared by children as well. "And because there is more money," she says, "parents no longer feel guilty about throwing things away. Children see this and they are learning from adults that it's OK to be wasteful."

Even though the government is now paying greater attention to cleaning up Taiwan's environment, much remains to be done in the area of public education, especially in the schools. As of the end of July 1990, no single department within the Ministry of Education (MOE) had yet been assigned the specific re­sponsibility of developing comprehen­sive environmental education programs. But according to one MOE official, "committees on environmental education will probably be established soon."

Planners at the EPA, which is under the direct supervision of the Executive Yuan, began developing environmental educational programs only last year. "We realize the importance of getting kids involved," says Chen Yung-ren, director of the EPA's Bureau of Comprehensive Planning. "We can have an impact on those kids who are still very young, say, under age ten. If we teach them, they may remember these things forever. In the U.S., on the other hand, it took twenty years before people started even thinking about the role of children in environmental protection. We won't make the same mistake here."

Besides the children's environmental conference held earlier this year, the EPA is also banking on schools, student competitions, and the media to help turn kids on to conservation. Along these lines, it is planning to introduce a series of illustrated environmental primers for fourth-to-sixth graders as well as middle school and high school students. According to Chen, the kindergarten-to-third grade handbook (complete with the easy-to-learn phonetic symbols used in Taiwan written next to each Chinese character) should soon be ready for distribution.

To introduce the new materials and build enthusiasm for their use, the EPA recently sponsored a national competition based on material from the environmental primers. The competition attracted hundreds of school teams from all over Taiwan. In Taipei County alone, forty schools vied for a spot in the televised national finals.

"We're told that the competition in each school to get on the team was even more intense," Chen says. Local competitions led to the finals, and every competition featured two teams pitted against each other. They fielded tough questions, such as "What caused Minamata disease in the 1960s?" and "What are two household products with CFCs?" Many of the kids' parents were happy they did not have to answer, because they were unable to recall the details about the Japanese factory that dumped methyl mercury wastes near Minamata, and did not even know that refrigerators and air conditioners use CFCs.

Equally successful were two recent elementary school contests on environmental awareness, one for posters, the other for prose. There were over twenty-one thousand entries for the art competi­tion, and over ten thousand for the essay. Chen explains why the EPA is keen on contests: "Students in Taiwan are familiar with competitions. They enjoy them and they know that if they win, they will get some award or recognition. So we tried to work within the system to make it easier for them to grasp environmental issues."

EPA officials also know that cartoons have a special hold on children. In June 1990, the EPA commissioned a program that was aired on all three local television stations simultaneously. Called "The Little Heroes of Environmental Protection," it was a one-hour cartoon special in which the lead character is a green-nosed, buck-toothed, outer-space rabbit named Environmental Protection Bunny (it sounds better in Chinese). The extraterrestrial rabbit takes a look at a polluted Earth from his spaceship, and then closes in on Taiwan where people are choking on air pollution, drinking impure water, and swelter­ing in the heat caused by global warming. He then picks up two schoolchildren and takes them back in time to Taiwan during the Stone Age.

When they arrive in the prehistorical past, the children enjoy the clean air, the open space, and the animals running free. But as much as they enjoy playing in the green, pristine environment there is no choice but to return to the 1990s and their polluted hometowns. Before blastoff, the rabbit asks them why there is so much difference between Taiwan in the Stone Age and in the present. The kids shake their heads, and the rabbit gives a stern reply to their lack of knowledge. "You can only blame yourselves," he says.

After the children return to the Taiwan of today, they decide to help clean up the island. They teach other children how to protect the environment by taking simple preventive steps such as refusing to use ozone-depleting aerosols and non-biodegradable plastic and styrofoam.

"We want to encourage kids to read, watch, and be interested," says Chen of the EPA's overall strategy. "The next step is for them to take action and make environmental protection a part of their daily lives." He acknowledges that much still remains to be done, but so far they have received positive responses from both teachers and children.

But Chan Hsiu-mei, who is principal of Chengchang Kindergarten in Taipei, is critical of what has been done thus far. She says that the government has been too slow about adding conservation issues to the curriculum, and the govern­ment also lacks adequate personnel, es­pecially at the local level. "We want the government to lead us, but we're left sitting and waiting. So we teachers have to make an extra effort to learn methods of teaching children about the environment. At our school, for example, we encourage the kids to carry their food in reusable boxes. You wouldn't believe how enthusiastic the kids are. Some even say they don't want to use air conditioners so that they can save the ozone."

Such school programs remain rare. Taiwan teachers are usually too inexperienced to integrate environmental education into school activities. Some teachers and administrators are even unwilling to do so because they feel it takes valuable time away from an already crammed curriculum. This tentativeness in the classroom makes it all the more important for children to be exposed to environmental concepts outside of school.

The extracurricular activities sponsored by the Boy Scouts of Taiwan serve as a good example of fun and practical training with an eye on environmental awareness. According to Susan Yang, a den mother and full-time accountant at the China Trade and Development Corporation, the Boy Scouts teach boys aged five and up to respect nature and pay attention to their own health. Recently, various scout units have promoted separating garbage into different categories before pick-up. The scouts meet on two Sundays a month, and Yang says that the boys "gain a valuable supplement to their education." They meet in parks, go hiking, and take frequent field trips.

But to many parents, a "valuable supplement to education" for their children means filling after-school hours with activities such as advanced math classes, Chinese calligraphy, and English-language classes that will reinforce academic performance. It is, after all, these subjects that will determine whether or not their children can pass the high school and college entrance examinations.

With both schools and parents giving environmental education for children less than an enthusiastic interest, the job is therefore left in the hands of public interest groups like the Homemakers' Foundation. But many civic organizations already have their hands full with pressing issues such as the shortage of affordable housing, consumer protection, and women's rights.

Chen Hsiu-hui, president of the Homemakers' Foundation, says that Taiwan desperately needs many more environmental volunteers. Her own organization lists more than thirty active members. "But we're not environmental experts," she says. "We simply tell the kids how they can make a difference in their own homes. Our activities are not designed just for the kids to play and have a good time; we try to teach them new attitudes."

Most recently, Homemakers sponsored the production of ten thousand reusable nylon shopping bags stamped with the Chinese characters meaning "Save the Earth." Volunteers distributed the bags to discourage the proliferation of the thin red and white plastic bags widely used by supermarkets, department stores, neighborhood stores, and take-out shops. The Homemakers' newsletter publicizes children's field trips, which have included visits to nature preserves as well as polluting factories. The foundation has also published manuals for adults on recycling methods, and comic books for children explaining en­vironmental issues. The chief problem, Chen says, is that her group—just like other activist groups—suffers from insufficient funding.

Last fall, the foundation received an unexpected boost when Roderic and Stephanie Maude, two environmentalists from Leicester, England, accepted the group's invitation to do something about children's environmental education. The couple expressed interest in designing and conducting an environmental education workshop for elementary school teachers, and with the backing of the Homemakers' Foun­dation and the Council of Agriculture, the Maudes began a three-month, seven­-city trial run last March. The training featured seminars, field trips, and games to aid teachers in planning activities that will bring children into closer touch with nature.

Many workshops included actual practice with children, most of whom were under age eleven. "We wanted to use a good, fun approach to make children learn through play," Stephanie Maude says. In one simple game called "Breathing Trees," five children are selected as trees, around which the other kids (who are pretending to be various kinds of animals) must gather in order to breathe. The problem is that there is a woodcutter bent on chopping down all five trees. As each tree is cut, the animals have eight seconds to run to the nearest standing tree; otherwise, they die. Eventually, one tree remains—the only source of oxygen.

"In some groups," says Roderic Maude, "the kids yelled 'Protect our tree!' when there was just one left. It was really wonderful seeing their enthusiasm. Then afterwards, we held a discussion about what trees actually mean to us. They provide us with fruit, shelter, oxygen, and they hold the soil together. But the kids also learned that we can't take for granted trees or anything else nature provides. We have to protect our environment in order to enjoy it."

The main purpose of all their activities, according to Stephanie Maude, was to develop "positive attitudes, especially among the youngest." By exposing teachers and children to the outdoors, the Maudes tried to do something that they say "can't be covered in textbooks." But Stephanie Maude adds, "We're here only to inspire people, not to tell them what to do. I'm sure that people here will come up with even better ideas."

Recently, Homemakers' sponsored a field trip to the Wei Chuan Foods Corporation factory, a manufacturer of juices, milk, MSG (monosodium glutamate) and other food products. A group of about thirty children under eight years old called the "Little Magic Scouts of Environmental Protection" toured the factory. Most of the scouts grasped the basics; some even posed tough questions to Wei Chuan representatives about the company's use of plastic containers for soy sauce. At lunch time, the children ate their meals out of reusable containers, except for one seven-year-old who ate a McDonald's Egg McMuffin packed in a styrofoam box. In an instant, the child was roundly scolded by his fellow scouts.

As the example shows, children can learn their environmental lessons well. And although the curriculum remains in­complete, many environmentalists are hopeful that more children will be won over by field trips, media contests, school activities, and parental enthusi­asm. "Taiwan has already experienced an economic miracle," says Roderic Maude." Now the people should realize they have an opportunity for an environ­ mental miracle—by starting with their children."