ABSTRACT
Taiwan celebrated the 20th anniversary of its ‘rebirth’, so to speak, in 2007, marking the date when martial law was lifted and the democratization and flowering of human rights began to take place. The year of 1987 was also momentous on the environmental front, as we have seen, with the formal establishment of the central government’s Environmental Protection Administration, followed by a complex hierarchy of agencies and organizations at all levels, whose collective goal has been to work toward a cleaner and better environment, a higher quality of life, for the people of Taiwan. While some of the foundations for this campaign had been laid before 1987, that year truly was a watershed on the environmental front, in that it opened the floodgates to policies, programmes, and initiatives on a broad front, public and private, from which the people of Taiwan are beginning to reap the benefits. Much progress has been made, without question. However, it has been uneven progress, and certainly not as rapid as many people in Taiwan wished for. Bad habits and attitudes toward the environment are difficult to change. Moreover, it must be remembered that Taiwan labours under a multitude of constraints or burdens, as outlined in previous chapters (especially Chapter 1), including: (1) limited land area (especially lowlands); (2) very high population density and hence also very high density in numbers of factories, automobiles, and all the other consequences of high levels of urbanization and industrialization; (3) a subtropical, typhoon-prone climate that exacerbates the liabilities of steep slopes and an unstable geologic structure; (4) an immature political democracy made more dysfunctional by complex and politicized ethnography and the inability of many people to focus on the future rather than the past; and (5) an implacable nemesis across the Strait in the Peoples Republic of China that does everything possible to make Taiwan’s political separateness uncomfortable. Given all these burdens, it is a wonder that Taiwan has accomplished as much as it has on the environmental front.1
