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Wetlands, Petrochemicals, and Imagining an Island 濕地、石化、島嶼想像

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The book "Wetlands, Petrochemicals, and Imagining an Island  濕地、石化、島嶼想像" (Wu and Wu 2011), see also the review by Wen-Ling Tu (2011) and book chapter by Kathryn Yalan Chang (2023), quotes below.

“Wetlands, Petrochemicals, and Imagining an Island represents the voices of regional residents, environmental protection activists, artists, cultural critics, and university teachers and students from around the country. It offers an insight into grassroots bioregionalism through its mixture of local voices, place-related poetry, songs, essays, analyses of the Sixth Naphtha Cracker Plant (1991) in Yunlin County, discussions of the environmental impact assessment of petrochemical technologies in Changhua County, records of community events, and details of environmental activism. Wu and Wu and the other authors represented in the collection share the same concerns about how the petrochemical industry has greatly impacted the environment and public health.” (Chang, 2023, p. 163)

“What counts as the Taiwan environmental imagination in the event of the anti-Kuokuang campaign? The environmental imagination in Wu and Wu’s book is not an exclusively anthropocentric one; rather, it takes into consideration the threats to nonhuman species and the habitats of these species.” (Chang, 2023, p. 166)

“As Taiwanese culture continues to be influenced by liberalization, modernization, and westernization, social movements and political reforms are not taking, and need not take, the form of a radical political revolution or violent acts against the government. Anti-Kuokuang campaign actions include spiritual blessings and ceremonies, music videos, and social media petitions against Kuokuang Petrochemical Corporation Factory. Wu and Wu’s Wetlands, Petrochemicals, and Imagining an Island is also particularly significant, for it provides a historical and political environmental analysis of the Kuokuang. Even if a reader has no idea about the Kuokuang project, he/ she can learn about the project through the more creative material in the book such as poems and other creative writings.” (Chang, 2023, p. 172)

Diane Wilson's writing

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Throughout her 30-year career, Diane Wilson has been a prolific author, having published several books (Wilson 2005; 2011) that have been highly regarded by scholars of feminist and environmental literature (Poe 2013; Thornber 2014; Aming-Hong 2022). Wilson's book, An Unreasonable Woman (2005), has been praised by Karen Thornber (2014), an ecocritical writer who has noted that the book highlights the "global consequences of local and national behaviors" and can "work to change consciousness in the absence of public policy" (Thornber 2014, 991). Moreover, literature scholar Heidi Amin-Hong (2022) has argued that Wilson's "documentary aesthetics" demonstrate how Formosa's pollution of Vietnamese waters is part of a longer history of pollution caused by militarized projects across transpacific geographies, ranging from Vietnam to Taiwan and Texas (Aming-Hong 2022, 1). According to Amin-Hong, Wilson's use of dialogue "decenters individual authority in favor of collective knowledge gathering and communal action" (Aming-Hong 2022, 6).

2016 Vietnam marine disaster

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In 2012, Formosa began construction of the Formosa Ha Tinh Steel plant in Central Vietnam. Initially, the facility was meant to be built next to the Yunlin County Complex, but concern over water pollution – especially threats to Taiwan’s white dolphin population (Winkler 2019) – pushed the project abroad. Only shortly after the steel plant began operating in 2016, the release of toxic chemicals polluted an estimated 150 miles of Vietnam’s coastline. The death of hundreds of tons of fish and job loss of an estimated 50,000 – 100,000 fisher people marked a turning point for Vietnamese environmental movements and politics (Jobin 2020). After several weeks of silence, Formosa took public responsibility for the disaster and paid $500 million in compensation to the government. However, anger over the magnitude of the disaster and unequal distribution of funds led to large scale protest movements across the country. The government responded with violent police interventions, imprisonment of protestors, and tight control over media reporting, casting activists as agents of outside forces (Ortmann 2021, 288). Social scientists Stephan Ortmann explains the severity of this response with the nationwide spread of protests, exacerbated by the protestors' use of decentralized social media and involvement by the Catholic church, as well as international attention, all of which posed serious challenges to the legitimacy of Vietnam’s government (Ortmann 2021, 300).

When the South Wind Blows Exhibition

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In the 2013 exhibition and catalog When the South Wind Blows, local village leaders and visual artists documented life after the arrival of Formosa’s Sixth Naphtha Cracker Complex in over 100 stark black and white images (Huang and Chen 2018). The exhibit at the Museum for Natural History in Tainan featured a recreation of the Taihsi village’s layout, with projectors displaying the petrochemical complex, in order to relay the human tragedies occurring in the village (Huang and Chen 2018). Geographer Huei-Ling Lai (2021) further noted that the exhibition renders visible how the community articulates its relationships to place, representing themselves as victims of pollution, declining agriculture, an aging population, and silencing of community opposition by Formosa Plastics.