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

tschuetz
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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

tschuetz
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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.

Stakeholders at Mallinckrodt and Weldon Spring

veralaub
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Multiple stakeholders are introduced in this film, such that either directly worked at the plant or had family who worked there, such that were academically interested in the matter, or such that were concerned about their community.

Paul Mitchell was a former electrician at Mallinckrodt, he was not informed about potential dangers and states that "no one there knew what uranium was". Further, he talks about noticing how colleagues got cancer, at beginning he did not find this unusual but then became weary after one colleague who had been very young and fit also was diagnosed with cancer.

Further, Brooks Davis tells her family story, she is the daughter of former plant workers (I think the father worked there for about 15 years, while the mother worked there for 1 year). Her father had been working in "hot areas" and was shifted to other areas in the plant whenever his exposure to radioactivity had been exceeding permitted levels for some time, and then was moved back after a short period of "cooling down". He got lung cancer at age 40, and was struggling with the disease for years, which caused him much bodily and emotional pain, finally he died in 1978. Her mother, who lived in poverty as a result of losing her husband so early and having to provide for her children, tried to claim to be entitled for compensation but was denied this repeatedly for bureucratic reasons until she wrote a letter explaining her situation.

Clearance Schneider was a health and safety inspector at Weldon Spring, he explains that one had to wear a badge and a white uniform when working at the plant, and if something was not right with the badge (that recorded nuclear exposure), it was taken off. He reports an incidence with a hydrochloric acid cloud that was released into the air and hovered over the neighborhood. He had skin cancer, but you could not confide this to anyone as he was afraid to lose his job, and when the company closed he reports that one was not allowed to leave the country for 3 years.

Obie Young was a chemical operator and reports that when his job was eliminated, he got several months of pay such that he would not need another job for a while, because if he had started a new job they would ask for tissue samples and find out that radioactivity was much too high in his body.

Another stakeholder is the organization "St. Charles County against hazardous waste" with his president Dr. Michael Garvey. They were concerned about contamination at Weldon Spring site, and demanded that the voice of concerns were heard at citizen meeting.

Gary Ferguson, a laborer who was involved in the cleanup of the site, reports that Geiger counters went through the roof but "they told us it was not dangerous". Further, he reports that containers with stored chemicals were disintegrating. Every day he worked at the cleanup, he had a bloody nose, but when he told his supervisor this person respondet that he should not talk to anybody about it, because otherwise he would get fired. He therefore decided not to confide in anybody, because he "had to pay his bills".

Gerald Kleba, a priest in the community, who noticed that many children in his precinct were sick and died, went on a Weldon Spring "tour". He was surprised that people on the other side of the fence concerned with the cleanup had moon clothes on, but people on the tour on the other side of the meshed fence were wearing everyday clothes and not informed about potential dangers. This shocked him, and encouraged him to engage in communal activities to raise attention to the danger of chemical and nuclear waste in the neighborhood.

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Alexi Martin
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The stakeholders that are described/portrayed in the film was the fate of Japan, the nuclear disasters in th past that shaked Japan, preventing the same thing from happening. The kinds of decisions they had to grapple with before the aftermath is the powerfailure, the lack of generators, and the affect the water had on the plant, and the future of the fuel rods. During the event they had to figure out how to stop the meltdown, how to restore power to the plant, how to help the engineers who had no choice but to be stuck inside, how to save Japan from nuclear fallout,etc. The aftermath was how to get the plant up and running again, the future of nuclear power in Japan, how to clean up and prevent further contamination of the land surrounding the plant. Also the health,safety and preperation of further nuclear power plant endeavors.

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Zackery.White
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The biggest stake holders in this are TEPCO, the Japanese Prime Minister, and the people of Japan are the largest stakeholders. There were many decisions made such as evacuation, releasing steam, pouring water, and leaving the fukushima fifty behind. Nobody was left without making a tough decision.

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wolmad
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The stakeholders discribed in the film was the general population of Liberia. They had shared experiances of seeing the effects of ebola, innitially being in denial of its severity, then finally seeing the entire liberian public health system be overwhelmed and fail by an apparently unstopable and horrifying disease. The people effected needed to make difficult decisions about how to avoid contracting the disease, how to protect their families, and how to deal with the emotional strain placed on them by the epidemic.