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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

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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.

Rabach Theorizing Place and Covid 19

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Mishuana Goeman in Mark My Words talks about remapping as a way of rethinking space and temporality, so the future is driving the study of the past and the past is interrogated for the future.

Goeman uses the fiction of Native women to push forth the idea that words don’t only represent reality, arguing that by using narrative “in (re)mapping, we as Native people have the power to rethink the way we engage with territory, with our relationships to one another, and with other Native nations and settler nations” (38–39).

So imagining spatial encounters and relationships is actually a way of mapping alternative relationships

Massey’s understanding of space is the “product of interrelations,” “spheres of possibility,” “and always under construction or a simultaneity of stories-so-far” (6-7), so space is a meeting of histories.

What histories are meeting now? Maybe more importantly, whose histories are meeting? I think this is where scalar analysis can come in to complement Massey’s thinking about space.. to start to tease out a bit these entangled encounter or meeting space, knowing it will never fully be disentangled.

 

Also, when think about Massey’s line of space as a meeting place, something always in transit, I’m thinking specifically of encounters. And space/place as encounter. And stay at home orders rethink the way many of us are encountering each other, also in certain contexts, especially for those with the privilege of staying at home, change encounters are being lost. The sort of tranistness of space is being lost.

UN Scientific Committee on Effects of Atomic Radiation, Fukushima Report

Sara.Till
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The report encompasses reports on the proceedings of the UN Scientific Comittee during its 60th session, May 2013. The UN report presents an unbiased plethora of data surmising Fukushima radiation exposure to both human an biological life. It primarily focuses on 2 reports detailing aspects of radiation exposure during the 2011 nuclear accident. The first report gives estimated levels of radiation experienced by individuals and non-human biota. Human individuals estimates are based on age and ongoing proximity to the accident. Evacuated adult citizens had an estimated exposure <10 mSv, while workers experienced doses >10mSv, with the highest exposure  an estimated 100 mSv. It places these values within the context of lifelong anticipated exposure and international expected exposures. This first report also briefly discusses effects beyond radiation, including the adverse outcomes thousands faced by evacuating. The second report concentrates on radiation exposure of children during the accident. While it concludes longer epidemological studies are needed to accurately assess the prevailing biolgogical effects, several important facts are highlighted. At a given radiation dose, children are more at risk of tumor induction than adults. In addition to this increased radiosensitivity (partially due to physical factors such as size), children also demonstrate increased prevalence of several cancers. These include leaukemia, brain, and thyroid cancers, all of which show radiosensitivity. The report also suggests narrowing the scope of inquiry, as radiation-induced cancers can be influenced by factors such as age and gender.

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This report is comprised of several parts, beginning with an introduction. The report describes radiation exposure and effects that have been linked to the Fukushima disaster. Then it outlines future goals of increased awareness of the risks of nuclear disasters and the effects of radiation exposure as well as the need for a network of experts capable of sharing knowledge and expertise when needed. Finally the report mentions further studies being completed concerning the effect of radiation on children.