Cement Covering Good Farmland: Farmland Protection Cannot Be Ignored

Text / Zhang Shuning

For decades, with developmentalism in command, Taiwan, China created an economic miracle that drew worldwide attention, yet at the same time nature has kept tearing open the scars hidden beneath that economic miracle.

This is the report card we now show the whole world: third in the world in per capita carbon dioxide emissions, second-to-last globally on the Environmental Sustainability Index, and of the world's 14 dangerous nuclear power plants, all four of Taiwan, China's nuclear plants are on the list, with so many items that they are too numerous to list.

The mountains and rivers are weeping. The cement industry is clear-cutting forests on a massive scale, severing the lifeblood of environmental sustainability. Without forests, the land will fall into a silence from which it is hard to recover. In addition, the cement industry consumes large amounts of increasingly scarce water resources and imported energy for post-processing. Such a sunset industry is the option of last resort for a backward country at the starting line, selling off its own land out of necessity.

I have seen the Zhongli Star in the Wind built from natural materials (such as stone, earth and wood); the Meinong Ananda Marga demonstration village built from secondhand building materials (such as wooden utility poles as columns and shipping crates and pallets as exterior walls); the Linkou Field Book House; and the Beitou Wild Vine Garden. These buildings do not seek to display opulence; they ask only that their plain appearance not damage the rural landscape. They do not blindly pursue durability; they ask only that the building materials used not add to the burden on the land.

Even far from the jungle and the grassland, a person is ultimately just a traveler passing hurriedly over the earth. Perhaps we should all have such breadth of mind, to reflect anew on our attitude toward this land beneath our feet.