Aspects of the Taiwanese Landscape in the 20th Century

Extract

As I set out to write this contribution, a series of earthquakes transformed a large part of Taiwan causing me to rethink the project. They reconfirmed that humans are not the only factor determining a landscape – a point sometimes forgotten in an age when our ability to modify the earth seems to be increasing exponentially. The subsequent “earthshaking” election of Chen Shui-bian to president brought to the fore an age-old problem: how much do natural events like earthquakes or floods influence society? Is it merely the governmental response to a “natural” disaster that affects politics? Whatever the speculation, our ability to sort out the “human” from the “natural” landscape remains problematic. As work proceeded, it became clear that it would be difficult to gather comparative data in a fashion which could do justice to a sort of “sequent occupance” study of the Taiwan landscape with five slices of time as I had originally planned: the beginning of the century, around 1925, the middle of the century, around 1975 and the end of the century.