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National Geographic : 1993 Nov
Contents
Protection Agency survey, half its drinking water comes from polluted sources. "In a sense, we've become too prosper ous," said Jaw Shau-Kong, then Taiwan's energetic minister of the environment, as he looked down through the pall of smog from his office windows high above Taipei. "After you make the money, you've got to spend some on environment. Because your life, your health, your kids are precious." He sighed. "We've made a start. But can we turn things around fast enough?" The southern town of Linyuan will have a hard time turning things around. There Tai wan's largest chemical company, Chinese Petroleum Corporation, attempts to put a good face on pollution by painting its air monitoring stations with fluttering birds and gamboling sheep. When I visited the plant, the chief engineer showed me a film explaining the company's environmental cleanup efforts. Images of gurgling mountain streams and wild mountain flowers flickered on the screen. But none of them bore any relevance to the reality of the blighted coast just outside. "Air, water, noise, and solid-waste pollution control stan dards are all higher here now than national standards," the engineer assured me. A mile away from Chinese Petroleum I met a married couple who told a different story. Chen Feng-fu and his wife, Wang-to, both 59, were mushroom sellers who lived in the bam boo and concrete farmhouse where Chen was born. Ten years ago, they said, monsoon rains created an atmospheric condition that caused noxious plant emissions to collect along their house's earthen floor. When Mrs. Chen squat ted to light a mosquito coil, the air exploded, flash-burning her legs and feet. She spent four months in a hospital and had hideous pink scars. She suffered from liver cancer, respira tory problems, and other ailments, which her doctor blamed on the plant. "The air was clean here before Chinese Petroleum came," Chen told me. "It's gotten worse every year since." Why didn't you move? I asked. Chen shrugged. "No one will buy the house because of the pollution," he replied. Did the company offer compensation? "They covered some medical expenses but paid no damages," Chen replied. By then I'd been there perhaps an hour and a half, and my eyes and throat burned from the fumes. Mrs. Chen's eyes filled with tears. I asked if she was crying. "No!" she snapped. "My eyes just won't stop watering. I'm not sad. I'm angry!" Mrs. Chen died last June. OME 200 MILES NORTH of Linyuan, the government is trying to clean up the human wastes polluting the water supply of the more than six million people crowded in greater Taipei and along the banks of the Tanshui River. To serve them, a massive 154-million dollar sewer project is under way, but it is at least seven years away from completion. Allen Tsai, adviser to the Taiwan EPA's Water Quality Control Bureau, gave me a glimpse of the enormity of the project. We visited the power plant, where a dozen 3,000-horsepower pumps would one day drive the system. We sloshed through a dripping wet tunnel and clambered down into giant con crete sedimentation tanks that would treat 31,000 tons of sewage a day. I left Tsai at Tanshui village and took the ferry back to Taipei to see the river for myself. Its banks were thick with refuse; its waters greasy with excrement and stinking of sulfur and methane. A bloated dog carcass drifted by. On the far shore putrid smoke wafted from a smoldering mountain of garbage. Behind it, the lowering sun burned like a rebuke. And then, as we approached the Taipei dock, a flock of snow white egrets swooped out of nowhere, glided over the ferry, and flashed on down the river-a gleaming splash of beauty, and a promise, it seemed to me, of what could be. And as I climbed the old stone steps back into the city, I pondered the miracle Taiwan's determined people had achieved since I first visited the island so many years ago, and what it had become: China, yes, and yet Taiwan; Taiwanese, but Chinese too. And out of both something new still becoming. Q Masked against airpollution, a young family takes a spin in a Kaohsiung park, choosing the maneuverability and economy of a motor scooter over the comfort and safety of a car. Facing similar trade-offs on a larger scale, Taiwan charges full speed ahead into the industrialized world. NationalGeographic, November 1993
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