Damn the Dam

On Monday, 3/3/08, I travelled with Funder Chen and Christina MacFarquhar of Wild at Heart, and Wei-Ling Su of Observer Ecological Consultant Co., to Yunlin County for a meeting with the Central Water Resource Office (CWRO) and their environmental consultants. We were also to visit the site of the proposed Hushan Dam.

After spending the past week in Taipei's dreary weather, it was wonderful to see blue skies again as we headed south. Once we arrived in Yunlin, we met with several other environmental groups and scientific community representatives from around the island to strategize our approach to the halt or delay the construction of the dam.

Promptly at 1:30 pm, we assembled at the temporary offices of the CWRO for a briefing on the steps that it has taken to protect the various species found in the proposed dam site. Each attendee was given a beautiful coffee table book that featured all of the dams in Taiwan. Mind you, the dams here are treated as tourist attractions. Looking at the map of Taiwan, dotted with dam sites, I was surprised to find the sheer number of dams for a small island that is approximately the combined size of Maryland and Delaware.

Within the hour, we were issued hardhats and loaded onto the water department vans for a tour of the dam site. Along the way, Mark Wilkie, an avid birder and a local member of Wild at Heart, filled me in on the plight of the various endemic species in the area.

As soon as we passed through the gates of the dam site, the groves of bamboo began to give way to large swaths of raw dirt. The view from the entrance reminded me of the clearcut logging shot in an old Patagonia catalog. The CWRO's environmental consultants assured us that only bamboos and betelnut trees were removed. But even from an untrained eye, there had to be many more indiginous species that were lost besides the threatened Fairy Pitta that is on the World Conservation Union's Red List.

We were allowed to venture into one of the proposed dam feeders so I took a few more shots of the area as clusters of butterflies fluttered around me. Such open space is difficult to come by in such a densely populated place. In the short time that I have been in Taipei, I realized that I have taken for granted the large stretches of wilderness that we have in the States. I hope the environmental groups here will be able to salvage what little space that is left for future generations and that the government will begin to focus on conservation and alternative energy.