Environmental movements in Taiwan’s Anthropocene: a civic eco-nationalism

Paul Jobin (Academia Sinica)

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Abstract

Despite the tremendous geopolitical pressure—or perhaps owing to it—Taiwanese civil society has consolidated the country’s democracy over the last two decades, resulting in the excellent scores on various democracy indexes. I argue in this chapter that environmental movements have played a significant role in this process, through what I call civic eco-nationalism, or a civic form of ecological nationalism. After introducing this argument, its theoretical framework, and the conditions that gave rise to it, this chapter reviews the main characteristics of Taiwan’s environmental movements during the last two decades, through the existing literature—which is abundant both in Chinese and English—and my own observation since 2008. A good deal of fieldwork was conducted as a participating observer, which enables an ethnographic immersion over the long run.

Speaker’s Bio

Paul Jobin is Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. His research focuses on two axes. One is the legacy of late industrialism and the time bomb of industrial diseases caused by exposure to various toxicants, with case studies in Japan and Taiwan such Fukushima and RCA. Another axis is the geopolitics of the Anthropocene, or how, from the viewpoint of Taiwan—a diplomatic UFO but a vibrant democracy—the challenges of the climate emergency and the mass extinction of species are necessarily entangled with traditional geopolitical risks such as the threat of a military invasion by a big authoritarian neighbor called China. Recent publications include “The Valuation of Contaminated Life: RCA in Taiwan and the Compensation of Toxic Exposure” (EASTS: An International Journal), "Our ‘good neighbor’ Formosa Plastics: petrochemical damage(s) and the meanings of money" (Environmental Sociology) and a book co-edited with Ming-sho Ho and Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, Environmental Movements and Politics of the Asian Anthropocene (ISEAS).

Organiser: Centre of Taiwan Studies

Contact email: jl91@soas.ac.uk