Rereading Hsu Jen-hsiu's poem written 20 years ago you can sense the frustration and helplessness between the lines about the ecological and environmental damage Taiwan had suffered. Twenty years later, now over 50 and with the organization he started, the "Society of Wilderness," just having celebrated its 11th anniversary, Hsu Jen-hsiu remains disheartened about the plodding pace of Taiwan's environmental policy.

Hsu says, "Nature is a key supporting element in the life of mankind, but in today's environment there is little opportunity for a person to get a good look at a tree, to become friends with a tree. The joy we get out of nature is becoming gradually a distant, unattainable dream, even a kind of luxury for us to enjoy."

Hsu Jen-hsiu, who wrote Taiwan's first essay on environmental protection some 32 years ago, has not only richly recorded in word and picture Taiwan's surviving, moving landscapes, he established the Society of Wilderness and has actively worked on an international level to protect an increasingly damaged global village.

Silent spring

On a late autumn afternoon kissed with gentle breezes, recalling Hsu Jen-hsiu's sorrowful tone, it's as if deep among the trees, their leaves blown about by the wind in waves of changing light and shadow, we can see back to 1956 and the young boy from Chiunglin, Hsinchu, who had just turned ten years old. A bit mischievous, curious and a little rebellious, he had a tough time finishing all his farm work and homework. His biggest pleasure in life was to explore the mountains and rivers with his village buddies.

Behind his home was a very dense patch of woods. Because the banyan trees grew very tall there, he and his cousins each picked one as their own "forest home." "I knew how many times a year it dropped its leaves, when it sent out new buds. The covering white-colored bracts tasted a little sweet and slightly sour, and the more you ate them, the hungrier you got. When the fruit was ripe we would share it with the birds. When autumn came the Javanese bishopwood berries ripened and we would pick them and scald them in hot water, add a little salt, a little sugar--this was our own wild fruit, quite sour to the taste, making your mouth pucker, like candied evergreen pears."

As a sixth-grader Hsu saw the Disney film The Living Desert in a movie theater in Chutung. The movie introduced the fauna and plants of the desert, and it made a tremendous impression on the young boy. Recalling what he had seen himself in his own experiences in the environment--snakes eating frogs, snakes eating each other--he thought, why not do a Taiwan version of The Living Desert? To learn more about the world of living things, Hsu entered the Pingtung Institute of Agriculture.

Getting out of the military in 1968, Hsu, who had grown up in a farm family, was about to experience the most damaging era of agricultural pollution in Taiwan, when farmers were over-using pesticides and there was an alarming and rapid disappearance of many living things: the croaking of frogs was no longer heard, the loaches that had filled the fields were gone, fireflies had vanished without a trace. It was then that Hsu read Rachel Carlson's book Silent Spring, which alerted him to how what had happened to America's environment was happening in Taiwan, too, and awakened his passion for environmental issues.

In 1969 Hsu took a job at the Provincial Department of Agriculture and Forestry (PDAF) under the Taiwan Provincial Government and became a researcher at the Seed Improvement and Propagation Station in Hsinshe, Taichung County. A year later the station's official photographer, who was responsible for photographing all kinds of activities and taking the pictures for lab reports, decided to travel to Africa and join an agricultural team. Just before he went he left all his photographic equipment to Hsu, who couldn't even load film into a camera! To learn photography, Hsu began to buy books and read them. "He left me a Pentax camera, but no light meter, so I had to learn myself how to adjust the aperture and shutter by the naked eye." He also learned how to develop film by gradually figuring it out in a darkroom.

"The primary reference material I used in learning photography was National Geographic. I regularly went to the old bookstalls looking for past issues thrown away by the soldiers of the US military stationed in Taiwan." Aside from photography, Hsu tried filmmaking, but the cost of film and development just for a short three-minute reel was NT$2,300. His monthly salary then was only NT$2,100 so he had to work up meticulous plans before he shot, fighting for every second of filming.

Six years ago the Society of Wilderness began to implement its program of youth ecology education and trained more than 100 seed teachers.

Bricks and pens

With camera in hand, in 1972-73 Hsu began his survey of wild orchids in Taiwan. In 1974 he published an article entitled "The Disappearing Horizon," that counts as Taiwan's first essay on the protection of the environment and ecology. He was 28 years old at the time, and in his article he advocated establishing a protected area for the wild orchid. That same year Hsu traveled to Central America as chief technician of the agricultural technical mission to Nicaragua. On the eve of his return three years later he made a special trip to Washington, DC to visit Adventure Hall at the National Geographic Society.

At the time Adventure Hall had just come out with a documentary on the California bald eagle, and with one push of the button the film would show for 50 minutes. Hsu pushed the button three times in succession, making the 70-year-old filmmaker curious. The elderly gentlemen told him, "For this kind of film, in addition to the filmmaker, you need a whole team of people made up of biologists, sound engineers, people who do high altitude suspension work, and post-production editors before you can get support from the National Geographic Society fund. You're still young, you can just as soon go shoot some photos yourself--taking photos can be done independently."

Returning to Taiwan, Hsu sold his 16-millimeter camera and devoted himself to still photography. Six months later even left his secure job with the PDAF. He had originally been planning on accepting an invitation to Indonesia but was unable to go because of disturbances there. To support himself, he took a construction job. During the day he hauled bricks and during the evening he wrote. Two books, My Home Is among the Snowbell Trees and The Moon Sets on the Wilderness--the latter a record of his adventures in the Nicaraguan forests--were written while he was hauling bricks and overseeing construction work.

A year later Hsu accepted an invitation to go to Mindoro in the Philippines as an agricultural adviser. For two years he explored the forests with the indigenous people and this experience became the basis for his books Night Rain in the Jungle and The Monsoon Wind Blows through the Forest.

Some animals use camouflage as a weapon to hide from their natural enemies. The picture shows how the caterpillar of the green Formosa butterfly uses the feathery hairs on its legs to blend in with a leaf.

Say no to pollution

After he had concluded his work in Southeast Asia and returned to Taiwan, the issue of environmental damage in Taiwan was gradually breaking out into the open. At the end of 1984 in Bhopal, India, 45 tons of poisonous gas leaked out of a pesticide factory owned by the US firm Union Carbide. In one night 2,500 people died and 50,000 were seriously injured, with some 100,000 people being forced to evacuate.

The Bhopal disaster attracted a great deal of attention in Taiwan because of the Sunko pesticide pollution disaster in Taichung's Tali that had occurred a year before. There had been numerous explosions, poisonous gas escapes, students collapsing, residents vomiting and agricultural crops ruined, and well water used for irrigation was tested showing lethal levels of contaminants. The residents, emotionally and physically devastated had, over a period of four years while they were undergoing this suffering, made a total of 269 appeals and had clashed violently with Sunko company personnel. At one point people even broke into the factory late at night and vandalized the plant. Finally, at the end of July 1986, Sunko ceased operations and the case became the first anti-pollution campaign in Taiwan where people had been successful in saving a situation on their own initiative.

During the same period, in September 1983, the Lee Chang Yung Chemical Industry Corporation in Hsinchu polluted the source for the Nanya Water Treatment Plant and there was an emergency cutoff of tapwater to some 40,000 people by the water company, ultimately revealing the cause of some unusual diseases that residents had suffered year in year out. For this reason not only did 355 professors from National Tsing Hua University and National Chiao Tung University sign a joint appeal to the government, the local residents surrounded the company three times, once for three days, then for 12 days then for a period of 425 days. Men, women, young and old, surrounded the company all day long waiting for the shift changes and even sealed up the factory gate with cement. Finally, in March 1987, they forced Lee Chang Yung to announce it was shutting down.

In these two major pollution disputes the public displayed its determination and fortitude to protect hearth and home, and this gave encouragement to residents all over the country to stand up and say no to plans for factories that would be heavy polluters, including the protest movement of June 1986 in Lukang, "We Love Lukang--No to Dupont," which was the first-ever street protest in Taiwan's environmental movement. In December of the same year more than 300 Lukang residents carrying placards reading "Protest" marched in front of the Presidential Palace in Taipei and the country was in an uproar, finally forcing Dupont to give up its factory plans.

Hsu Jen-hsiu, former Taiwan National University mathematics professor Huang Wu-hsiung and CTS general manager Li Yuan started a trail hiking movement. The picture shows Ilan Community University volunteers leading people on a walk of the Shihkung Historic Trail.

Fight for Niushan

Hsu Jen-hsiu emphasizes that at the time under martial law the media were controlled by the government and the public had no channel to express themselves and no alternative but to rely on their own strength to save the situation. Although Hsu himself did not join the front ranks of the protest movement, he used his numerous pictures and writings to document the last landscapes that still survived in the face of the rapid economic development of Taiwan, and in 1987 published Don't Say Goodbye, Taiwan.

Besides writing documentary books on ecology, Hsu began a five-year stint in 1989 as a summer vacation docent in Kenting National Park. Following this he pulled together like-minded people and in June 1995, established the Society of Wilderness, carrying out wilderness protection work, habitat conservation, nature education for children and community activities.

In 1997 Taiwan suffered its worst year for ecological damage. The Taiwan Cement Corporation's Hualien plant, which had been authorized to produce 200,000 tons a year, was now authorized by the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) to expand to an annual output of 1.5 million tons. To provide the electricity, preparations were made to set up three power stations in the Hualien area. Before the policy of East Coast tourist industry development had been formally put on the table, the Taiwan Highway Bureau was already quietly using the excuse of broadening the roadway to destroy the Hualien-Taitung seacoast highway, formerly regarded as a "national treasure." And finally, the Kuanhsi Industrial Park in Hsinchu County, the first project to open up a slopeland area for industrial development, was forced through.

The power plant drawing the most severe public condemnation, of the three authorized by the MOEA, was the 1.8 million kW thermal power plant in the Niushan ecological conservation area. The planned location was right in the Hualien-Taitung coastal scenic area, which supposedly had legal protection as a nature preserve. Under the leadership of Hsu Jen-hsiu, the Society of Wilderness's approach to protesting the Niushan power plant was not the traditional technique of wearing white strips of cloth around your forehead or throwing eggs, but to have the docent of the Hualien branch of the society go to Niushan and make a survey of the unique fauna there, the scenic attributes and the geology, including the nearby ocean ecology where whales returned to feed. At a public hearing of the Legislative Yuan a film made by the Society of Wilderness affected legislators and MOEA officials deeply. How could anyone let such a beautiful place be destroyed by a power plant? This move successfully put a stop to plans for power plants in Hualien and Taitung.

The roots of a love for nature are planted during childhood, and if one misses this moment, it can be hard to nurture that love later in life. Hsu Jen-hsiu has used his childhood experiences as a blueprint, writing the book A Village Child's Path.

Taking root

Although the society had won a battle, Hsu still wistfully remarks, "Taiwan has many civic organizations that have joined the fight for environmental protection yet unfortunately our enemies are like the mythological 'nine-headed dragon-demon': you cut off one of his heads and he grows two in its place. Even worse, some officials with ulterior motives give him some giant wings so not only can he fly the skies, they can use him to block off the sun as they practice their deception."

This convinced Hsu that to solve the environment problem the best approach was education, and the creation of the Society of Wilderness embodied this idea, "to nurture people who in the future will cherish 'Formosa,' the beautiful island, and not those who will destroy it." Hsu believes only in this way can future administrative leaders, legislators and industrialists be developed who are deeply imbued with the concept of conservationism. These people will no longer endanger the environment and leave a disaster behind for their grandchildren for the sake of their own short-term interests.

In 2000 after the Society of Wilderness had finished its mid-term plans for the training of docents throughout Taiwan, it began to implement ecology education for children and move toward international longterm planning.

For children's ecology education, the society trained more than 200 seed teachers to assist in curriculum design, as well as more than 100 seed teachers on school campuses who are leading children to put ecology concepts into practice.

This past spring Hsu Jen-hsiu combined the bits and pieces of his experience growing up surrounded by nature in his hometown of Chiunglin and his explorations of nature to publish A Village Child's Path. Through the 52 poems in the book, readers not only can acquire all kinds of environmental knowledge, but can also appreciate the deep emotional bonds between different species, and can return to their childhood, to the Hsinchu buster winds that are disappearing due to global warming, to the wetlands that have been sealed forever under the concrete foundations of tall buildings, and can see the terrible difference between rural and urban children:

"I hear that city kids know everything, / And often test with perfect scores, / But they can't catch dragonflies, / And they can't find horned beetles, / Just a little tree lizard, / Scares them like it was a dinosaur."--"Country Walk," from A Village Child's Path.

"Childhood is the foundation for a person's whole life. Almost everything I did after age 29 gradually turned toward realizing my childhood dreams: travel, exploration, photography, writing...." Hsu feels every age has its own backdrop, every person has their own unique experiences and each can be wonderful. All that is necessary is the attention and care of parents and teachers. It has nothing to do with being rich or poor but all to do with the guidance that stems from love and wisdom.

The Nicaragua Society of Wilderness, established three years ago, was the SOW's first overseas branch. To mark the occasion Hsu Jen-hsiu worked on a photo book on Nicaragua, making many trips there to gather material.

Going international

Although Taiwan is constantly being bashed on the international stage, the Society of Wilderness has long extended its feelers out into the international arena. Hsu, who emphasizes the idea that environmental protection knows no borders, says that in the global village the sandstorms of northern China can directly affect Taiwan and even the US; when in 1986 the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded, milk was made undrinkable throughout northern Europe; and rampant logging of the tropical rain forests is tantamount to cutting off the planet's oxygen supply--everyone suffers, no-one can escape.

To establish overseas branches of the society, Hsu has aimed for a conservation organization based in Chinese communities that pulls together Chinese around the globe to promote conservation.

Take the Malaysian rainforest in Sarawak, for example. The ethnic Chinese there are quite active and so at the beginning of 2000 a preparatory office for a branch of the Society of Wilderness was set up in Kuching. The head of the branch office, Cheng Yang-yao, was a graduate of the Kaohsiung Institute of Technology and a person well qualified for taking a leading role in ecology work.

Hsu stresses the fact that the local people there have a low level of concern for public issues and thus the Sarawak branch of the society focuses on promoting community environmental education, as well as assisting in the development of eco-tourism, which combines nature with culture, to move forward and protect the planet's lungs--the tropical rainforests.

Currently the society's Sarawak branch is actively promoting a python conservation project. The pythons frequently come to the conservation area buffer zone in search of food at the duck farms run by Chinese. If they are not careful, the workers there catch them and they are regularly killed and eaten. Hsu, dead set against the killing of pythons, which have a low survival rate and take ten years to grow to maturity, suggested to the duck farm owners give the pythons a way out. The society branch set up a "halfway house" and came up with the money to purchase old ducks, or those about to be culled, to feed to the pythons. This initial temporary measure gave captured or injured pythons time to recover their health. When a permanent refuge can be set up they will be released into the wild.

To this end the society has set up the Society of Wilderness International Python Conservation Foundation to financially support the building of halfway houses in the wild and their maintenance and operation costs. "Although the pythons cannot send us a thank-you letter, the opportunity to make even the most modest of efforts on behalf of other living things on this planet I consider a way of paying back the planet for taking care of us. I think this beautiful idea is the beginning of something that will change the world."

After leaving his position with the Provincial Department of Agriculture and Forestry, Hsu Jen-hsiu took up work in construction, using his free time to write. The Moon Sets on the Wilderness is the result of his work during that time.

Wild Nicaragua

The Nicaragua branch of the Society of Wilderness was established in June 2003. This was the first overseas organization of the society to formally complete the registration process. The director of the branch, Chiu Yi-hsing, was a rice expert who had been sent to Nicaragua in 1974 with Hsu. He later remained in the country and set down roots. At Hsu's invitation, Chiu got the local Chinese to organize a branch of the society, giving something back to the local community and also wiping out the bad reputation the Chinese had for not valuing the ecology.

Additionally, given that well-planned eco-tourism can not only spur economic development and improve people's lives, but is also beneficial for protecting the environment, Hsu devoted his efforts to publishing a book rich in both pictures and text giving a "nature portrait" of Nicaragua. This project received the support of Luis Wang, the ROC ambassador to Nicaragua, and after several years of effort, last year the English edition of the book was published as Wild Nicaragua. The book not only makes international ecology organizations sit up and take notice of the Society of Wilderness team, it is of great help to the promotion of eco-tourism in Nicaragua.

As for China, in 1996 the Chinese University Students Green Camp was established and in 2000 Hsu was invited to become a camp teacher. Seeing that Chinese students were still stuck at the anti-pollution survey and protest stage, he suggested they must first become environmental docents through the observation of nature before they could have an influence on more people. That same year the Greenwild Society was set up at Xiamen University. After many years of effort, and with the assistance of international environmental protection organizations, the group published Protecting the Redwoods, giving free copies to nearby primary schools, setting down roots with education.

Hsu Jen-hsiu's Playing Hide-and-Seek with Nature is a record of what lies behind the interplay between living things and the environment. The picture shows how the skin color of Swinhoe's frog changes with the surrounding environment.

All it takes...

Although he has always maintained that "the environmental movement is optimism founded on pessimism," this longtime dreamer and champion of nature feels a sense of incomparable gratification whenever he encounters a student who has been influenced by him and has decided to go abroad to study environmental and conservation education, or those who had intended to emigrate but now want to remain in Taiwan and continue the struggle with him.

Hsu has always had expectations for Taiwan: "It's hard to find a place in the world like Taiwan, with its tall mountains, expansive ocean and its varied fauna. I hope some day Taiwan can go back to the 1960s--with fish coming back to the Tanshui River, in autumn countless mitten crabs following the stream down to the river's mouth, the sound of frogs in the fields filling your ears, the loaches rolling around in the mud, the summer sky bright with fireflies.... This would not be difficult, all it takes is for people to want it to be that way." Hsu's face breaks out in a dazzling smile.

From the towns in the hills of Hsintien, one sees in the distance the neon lights of the city coming on and Hsu's words, emphasized over and over, reverberate in the ear: "This would not be difficult, all it takes is for people to want it to be that way." The lights in the room go off, and the starlight that has been sparkling in the sky all along becomes visible. One cannot help but think of a paragraph from the "Children's Environmental Declaration" written by a member of one of the society's "Bee Brigade Family" children's groups:

"If the eagle no longer soars in the azure blue sky; if the mountain forests are no longer home to the hulking Taiwan black bear or the delicate shadow of the Taiwan macaque; if the streams no longer show the artful traces of the Taiwan bream or figure of the elegant masu salmon--what will this land become? Who will want to live in this lonely world?"

Yes, this lonely world, who will want to live in it? A radiance spreads over Hsu's darkened, rough and weather-beaten face, seeming to tell us once more that all we need is the desire, to dream of the wild, to learn to co-exist with nature, to let nature and mankind be healed together, and to prosper.

Using a certain color or pattern to frighten the enemy is the specialty of the brahmid moth. It impersonates a pit viper and on closer inspection looks like an owl with both eyes wide open, causing those looking for a meal to give it a wide berth.

After several years of effort by the Society of Wilderness team, Wild Nicaragua was published in 2005. Not only did the book bring the Society of Wilderness to the attention of ecology organizations around the world, it also made a contribution to promoting ecological tourism in Nicaragua.

Hsu Jen-hsiu (right) in his studio in Hsintien spreads out his work done in Nicaragua. He laughingly recalls with Huang Yi-feng (left), a photographer who accompanied him, how they were plagued by mosquitoes.