Visible and Invisible Landscape: The Political Ecology of Mountain Agriculture in Taiwan

• Main Authors: Pao-Hui Tseng, 曾寶慧
• Other Authors: 洪伯邑
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/3xteea

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 地理環境資源學研究所 === 104 === People, including government officials and NGO professionals, now often regard mountain agriculture as one major cause of environmental problems, such as soil erosion and loss of biodiversity. As a result, mountain agriculture has symbolized a landscape of environmental degradation. However, mountain agriculture is also a critical source of livelihood support for mountain people, especially peasants and indigenous groups. Mountain people, therefore, have also practiced mountain agriculture as a way to improve their economic conditions. In consequence, mountain agriculture is situated within a tension between environmental conservation and economic development. This paper, by taking the temperate fruit production in Taiwan as an example, intends to investigate the emergence and effects of the tension. My analytic approach is from geographers’ understandings of landscape as a “way of seeing”, “broadly defined political economy” and “marginality” concept of political ecology. Through analyzing the ethnographic data collected in an indigenous community called Huanshan, I argue that current mainstream discourse has created an oversimplified “way of seeing” to denounce the mountain agriculture. This oversimplified “way of seeing” from the outside, however, has ignored the historical processes and people’s practices in developing mountain agriculture. This ignorance has then furthered the chasm between people and environment in Taiwan.