Commentary
Houston from a Distance
It has been a rough year for air quality in the Houston region. The hottest, driest summer in living memory made for some of the worst ozone days we have seen in years. The weather also lead to seemingly unstoppable brownouts in our heavily industrialized areas, meaning that places like the Ship Channel and Texas City saw (and smelled) many more incidents as facilities constantly went into upset when they suddenly lost power. And after a decade of air quality improvements, thanks to strengthened federal standards, we are left stranded in a void of indecision after the long delay of EPA’s choice of a new ozone standard was brought to a sudden conclusion by the White House’s political calculation.
I recently had the opportunity to reflect on Houston’s environmental predicament from the other side of the world. Taipei, one of the densest cities on earth, has a number of factors which make their air quality challenge even more daunting than that of Houston. The city is rimmed by spectacular mountains which have the unfortunate effect of trapping pollution in their bowl of a city. Though most of the large factories and generators are located outside Taipei, those massive pollution sources are more than replaced by the countless cars, mopeds and motorcycles choking Taipei’s streets. And the Chinese pollution which Californians frequently deride must first pass over the island of Taiwan on its journey west.
Yet despite these challenges, and an admittedly late start to regulation of environmental quality (leaded gasoline and two-stroke engines were outlawed only in the last decade), you get the sense that the people of Taiwan have recently come to hold their environment in their collective hand – acknowledging both how precious and how fragile it is.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in a series of pavilions in one of Taipei’s largest parks. Only one of these pavilions superficially has anything to do with the environment – the Ecoark – which is a huge monument to Taiwanese ingenuity and design. The Ecoark is a large exhibition hall built almost entirely of recycled plastic bottles and simple road-grade construction supplies. Extremely strong, extremely efficient, breathtakingly elegant and with a phenomenally small environmental footprint, the Ecoark is an embodiment of Taiwanese ability. It is also a beacon of the island’s environmental awakening. Constructed with funding by one of the island biggest corporations, it is a testament to the general acceptance by both individuals and big business of the limitations of natural resources and the imperative of finding a different way.
This lesson, and Taiwan’s attempt to embrace what it has learned, is much more subtly but powerfully illustrated in two smaller pavilions across the street from the Ecoark. The Pavilion of Dreams is a room by room showcase of Taiwan’s latest technological innovations. These breakthroughs are displayed, however, as pieces of nature – paper thin speakers are leaves in a forest, flexible light tubes are blooming plants and translucent display screens are molded as human cocoons.
Having explored the technology on display in the Dream Pavilion, I was more than curious as to what I would find in the Pavilion of the Future, expecting to be truly blown away by what this Asian tiger of a nation could really do. Once inside, however, I continually asked my guide if this was it? Was this all? Was I missing something? Because Taiwan, one of the most hyper-connected and digitally proficient countries in the world, built a testament to the future that was little more than a modest greenhouse. I mean, it was nice. They had different sections for different biomes – tropical, temperate forest, desert, alpine, etc. But it was a greenhouse, nothing more.
And then, somewhere while I was three levels up looking at cacti, I realized that this was actually someone’s very powerful statement. This is the future. The Pavilion of Dreams, full of moving multicolored plastic plants, beautiful though they might be, could never be a plant and our ingenuity could ultimately never substitute what nature has provided.
That’s when my entire trip finally started to fall into place. Taiwan might have been late to start regulating the fuels for and emissions from millions of mopeds, but when the argument was made and the choice was clear, the country rapidly started making a change. When the government realized it had to cut emissions from refineries and power plants, it didn’t wallow in a political fight over the electoral viability of cap and trade. It asked an economist what system would work best and have never looked back from their highly successful pollution tax. And even though they are not formally a member of the United Nations, the Taiwanese live on an island with scarce resources and very few options as to where they can go. They realize the precariousness of their position as our atmosphere warms and the climate changes and so are pushing to sign the Framework Convention on Climate Change. A statement, inarguably suffused with geo-political overtones and agendas, still powerful in its import to a people who increasingly embrace what the future means.
Maybe if in Houston we pretended for a while that the Gulf of Mexico extends a few dozen more miles inland we could get past the pablum and the need for federal dictates and care for our environment simply because we should.
