A Contract with Nature

The film Miss Potter portrays the life of Beatrix Potter, the British writer and illustrator of children’s books and the creator of Peter Rabbit. Her creative work drew inspiration from nature, and in her later years she actively devoted herself to the environmental movement. She used the ­royalties she had amassed in her lifetime to buy some 4,000 acres (1,600 hectares) of land in the English Lake District which she bequeathed to the UK’s National Trust to ensure that its pristine environment would be preserved forever.

Without seeking personal benefit, Potter acted in the interests of long-term harmony with nature. Now, some people in Taiwan have begun to follow her example.

Where there is water there is life

Alibang Ecological Farm, located in New Taipei’s Shimen District, is currently being operated by an ecological trust. With an area of 10.3 hectares, it includes eight ponds. When we visit at the height of summer, shortly before Dragon Boat Festival, we feel cool breezes coming off the surface of the water, taking the edge off the summer heat.

We follow Daniel Huang along a verdant path on the farm, which is currently managed by the Environmental Trust Center (ETC) of the Taiwan Environmental Information Association (TEIA). They have four full-time staff living on site, including Huang, who is the team leader.

The site has both low-elevation forest and pond-based wetland, with lustrous green trees and moist air, giving Alibang a rich biodiversity no less impressive than tropical rainforest or coral reef ecologies.

Evidence of this can be found in the cacophony of insect noises among the trees. We can see swallowtail and large tree nymph butterflies, and we have to be careful not to step on the many black-spectacled toads that have just matured from the tadpole stage. Next to the ponds damselflies and dragonflies flit about, while on the water rare water scorpions are resting. There are even black-crowned night herons, known as “Taiwan penguins” for their coloring. In the soft soil beneath our feet, there are signs of ferret-­badgers having dug in search of earthworms to eat. A hole in the hillside is the entrance to a pangolin burrow.

Management team members and volunteers hard at work clearing duckweed from a pond at the Alibang Ecological Farm.  (courtesy of Alibang Ecological Farm)

Investing in nature

The farm has few constructed facilities and there is no ongoing cultivation. You could say it is a “five-star hotel” for wild animal and plant life. But it was by no means easy to create this kind of environment.

When the farm’s landowners bought this piece of land 20-plus years ago, they had the notion of creating an environmental haven. At that time, the land did not appear as it does today, but had been a tea plantation, and before that had been the site of a private guesthouse.

Wang Dechang, the founder of the project, has long believed in treasuring the land and preserving natural assets for future generations. In the 1990s he proposed the slogan “invest in nature” and recruited 60 households who shared his love of nature. With support from a philanthropist who asked nothing in return, they were able to raise NT$100 million to acquire the site.

In 2022 the landowners turned the farm over to the ETC to manage. They did so in the hope of overcoming problems with administrative procedures so that the land can ultimately be placed in trust to enable this environment to be sustainably preserved into the future.

A wide variety of plants and animals have appeared since the land was restored to a more natural state. Shown here are a black-kneed featherlegs (Pseudocopera ciliata), a green tree viper (Trimeresurus stejnegeri), a large tree nymph butterfly (Idea leuconoe clara) and a Taipei tree frog (Zhangixalus taipeianus).

The nature of environmental trusts

In the shade of a tree, with a cool zephyr blowing, we talk with Daniel Huang about different examples of environmental trusts in Taiwan and around the world. An environmental trust is a kind of charitable trust, and they are most widespread in the country where this mechanism was invented: the UK.

There are various ways to promote environmental conservation, sustainability, and education. One hears from time to time of large landowners doing conservation work on their own property, or folks generously donating land to environmental organizations. There are also businesspeople who establish personal foundations and buy property to engage in environmental protection work.

These approaches, though varied, share basically the same goals. “Environmental trusts are by no means the only way to go, and in fact sometimes they are more trouble,” says Huang frankly. But considering that people will pass away and that organizations can potentially be dissolved or go bankrupt, the trust mechanism was devised to ensure that these philanthropic endeavors can carry on long after the principals and even the original trustee organizations have disappeared.

Once land is turned over to a trust, operations become subject to review and audit by third-party institutions, which is more onerous in terms of practical management. “However, trusts definitely have benchmark value,” suggests Huang. When land is placed in trust, the property owner (principal) signs a contract with a trustee organization, and the pact is reviewed and supervised by the competent authority for the relevant economic sector; there is no longer any opportunity to withdraw from the contract or abandon it. It will never terminate even if the principal dies or the trustee organization disappears. These arrangements enable the agreement to continue in perpetuity.

Taiwan’s first environmental trust

Due to a number of factors including lack of clarity as to the powers and responsibilities of the competent authorities and a heavy tax burden, there are still very few examples of environmental trusts in Taiwan. The Nature Valley Environmental Trust, on the slopes of Mt. Nanhe in Hsinchu County’s Qionglin Township, which is also under the management of the ETC, is in fact the only other case so far.

The Nature Valley site, which was owned jointly by three lifetime volunteers of the Society of Wilderness, reached a major turning point during the financial tsunami of 2008. Due to economic pressures, three of the original six partners in the venture left. At this time Wu Jie-feng, one of the landowners, happened to learn about the concept of environmental trusts, and the idea resonated with him.

“If the financial tsunami could cause people who embraced environmental conservation to pull out, what other events might prevent this land from being passed down to future generations?” wondered Wu. The other two landowners, Wu Yuqiao and Liu Xiumei, supported Wu Jie-feng in exploring the trust option. In 2011 they finally decided to put the 1.3 hectare site they had purchased into a trust, first commissioning the Society of Wilderness to manage it and then in 2014 switching over to the ETC.

After being put into trust, Nature Valley became an important wildlife habitat. The photo shows a Formosan crab-eating mongoose (Urva urva formosana), which is seen as an environmental indicator species. (courtesy of Nature Valley Environmental Trust)

Passing the baton to nature

Four large trees mark the fork in the road where one enters Nature Valley: a mango, a lychee, a camphor, and a Ceylon olive. The youngest of them is nearly a century old, and the mango tree, which Wu Jie-feng calls “Grandma Mango” is over 200 years old.

The site had previously been a tea plantation and fruit orchard. Wu relates that when they first bought the land, it had long lain unused and was covered in large stretches of silvergrass and vines.

Wu was in the hiking club in university and since youth had aspired to live in the forest; today he resides in a wooden cabin next to the trust land. Formerly an engineer in the Hsinchu Science Park, he is now a certified tree worker climber specialist and environmental educator. He watches the changes in the forest up close every day, and he shares with us his observations on the process of ecological succession that the woodland has undergone.

After the silvergrass (Miscanthus) and mile-a-minute vines (Mikania micrantha) that had blocked most of the sunlight from the soil were cleared away, they were quickly replaced by fast-growing pioneer plants including turn-in-the-wind (Mallotus paniculatus), Japanese mallotus (Mallotus japonicus), common schefflera (Schefflera octophylla), and wild coffee. These were gradually followed by shade-tolerant ferns, and long-lived, slow-growing plants such as Taiwan incense-­cedar (Calocedrus formosana), sweetleaf (Symplocos spp.), and odor-bark cinnamon (Cinnamomum osmophloeum). “By the third year we no longer had to plant anything, because there were seeds naturally in the soil and the environment was suited for them to grow on their own,” says Wu.

After land is put into trust, a lot of manpower is required to manage and maintain it. The photo shows the management team at Nature Valley.

A harmonious blend of nature and culture

We follow the management team into the rarely visited deepest part of Nature Valley. ETC project manager Yang Jia-hao explains that the flourishing of ferns like the turnip fern (Angiopteris lygodiifolia), and the flying spider-monkey tree fern (Alsophila spinulosa), which can grow taller than a man, indicates that there is abundant moisture in the valley. Meanwhile giant elephant’s ear (Alocasia macrorrhizos) provides a home to amphibians such as the Taipei tree frog (Zhangixalus taipeianus), as well as to Swinhoe’s tree lizard (Diploderma swinhonis) and the yellow-mouthed japalura (Diploderma polygonatum xanthostomum). It also offers a refuge where birds like the Taiwan bamboo partridge (Bambusicola sonorivox) can hide from predators.

The entire site is no larger than a baseball field. “But even in this small area more than 40 Taiwan endemic species have been observed, and there are many protected species,” says ETC section manager Kuo Hui-fang proudly.

However, despite the abundant flora and fauna, what at first glance looks like a primitive landscape on closer inspection shows the traces of human handiwork. Because the geology here includes much conglomerate rock, the terrain is loose and vulnerable to landslides, and in one place the management team has used logs discarded by local mushroom farmers to shore up the slopes. At another spot, the foot of a steep slope is terraced with stone retaining walls, built with the help of volunteers and local elders. This project drew on the “stone riprap” approach often seen in local Hakka communities, with the material being locally sourced and each large stone being surrounded by at least five to seven smaller stones, creating a stable structure that fits in with the environment.

Kuo invites us to smell or taste plants along the way. These include the leaves of traditional-­variety guava trees, with a sightly astringent aroma of guava, and the Taiwan toad lily (Tricyrtis formosana), which has a modest fragrance of cucumbers. This multisensory experience, so novel to city dwellers, also is often significant in terms of preservation of local culture.

For example, the richly aromatic fishwort (Houttuynia cordata) is an ingredient that local Hakka residents sun-dry and cook into chicken soup. Japanese climbing fern (Lygodium japonicum) can be boiled and drunk as a tea, sweetened with a little sugar. It has a pleasant flavor similar to winter melon tea, and is used as an ingredient in Traditional Chinese Medicine for its heat-relieving and detoxifying properties. Local farmers often drink it after spraying pesticides on their crops.

Proper management of the natural environment not only gives living things a path to survival, but can also preserve the life wisdom and collective memories accumulated over the years by local residents. The harmonious co-existence of humans and nature is precisely what environmental trusts aim to achieve.

By signing a contract with nature, some unblemished piece of the environment can be preserved for future generations. (courtesy of Nature Way)