Isle of All Beings: Changing Ecologies in Taiwan

Isle of All Beings: Changing Ecologies in Taiwan explores how natural disasters and ecological disturbances have shaped Taiwan's environments, societies, and cultural imagination. Bringing together scholarly essays and literary works, the volume examines earthquakes, mudslides, floods, droughts, and tsunamis, tracing how different forms of environmental disruption are experienced, represented, and understood in Taiwan. Together, these texts illuminate the complex relationships between geological forces, everyday life, Indigenous communities, family and social relations, agriculture, cultural memory, and transnational disaster governance. Rather than treating natural disasters simply as exceptional events or environmental crises, Isle of All Beings reveals how they become embedded in everyday experience while also exposing wider questions of identity, resilience, mobility, and global interdependence. Moving from Taiwan's local environments towards the transnational consequences of ecological disaster, the volume ultimately reimagines the island as an "isle of all beings," connected through shared vulnerabilities and responsibilities to an increasingly interconnected world.Published in collaboration with the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Science and Technology Council, National Museum of Taiwan Literature, and National Taiwan University.