Members

Shiuhhuah Serena Chou has been writing, theorizing, and researching organic farming literature and culture as a re-worlding practice since 2005. She is currently working on her monograph on transpacific agricultural literary environmentalism while growing chives, asparagus, mulberries, and gourds sustainability at her office eco-rooftop garden in Taipei along with 23 colleagues in the Farm for Change project. This community farm that she and her team founded in 2019 is called Chung Chung Kan (種種看) or, literally, “let's try to farm.” Farming in Taiwan's most prestigious research center as perpetual beginners, Chung Chung Kan is becoming a radical site that aims to test out popular understandings of “organic,” “cultivation,” “urban farming, and “farming as spirituality.” Chung Chung Kan participants are also encouraging words and themes that embody the ethos and tactics of world-building and care-giving practices.

Email: sschou.academia@gmail.com

Website: www.ea.sinica.edu.tw/people/Serena-Chou.aspx

Chien-Yi Lu’s research interests include climate change, neoliberalism, democracy, inequality, politics of EU, and animal rights. Her book Surviving Democracy: Mitigating Climate Change in a Neoliberalized World (Routledge, 2020) places neoliberalism at the center of our ecological plight. She is a Podcaster and an op-ed writer. Without a green thumb, she is not gardening at Chung Chung Kan. However, she tries her best to be a "good ancestor" by reducing plane rides and animal consumption to close to zero. More importantly, her activism is grounded in her research, which traces the root cause of the deterioration of both democracy and the environment by unpacking the neoliberalized social, economic and political structure. She is currently examining how fascism gains grounds as the dominant organizing logic of society as neoliberalism bows out, and how degrowth might be a plausible counterforce that keeps civilization from plunging into an ecological as well as political dystopia. Other than being the mom of Niu Niu, a street dog she rescued 15 years ago, she has helped bettering the lives of romaning animals for over a decade by mainstreaming neutering (rather than culling) as the more effective and humane way of population control.

Email: chienyilu@gate.sinica.edu.tw

Website: www.ea.sinica.edu.tw/people/Chien-Yi-Lu.aspx

Chien-Huei Wu is a Research Professor in the Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica. He is interested in food security and agriculture trade as well as the intersection of climate change and world trading systems. He was raised in a coastal town, five miles off the Ocean.  He had a lively childhood growing up along with the scents and sounds of cows, goats, dogs and pigs, roosters and chicks. He spent his juvenile years biking along the coastal pastures.  He helped his family cultivating and harvesting various kinds of produce, including asparagus, watermelon, sugarcane, and peanuts. Laboring beneath the morning dews of the asparagus and the blading leaves of the sugarcanes were memorable.  His objective for Farm for Change is to explore possible ways to mediate soceity and nature, humans and the earth, trade and climate change.

Email: wch@sinica.edu.tw

Website: www.ea.sinica.edu.tw/people/Chien-Huei-Wu.aspx

Rob Sean Wilson has always dreamed of growing his own plants & flowers since first reading Thoreau’s Walden as a youth in Connecticut USA and later tending a little tomato patch and mulcher in Berkeley. Dwelling eventually in Santa Cruz on one acre by a watershed down to the ocean, he has been able to maintain a garden, a Mary grotto, California grape vines, and an array of over 300 plants and trees cultivated or wild from Angel Trumpet and Cherry trees to opium poppies, hemlock, olive & avocado trees, French and China roses.  His ethos of gardening/farming has been deeply influenced by the Farm for Change worlding project and eco-ponds at Academia Sinica in Taipei, where he hopes one day to help out as a migrant farmer. (more)

Email: rwilson@ucsc.edu

Website: ucsc.academia.edu/RobWilson

Lo is a journalist and freelance art writer. She considers Paris her second home after her long post there as a Central News Agency reporter. She has been co-producing and co-hosting the “Democracy in Trouble” podcast with Chien-Yi Lu since 2019 to promote citizen participation, environmental justice, and class equality. She is committed to persevere as a small but positive force in eliminating discrimination and injustice.

Email: teawithys@gmail.com

When not lecturing over Zoom, working on various research and editing projects in the environmental humanities, or training as a distance runner, Scott Slovic spends much of his time picking weeds in his home garden in Eugene, Oregon, USA, where he and his wife Susie grow blueberries, artichokes, tomatoes, and various other edible and pollinator-friendly plants. Scott served as the founding president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) in the early 1990s and was then editor-in-chief of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment from 1995 to 2020. At present, while teaching remotely as University Distinguished Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Idaho, he serves as co-editor of the book series Routledge Studies in World Literatures and the Environment and Routledge Environmental Humanities. He is also contributing editor of the website, the arithmetic of COMPASSION. 

(more)

Email: slovic@uidaho.edu

During the second half of the 1990s, I came across “environmental history” on a postgraduate course. It was my first time hearing this term, which caught my attention immediately. I noticed that the demand for interdisciplinary approaches of environmental history suits a person just like me, who “ignores his/her proper occupation” and likes to take various courses at university. Since then, I groped in the dark to find the meanings of all the words I got in the class: “environmental history is not about the history of the environment, but about the interaction between humans and the environment,” reviewing all the subjects of concern from the perspective of environmental history. (more)

Email: yawenku@gate.sinica.edu.tw

I teach at the Department of Religious Studies, Fu-Jen Catholica University. When I was a student of Psychology, I was inspired by “Psychology of Being-in-the-World” advocated by Professor Yee, Der Huey. In 2010, I came across Ecopsychology through the Chinese edition of Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind translated by The Society of Wilderness in Taiwan. For me, Ecopsychology is an example of “Psychology of Being-in-the-World,” which integrates the wholeness of human mind and the health of the ecological environment. Ecopsychology attempts to restore the original reciprocity between human and nature by searching for an environmentally-based standard of mental health beyond the scope of anthropocentrism. (more)

Email: yijia.tsai@gmail.com
blog：https://rereadingreligion.org/