Since 2018, EASTS has beenworking with our sister journal Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society. The collaborations include a set of response papers from Tapuya that reflect on provincializing STS, a theoretical call by John Law and Wen-yuan Lin on the making of non-Western STS scholarship (EASTS 11.2). When EASTS started working with Routledge in 2021, the collaboration with Tapuya (also a Routledge journal) intensified. Despite the Covid pandemic, EASTS has arranged for our associate editor Wen-Ling Tu to write us a commentary, in return, on four Tapuya papers about environmentalism in Latin America. Currently Dean of the International College of Innovation and Director of the Center for Innovative Democracy and Governance at National Chengchi University, Taiwan, Professor Tu is not only an expert on this topic; she is also an active member of the global STS community. We are grateful to Professor Tu for her intellectual efforts in engaging with these inspiring works from the other side of the globe on behalf of EASTS, and we look forward to more exciting collaborations in the future.— EASTS Editorial Office
As a Taiwanese scholar, I have long been concerned with the various environmental impacts, controversies, and governance incapacity issues in Taiwan, a small Island state in East Asia. My research often follows the path of Taiwan’s industrial developments and analyzes the environmental consequences brought by rapid industrialization, closely associated as they are with Taiwan’s role in a global political/economic division of labor. Examples include high-tech electronic industrial development in Taiwan and its challenges to ill-equipped environmental governance (see e.g. Tu Citation2005, Citation2007); and various other industrialization- or urbanization-related pollution disputes, such as citizen science initiatives around fenceline communities in petrochemical industrial clusters or civic campaigns against cross-boundary air pollution problems (see e.g. Tu Citation2019). I well understand that environmental issues are a global problem, and that climate change has worldwide impacts. Even environmental problems considered regional issues may have global implications. With 2020 only just begun, we have to worry about environmental crises brought on by the coronavirus outbreak, the worst wildfires in Australia’s history, locust infestations in East Africa, marine litter, loss of biodiversity, and so on and so on. Local crises have already become so overwhelming. It is probably hard for most people in Asia to cross their regional boundary, look beyond the Pacific Ocean, and study environmental issues in the Southern Hemisphere.
