EAEH2013 Welcome address-Ts’ui-jung Liu
October 24, 2013

President Wu, Ladies and Gentlemen:
It is my great pleasure to welcome all of you to participate in the Second
Conference of East Asian Environmental History (EAEH2013) on behalf of
the Association for East Asian Environmental History (AEAEH) and thelocal preparatory committee of the Conference.
For your information, I would like to brief first about the preparation ofthis conference. With the announcement of call for papers in March
2012, we received proposals of 59 individual papers and 8 panels
containing 27 papers. It should be noted that after reviewing only a few
paper proposals were not accepted. It is to be regretted, however, that afew scholars finally decided not to attend the conference for various
reasons. Thus, in these three days, we will have 70 presentations,including keynote speeches.
Under the general theme of “Transformation of East Asian Environment
in Historical Perspective: Local Reality and Global Connection”, all papers
and panels have been organized into 21 sessions focusing on different
sub-themes such as, conceptual view of environmental history, forest
management, environmental policy history, attitude toward nature,nature in the 20th century, natural hazards, disaster and prevention,
marine resources and imperialism, biological resources and imperialism,
land use, water resources, pollution, Taiwan’s post-war local
environmental history, and American environmental legacies in thePhilippines. The sessions are arranged in parallel due to limitation oftime; but I hope that all participants will be able to enjoy learning fromdifferent topics as much as possible by moving quietly from one session
to the other during the course of presentations.
It should also be mentioned that under the request of some participantsin July this year, a special session is arranged for introducing thedatabase of Geographical Information System (GIS) established inAcademia Sinica in order to show the operation of this database. I hopethat this introduction will be helpful for you to utilize the GIS database inyour research.
Regarding the current situation of the Association for East Asian
Environmental History, I would like to inform you that now we have 298
members in the membership list available in the AEAEH website.
Compared with the initial number of 193 in October 2009 when thewebsite was first initiated, there is an increase of more than 100
members in four years. This is a quite good progress. I would like to takethis opportunity to urge you to provide information such as activities ofworkshop and conference as well as new publications which can enrich
the content of the AEAEH website.
I would also like to take this opportunity to inform you that after the First
Conference of East Asian Environmental History (EAEH2011), more than
20 papers were revised and submitted for publication and 18 of themwere selected for a volume entitled, Environmental History in East Asia:
Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Ts’ui-jung Liu, to be published by
Routledge in association with Academia Sinica (forthcoming 2014). The18 chapters of this volume are divided into four parts concerning
environmental thought and policy, altered view on landscape, groundgained for agriculture, and ground lost: disease and disaster. It is notablethat 10 authors of this volume are also participating and presenting
papers in this second conference. I expect that from this second
conference we can produce another volume in due course. For this, Iwould like to encourage all presenters to submit your revised papers
after this conference. For a long-term expectation, a series on East Asian
Environmental History may be produced as we will have the Association’sconference held regularly in the future.
As environmental history has been developed into a field of study sincethe 1970s in the world and even though the steps in East Asia seems tobe a little bit slower, more and more scholars specialized in history andother disciplines have devoted to do environmental history. I believescholars concerning East Asian environmental history will not only try toestablish this sub-field into a solid interdisciplinary academic ground but
also to contribute to the world environmental history as a whole.
With this in mind, I would like to thank you all again for coming to thisconference, particularly for those coming from far away from abroad andthose who serve as the chairs of sessions. I would also like to thankNational Dong Hwa University for hosting this conference, to thankAcademia Sinica for providing necessary budget, and to thank theworking teams of the Dong Hwa University and the Institute of TaiwanHistory, Academia Sinica, for providing all services.