public health*an anthropological view=?

So my question is: do we know who is shaping certain area of our planet earth? if not, is our innocence making any sense, if we admit we humans are responsible for the events, phenomena, or observations that can be understood as Anthropocene?

If yes, what do we know....? if we knew, what should we do?

Wildlife has been a very interesting construct since the first human introduced one of them as house pet to be with or for food to be nourished from. But, if we project ourselves honestly enough to our history, the distance between wildlife and non-wilderness emerged possibly only as illusions because only certain animals are seen to be common and normal in modern urban Homo sapiens' daily life --- as food, normal animals mean those which provide pork, beef, chicken, lamb and some water-born animal protein, where usually the process of raising, butchering and delivering is outsourced and possibly industrialized, so most Homo sapiens are solely consumers. That consumption of varieties of meat therefore also imply the relationship between humans and meat source having been so normal to society through the very action of consumerism.

The current condition of pandemic COVID-19 has been commented in a documentary by Netflix as such:

The truth is that it is human behavior all over the world has made pandemic like this one became inevitable. Deforestation has been bringing more wild animals in contact with more people. The factory farming is pushing animals closer together, giving viruses more opportunities that combine into one that could infect us, then we give them more ways to spread. (23:50-24:04, Coronavirus explained, Episode 1, narrator)

According to the documentary, the frontline where new disease happened, is "in the end of a road in a tropical forest, ... or farms in Southeast Asia that has been expanding and intensifying, ... " This illustrates the picture of how masses of landscape being transformed for mining, cultivation, and meat production that generate more products to feed consumerist lifestyle. In other word, we are interact with wildlife already everyday through transparent links that are hard to see or to feel along the threads of money flow, logistics, and trade. That is also to say, when we purchase a packet of chocolate bar that contains palm oil, we are already interacting with the life forms of those other Homo sapiens and the wilderness near the palm tree farm.

These threads are very hard to discern, track, and categorize. These threads are linking bright places with shadow places, a concept by Val Plumwood to emphasize on why the idea of singular home or dwelling place should not be idealized or normalized because our ecological footprint, ethically, will not allow us to. If we can follow these ecological threads and what we buy contains with its origins and how it became, the linkage between who we are and what we have consumed and innocently allowed will become less shadowy and more concrete. The unknown will become the known. The next question is, how much can we afford to have and to hold this knowledge, to have it known and keep the same life and production mode? Wildlife, from the commodity lifestyle point of view, has never been wild - they are always part of our ever grown civilization and imagined, approached, visioned as the Otherworld that needs care, maintained, or conquered.

There are 37 bat species in Taiwan

Taiwan has a landscape rich in human-forest histories. These histories are not just decades old, but hundreds and maybe more than a thousand years old. Austronesian past of Taiwan is ancient and there is still a lot not well known. What we know at present is that that bond and relationship with forested land has been enormously transformed and maybe misunderstood, or forgotten collectively, due to increasing lack of language knowledge in research efforts and relevant resources. There are of course many important linguists who did make Taiwan special in terms of Austronesian languages as a discipline, but locally and publicly, very less people have heard of it, not to mention, to acknowledge it.

Forest areas are home to roughly 10 Austronesian language-spoken communities. These communities, especially their seniors, are familiar with the ecologies and systems of where they live with, which include immense knowledge of botany, zoology, geography, and medicine - in their own terms and contextual world views. For local government and the public, these societies are also the users/hunters of wildlife, who are, compared to the urbanites, backward, low-status and less-educated, having little sense of wildlife conservation. Wildlife conservation is by majority believed pure protection. Human intervention or using forest animal has been long time considered, thank to the Wildlife Conservation Act legislated in 1989, hazardous to wildlife conservation. But the hunting scene is far more complex where development of indigenous right and justice are still in its pre-mature phase. Also, for the customs of indigenous areas, concept of wildlife is not as logical as it seems to the urbanites. The relationships to the forest critters were never the same between the urbanites and the non-urbanites.

So let's take a break and come back to the question - what is wildlife. To whom? this is what I should continue to write about in the next post.