American Forestry, Aerial Surveying, and the Remaking of Taiwan's Forests During the Cold War
Speaker: Kuang-Chi Hung, National Taiwan University
Moderator: Victor Seow, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University
About the talk: In 1952, following the outbreak of the Korean War, the United States incorporated Taiwan into its Cold War strategy and launched a series of U.S. Aid programs to stabilize the island’s economy and governance. Among them, forestry became an important site of technical intervention. This presentation examines how U.S. Aid reshaped Taiwan’s forestry policy and redefined the very meaning of “forest.”
The key moment came with the U.S.-led forest survey between 1954 and 1956, which used aerial photogrammetry to assess forest area, distribution, species composition, growth, and mortality. This scientific project overturned earlier understandings of Taiwan’s forests. What had once been viewed as the island’s richest and most vital natural resource was newly diagnosed as a sector in crisis, an exhausted asset in need of complete restructuring.
In its wake, forestry policy shifted from protection and conservation toward large-scale logging and reforestation, framed as a program to “rebuild” the island’s forests. The talk explores how this American-sponsored survey transformed the episteme of forestry knowledge and the ontology of the forest itself, while also displacing local and indigenous practices of living with the mountains. By tracing this moment of epistemic change, the study sheds light on how U.S. Aid reconfigured the science, politics, and environment of postwar Taiwan.
About our speaker: Kuang-chi Hung received his Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard University after earlier training in forestry. He is now an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at National Taiwan University. His fields of expertise include the history of forestry, environmental history, and historical geography. In addition to academic writing, he is currently interested in integrating scholarly research with curatorial practice and museum exhibition.
Presented via Zoom. Registration here.