The 2024 East Coast Land Arts Festival is celebrating its tenth year. In an era that a great variety of art festivals are blooming throughout the world, the sustainability of a local event relies on whether or not all the participants are able to find the power of healing, transformation and rebirth through the praising of land, environment, and humanity. Over the past ten years, the East Coast Land Arts Festival continued exploring the meanings of lives in the east coast where mountains and ocean meet. After overcoming the fifth waves again and again, we look back and the profile of the island unexpectedly stands out.

In the context of global geological studies, Taiwan Island is relatively young, and its environment is still in the new phase of the life cycle. It means the environmental changes are still drastic as the formation of the island is still active. If we compress the 4.6 billion years of the Earth into one hour, Taiwan was a baby born in the last five seconds, and is growing up in full speed. Such fast changes can be experienced by imagining the phenomenal impacts caused by the crashing plates under the ocean. It also can be referred to the abundant traces of the Earth’s formation in the rocks that geologists always discover along the east coast.

In his research of ferns, botanist Prof. Kuo Chen-Meng proved that Taiwan, covered with thick forests, is a blessed island of healing. Ferns are the oldest species, and Prof. Kuo found 34 families of them in Taiwan out of the 39 families throughout the world. The evolution history of ferns can be inspected on this island. “Taiwan is young and old, the geology is young, and species are old. It is because when the island was forming two or three million years ago by the pushing of tectonic plates, the Earth was in Ice Age, and many species moved southward. At that time the ocean water level was lower, many species migrated to Taiwan through shallow gullies in the ocean. Taiwan could be a real Noah’s Ark which saved each species. Taiwan’s steep terrains, elevation of 3,952M above sea level within a very small territory provide very diversified habitats for various lives.”

In addition to ferns, Taiwan also has the most diversified mosses in terms of its area. And Paper Mulberries, the material of Tapa(tree bark fabric) only pollinate in Taiwan, compared to those in South Pacific regions that are reproduced asexually(parthenogenesis) from the root sprouts. From the perspective of biogeography and genetics, the origin of a species is more likely to be the area with more diversified genes. The theory that the Paper Mulberries around South Pacific areas came from Taiwan supports the hypothesis that Austronesian peoples in Pan-Pacific regions originated from Taiwan.