In the early sixties, people abroad were already pumping water into the ground to keep the land from sinking and to store more groundwater. On the Pingtung Plain, a group of people is also trying to learn more about their land because of their love for their hometowns and for future generations. They are trying to turn the Pingtung Plain into a water bank for southern Taiwan.

About five million years ago, the Eurasian Plate crushed against the Pacific Plate, thus creating the island of Taiwan. Thanks to high mountains that accumulate moisture for the island, Taiwan was immune from the danger of desertification under the scorching sun of the Tropic of Cancer. The high mountains stop water vapor from the ocean as the seasonal winds change directions, and the vapor falls as rain. The rain nourishes millions of lives on the island as it gathers into rivers and flows into the sea. Life on the island may experience the climate of the frigid zone, the temperate zone or the tropical zone, depending on where it springs up, and it lives with water in all its forms.

In the summer, the southwest wind blows to southern Taiwan and brings in heavy rain. After that, the northeast wind blows and it rains in Taiwan's northeastern area. At the same time, the high mountains block the northeast wind from going further, so southwestern Taiwan goes into the dry season for half a year. Fortunately, this dry part of Taiwan also has the most abundant groundwater. The summer rain gathers in the rivers, which flow through the stony, alluvial plain. The water is absorbed into the ground as if by a sponge. This groundwater is a lifesaver during the dry season.

Sinking land

The Pingtung Plain is the largest alluvial plain in southern Taiwan. There the groundwater is so abundant that it is basically used throughout the whole year, not just as a lifesaver during the dry season. It is used for drinking and also for agriculture and aquacultural industries. Once every family had a well and no one needed tap water. The water was so abundant that you could simply punch a hold in the ground with a stick and the water would flow out. You could even feel the water flowing beneath you. If you were thirsty, you could simply stamp on the ground a few times and clean groundwater would gush out.

No one ever expected that their groundwater would be used up one day, and no one thought that water was a blessing from heaven. But in 1981, areas like Linpien and Chiatung in Pingtung County had incidents of land sinking. The sea went further inland and salinized the groundwater. People later discovered the cause: the aquacultural industry had overextracted the groundwater.

"I felt sad and guilty," said Tsao Chi-hung, a former provincial assemblyman who is now a member of the Blue Tungkang River Environmental Council. He comes from Chiatung, and in his youth he engaged in his family's aquaculture business. When one ground-sinking incident happened, he went to the beach that he used to play on when he was a child and discovered that three hundred kilometers of sandy seafront had sunk into the sea. Nature spent so many eons to create a piece of land, but it disappeared in just twenty years. The resulting damage was more costly than the aquaculture could afford to pay, so Tsao persuaded his father to close the business. After that, he threw himself into the mission of water conservation to atone for his sins.

More than ten years have passed since the incident, but the government has not done anything about the situation, even though it still says that it wants to prevent further sinkage. Fishermen who depend on aquaculture for their livelihood have to continue shouldering the blame for causing the land to sink.

"In reality, the land sinkage in Chiatung was caused by improper use of groundwater in the whole Pingtung area," said Chou Ke-jen, secretary of the Pingtung County government. When he was a student, he was already very active in environmental issues. Inspired by Tsao Chi-hung, Chou also worked to protect water resources in the Pingtung Plain, and he joined the same Blue Tungkang River Environmental Council as well. He remarked that at the beginning, his group believed that by reducing the total area of aquaculture and helping these people find other jobs, or by charging high user fees for the groundwater, the problem of land sinkage could be solved forever.

They interviewed university professors and scholars, environmental experts, relevant government officials, well diggers, and old people who were good at irrigation to learn more about hydrology and the history of local rivers. They discovered that people who destroyed forests upstream, farmed land by rivers, built houses on riverbanks, or illegally exploited sand and rocks from riverbeds for construction gravel all collaborated in causing land to sink.

A natural reservoir

Tens of thousands of years ago, while the earth was moving to create mountains, a north-south fault line was transformed into a valley between the Central Mountain Range and the Pingtung Plain, which was once a mountain. Rivers like the Kaoping, Ailiao and Linpien carried rocks and sediment downstream and created alluvial deltas, which were then joined together and transformed the valley into a plain.

When the rivers went through the gravel and coarse sand surfaces of these deltas, the water would be absorbed and become groundwater. But at the ends of the alluvial deltas, where fine sand was deposited, the rivers could not go down any further, and they instead came back up to the surface. Thus when heavy rains fell, the rivers sometimes flowed underground and sometimes on the surface. A plain that was filled with networks of rivers thus became the flooded area as people saw it.

Several hundred years ago, the Ailiao River went past a place called Shuimen, branched out into many smaller streams, and flowed southwest to a river we now know as the Tungkang River. The Ailiao tended to flood in the summer. Therefore, during the Japanese occupation of 1895-1945, the Japanese built dikes about three kilometers upstream from the Shuimen Bridge and bound all the branch rivers into one. The Japanese also diverted the Ailiao River to flow northwest to the Laonung River. The Ailiao has now become one of the most important tributaries for the Kaoping River.

People gradually forgot that the Ailiao River was once the source of the Tungkang River. Even though the Ailiao was diverted to the Laonung River and renamed the Ailiao River, it still flows, in a permeable fashion, back to the Tungkang River. It thus joins together the Tungkang River, the Linpien River and other seemingly independent river systems, both above and under the ground. Together they ecame a tight-knit water network and an underground reservoir.

Fighting for land against the rivers

Even while the land near the shoreline was sinking, the Taiwan Sugar Corporation built dykes and reclaimed over six thousand hectares [14,820 acres] of riverbed from the Linpien River. This meant that the river, which originally flowed on a riverbed 1,500 meters wide, was suddenly squeezed into a riverbed only 300 meters wide. Thus the river ran deeper and faster to the sea. This also meant that instead of taking three to ten days to get to the sea, the water now took only three hours, and so there was little chance to supplement the groundwater.

What made matters worse was that during the dry season the river still had to provide four million tons of water every day for sugar cane on the newly reclaimed land. This amount was far higher than the 2.8 million tons of water used by the aquacultural sector. Fang Yin-chi was horrified to see the savage attitude of companies illegally plundering sand and gravel from the riverbed. Fang never realized that farmland along the Laonung River could be dug up like ravines ten to twenty meters [33-66 feet] wide. In the past ten years, the riverbed of the Linpien River dropped twenty-eight meters [92 feet], which meant that groundwater was not being replenished.

With no more water going underground, and with the overuse of groundwater along the shoreline areas, the land finally began sinking. Our forefathers dug ponds for farming and for storing river water. These ponds were also channels for supplementing groundwater. But when less and less water flowed through the rivers, no more water could enter the ponds, which thus lost their ability to irrigate farmland and were sealed with cement. This shut down another chance for groundwater to be replenished.

Nevertheless, people became more and more dependent on groundwater. Since they couldn't irrigate their farms with the ponds, they had to start digging wells to retrieve groundwater. And they had to dig deeper and deeper. The deeper they dug, the more they realized how valuable the groundwater was to the land. Their feelings of indignation exploded in the campaign against the construction of the Machia Dam and Ailiao Weir.

Stop plundering the water

On May 17, 1994, the Legislative Branch of the government completely slashed the budget for building the Meinung Dam. On the same day, Pingtung County Magistrate Wu Tse-yuan proposed the Machia Dam.

This dam would be built before the meeting point of the South Ailiao and North Ailiao rivers. When the dam was completed, water would flood two aboriginal villages. At the start, only the residents of these two villages opposed the plan. When the government planned a second phase of the Machia Dam to retrieve water from the Ailiao River, an unexpected and much stronger opposition appeared.

"Opposing the Machia Dam is not just about the life of one aboriginal group--it concerns the existence of people in the Pingtung Plain," said Chou Ke-jen, who accompanied the farmers and aborigines opposing the plan.

After the Old Ailiao River had been diverted (and renamed "Ailiao River"), plenty of water still flowed to the Tungkang River. In 1958, the government decided to improve the use of the Ailiao River and increase area for farming. Local irrigation associations paid for some of the costs, and farmers shouldered the rest in installments. An irrigation system was thus built by using the Ailiao River and five thousand hectares [12,350 acres] of farmland dependant on the river. The upstream section of the river brought life to the aboriginal groups, while the river and its underground water network helped to nourish countless other lives. One could say the Ailiao was the river of life for the Pingtung Plain.

That second phase of the Machia Dam construction was to send water from the Ailiao River to Kaohsiung and Tainan. The farmers who had to use groundwater during the dry season certainly didn't like this. The Ailiao riverbed allowed water on the surface to go underground and become groundwater. Thus, while the shoreline was sinking and groundwater levels were dropping all around the Tungkang and Ailiao river systems, building a dam and retrieving water from the Ailiao would simply stop more water from becoming groundwater and also kill life on the plain.

With those concerns in mind, it is no wonder that those farmers informed each other of their concerns and formed an association to protect the Ailiao River. In May 1996, they demonstrated in the streets to voice their opposition. Lin Te-hui, general secretary of the association, said that people didn't mind sharing extra water with other districts, but they adamantly opposed any idea of robbing the water right from the source of the river. It was equivalent to killing a hen to get its eggs.

Combining the strength of the farmers to protect the water and the determination of the aborigines to protect their homes, the Blue Tungkang River Environmental Council and many other people travelled to every river throughout the Pingtung Plain to search for answers from history and nature.

They finally found a way to supplement groundwater to prevent more land sinking, and they proposed this as an alternative to the Machia Dam. If the Taiwan Sugar Corporation could return the land it grabbed from the river, the riverbed could return to its original shape and size, Tawu Mountain could be green forever in a shroud of clouds, man-made groundwater supplement areas in the upper stream could be created, and there would still be a chance for the Pingtung Plain to alleviate its groundwater problem.

Land vitality from groundwater

This proposal from the general public and their understanding of the land was finally accepted by the government after persistent dialogues, lobbying and persuasion.

According to National Pingtung University of Science and Technology Professor Ting Che-shih's estimation, the additional supply of groundwater in the Pingtung Plain in 1994 amounted to 1.08 billion cubic meters [37.8 billion cubic feet], two and a half times the amount of water that the Meinung Dam could supply in a year. A location east of the plain also increased its groundwater supply by 390 million cubic meters.

In 1964, the city of San Jose, California, used artificial lakes and natural rivers as channels to supplement groundwater, which successfully prevented more ground sinkage caused by the excessive extraction of groundwater. In a similar case, the sea near Anaheim, California, went inland 3.5 miles due to coastal sinkage. In 1957, local authorities used the abundant water from the Santa Ana River to supplement groundwater and thus allowed the land to recover. In 1976, the annual increase in groundwater reached 370 million tons in this area. There were also similar cases in Europe. For instance, in the Netherlands more groundwater was being extracted than was being put back in, so they replenished groundwater by running river water into deep wells. With these successful cases of recovery abroad, people in southern Taiwan have become confident that their problems will be solved as well.　

Our fates are intertwined

"The water for all southern Taiwan has to come from the Pingtung Plain," said Tsao Chi-hung. Tsao has been protecting water for decades and is quite well aware of the responsibility that heaven has given to the Pingtung Plain. However, such understanding has to come from everyone in southern Taiwan, or else the water from the plain will eventually be used up, no matter how abundant it is.

The city of Kaohsiung has a serious water shortage problem. Besides the water for public use, the city also needs a lot of water for the industrial sector. Most of the water the city consumes comes from the Kaoping and Tungkang rivers, so the people of Kaohsiung have to ask themselves what they can do to help. They must also think of how they can help clean up the Kaoping River.

Chou Ke-jen pointed out that the public must give up traditional notions like taking clean water from the source and building dams, because those ways simply kill any chance of sustainable water usage. People from southern counties like Pingtung, Kaohsiung, and Tainan must build a consensus that the Pingtung Plain is the most important water reservoir for themselves and for all southern Taiwan. They share the same fate. With this understanding, they will be able to deal with the water shortage and thrive together.

Chen Kuan-hsueh, a local writer, wrote in his article, "Fall in the Farmland," that rain comes before October in southern Taiwan, but it is only enough to dampen the topsoil and protect the groundwater. After the land absorbs this rain, it goes into hibernation for the rest of the year. If we saw other people laboring all year long without a rest, we would certainly feel sorry for them. The land works even harder than human beings, so how dare we demand that it work without any rest? We can tell that the land is indeed resting by the fact that the trees stop growing, as seen in the tightness of tree rings. Fruit trees store enough sugar to produce flowers and fruit next year. The best examples are chinaberry trees: the leaves all fall and the trees look dead, but when spring comes they bloom with flowers and seeds.

Chen's article describes vividly the farmland in his native Pingtung. Chen knows quite well the limits the land can bear. Behind those limits is heaven's affectionate blessing, which appears as abundant groundwater gushing through the dry land of the Pingtung Plain. If people can cherish this water that is so hard to come by, they will be like chinaberry trees, growing beautiful flowers and abundant fruit.