Nineteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

Meinung Yellow Butterfly Festival (MYBF) is a community-based ecological festival launched in 1995 at Meinung, a southern rural town of Taiwan known for Hakka cultural traditions. A by-product of the anti-dam campaign that began in 1992, the annual festival originated from concerns of ecological degradation and has continuously focused on environmental protection, ecological education, and sustainable development. In recent years, it has taken upon the identity of an environmental art festival that is locally based with a global vision and has adopted the format of a biennial starting in 2015 with serial preparatory activities starting several months before its core programs, which usually take place in July and August. Overtime, MYBF has fostered a vibrant local community culture centering on environmentally-friendly agricultural practice, alternative lifestyle experiment, and public art production, among others, in Meinung town and its various rural villages. This study looks into the history of MYBF and discusses its major stages of evolutions. Specifically, it analyzes MYBF’s effort in the interrelated domains of environmental activism, ecological literacy, community building, public art production, and sustainable lifestyle experiment. Combining field research, online observation, and literature review, the article illuminates how this long-living ecological festival foregrounds local traditions and aspirations while addressing environmental and social issues of increasing global relevance. It intends to argue that the Meinung experience revealed in the making and continuing of MYBF has much to share with the world when it comes to producing a sustainable, holistic, and beneficial relationship between human living, nature, and art.