關於 why i chose english as my major ，我們在網路上蒐集到這些相關的討論、資訊與評價

💕「愛台灣，我的選擇」系列第14發：環境科學家馬耐德發現台灣的生物多樣性與供應鏈的關鍵角色

「我來自美國加州聖地亞哥，畢業於美國創價大學，主修環境科學，當時主要從事淡水魚和基礎漁業的研究。隨後我到加州蒙特瑞國際研究學院攻讀碩士，研究海洋及沿海資源管理。當時其中一位教授就是來自台灣，她告訴我：『你應該去台灣看一看。』很多旅居海外的台灣人都會這樣鼓勵外國人拜訪台灣。

而我後來也的確到台灣進行了一個海峽兩岸的研究，作為唯一一位環境科學學人，我必須要想一個能在台北和上海演講的主題，垃圾就是一個最明顯的題材。因為當你來到台灣，你會發現台灣街道上都沒有垃圾，這點讓我感到非常新奇，為什麼會沒有垃圾呢？當時我也發現並沒有什麼關於台灣廢棄物管理轉型的英文資訊，所以我就決定住在台灣，研究這個讓我很著迷的題目。那是2013年的事，後來我獲得傅爾布萊特獎助金在墾丁海生館擔任訪問學者一年，至此之後我就待了下來。大約六個月前，我開始在銳思碳管理顧問公司上班，我們負責協助大型品牌和他們的供應鏈設定並達成碳供應鏈目標。這是我們剛在台灣成立的新辦公室，公司的總部在香港，但我們想要把重心移到台灣，因為台灣是關鍵的供應鏈環節。我們認為台灣將在永續報告和減碳目標上持續成長，而且台灣真的是個好地方。

台灣有很多我很喜歡的優點，我覺得最棒但很少被注意到的一點是台灣的生物多樣性。台灣是亞熱帶島嶼，擁有非常豐富多樣的原生種和特有種，美麗的蝴蝶、螢火蟲、珊瑚、鯨鯊、鮪魚、熊……物種多到我三天三夜都講不完。而且就算不開車，也很容易親近大自然。我也喜歡騎單車，台灣的單車道做的非常好，還有優質的單車品牌和產品。我在台灣大多時候過的很不錯，沒什麼好抱怨的，食物也好吃。而且台灣人基本上對科學有充分的信任和熱忱，許多民選官員都曾經是醫生、科學家、工程師等等，連總統都曾發表過博士論文。台灣的前副總統大概是地球上最有資格帶領對抗新冠疫情的領袖。感覺上，台灣有很多科學家，當個理工宅男好像也很OK。」

✨馬耐德(Nate Maynard)連續兩年(2014及2015 年)榮獲美國傅爾布萊特獎助學金，現為「鬼島之音Waste Not Why Not」節目製作及主持人，及銳思碳管理顧問股份有限公司高級顧問。

💕Why I chose Taiwan #14 – Environmental sciences scholar Nate Maynard discover Taiwan’s and its key role in supply chains

"I’m from San Diego California originally. My undergrad was from Soka University of America; liberal arts with a concentration in environmental studies, and I work on fresh-water fishes mostly and basic fisheries. And then my Master’s program was at the Monterey Institute of International Studies with a concentration in ocean and coastal resource management. One of my professors was Taiwanese, and she said: ‘you gotta go to Taiwan,’ as most Taiwanese people living abroad will tell foreigners.

And I did go visit Taiwan for a cross-Strait research trip, and as the only environment person, I had to come up with something I could talk about in Taipei and Shanghai, and garbage was the most obvious thing. Because when you come to Taiwan, there’s no garbage, and I became fascinated: Why is there no garbage? I realized there really wasn’t much information in English about Taiwan’s waste management transformation, and that’s sort of how I got hooked and decided I wanted to live in Taiwan. That was 2013. And then I got the Fulbright Fellowship and spent a year at the National Aquarium in Kenting....and they haven’t been able to get me to leave. About six months ago, I started working for a private consulting firm called Reset Carbon. We help major brands and their supply chains set and achieve carbon supply chain targets. This is a new office that we just set up in Taiwan. The company’s headquarter is in Hong Kong, but we wanted to pivot to Taiwan because Taiwan’s the key supply chain link. We expect to see Taiwan growing in terms of sustainability reporting, carbon reduction goals, and Taiwan’s just a nice place.

There’s a couple things that I really enjoy about Taiwan. I think the best thing that doesn’t get enough coverage is biodiversity. Taiwan is a sub-tropical island. It’s full of native and endemic species, beautiful butterflies, fireflies, coral, whale sharks, tuna, bears...I can list the animals for hours. It’s easy for me to go and get access to nature, even without a car. I also enjoy biking and Taiwan has excellent biking infrastructure, and great bike companies that make fine products. Most aspects of my life in Taiwan are pretty good. I can’t complain. Food is great too. I think there’s also a general trust and enthusiasm for science in Taiwan. I mean there’s a lot of elected officials that are doctors, scientists, engineers, and the president has published papers as a PhD. And you know, the vice president was probably the most qualified person on Earth to lead the COVID response. In Taiwan, it feels like the scientists are pretty well-represented, and like being a nerd is kinda okay." -- Nate Maynard

✨Nate Maynard won Fulbright Fellowship two times in a row (2014-15, 2015-16), now serving as a program host and producer of “Waste Not Why Not” with Ghost Island Media and a senior consultant at Reset Carbon.

Nobody’s Fool　　( January 2011 )

Yoshitomo Nara

Do people look to my childhood for sources of my imagery? Back then, the snow-covered fields of the north were about as far away as you could get from the rapid economic growth happening elsewhere. Both my parents worked and my brothers were much older, so the only one home to greet me when I got back from elementary school was a stray cat we’d taken in. Even so, this was the center of my world. In my lonely room, I would twist the radio dial to the American military base station and out blasted rock and roll music. One of history’s first man-made satellites revolved around me up in the night sky. There I was, in touch with the stars and radio waves.

It doesn’t take much imagination to envision how a lonely childhood in such surroundings might give rise to the sensibility in my work. In fact, I also used to believe in this connection. I would close my eyes and conjure childhood scenes, letting my imagination amplify them like the music coming from my speakers.

But now, past the age of fifty and more cool-headed, I’ve begun to wonder how big a role childhood plays in making us who we are as adults. Looking through reproductions of the countless works I’ve made between my late twenties and now, I get the feeling that childhood experiences were merely a catalyst. My art derives less from the self-centered instincts of childhood than from the day-to-day sensory experiences of an adult who has left this realm behind. And, ultimately, taking the big steps pales in importance to the daily need to keep on walking.

While I was in high school, before I had anything to do with art, I worked part-time in a rock café. There I became friends with a graduate student of mathematics who one day started telling me, in layman’s terms, about his major in topology. His explanation made the subject seem less like a branch of mathematics than some fascinating organic philosophy. My understanding is that topology offers you a way to discover the underlying sameness of countless, seemingly disparate, forms. Conversely, it explains why many people, when confronted with apparently identical things, will accept a fake as the genuine article. I later went on to study art, live in Germany, and travel around the world, and the broader perspective I’ve gained has shown me that topology has long been a subtext of my thinking. The more we add complexity, the more we obscure what is truly valuable. Perhaps the reason I began, in the mid-90s, trying to make paintings as simple as possible stems from that introduction to topology gained in my youth.

As a kid listening to U.S. armed-forces radio, I had no idea what the lyrics meant, but I loved the melody and rhythm of the music. In junior high school, my friends and I were already discussing rock and roll like credible music critics, and by the time I started high school, I was hanging out in rock coffee shops and going to live shows. We may have been a small group of social outcasts, but the older kids, who smoked cigarettes and drank, talked to us all night long about movies they’d seen or books they’d read. If the nighttime student quarter had been the school, I’m sure I would have been a straight-A student.

In the 80s, I left my hometown to attend art school, where I was anything but an honors student. There, a model student was one who brought a researcher’s focus to the work at hand. Your bookshelves were stacked with catalogues and reference materials. When you weren’t working away in your studio, you were meeting with like-minded classmates to discuss art past and present, including your own. You were hoping to set new trends in motion. Wholly lacking any grand ambition, I fell well short of this model, with most of my paintings done to satisfy class assignments. I was, however, filling every one of my notebooks, sketchbooks, and scraps of wrapping paper with crazy, graffiti-like drawings.

Looking back on my younger days—Where did where all that sparkling energy go? I used the money from part-time jobs to buy record albums instead of art supplies and catalogues. I went to movies and concerts, hung out with my girlfriend, did funky drawings on paper, and made midnight raids on friends whose boarding-room lights still happened to be on. I spent the passions of my student days outside the school studio. This is not to say I wasn’t envious of the kids who earned the teachers’ praise or who debuted their talents in early exhibitions. Maybe envy is the wrong word. I guess I had the feeling that we were living in separate worlds. Like puffs of cigarette smoke or the rock songs from my speaker, my adolescent energies all vanished in the sky.

Being outside the city and surrounded by rice fields, my art school had no art scene to speak of—I imagined the art world existing in some unknown dimension, like that of TV or the movies. At the time, art could only be discussed in a Western context, and, therefore, seemed unreal. But just as every country kid dreams of life in the big city, this shaky art-school student had visions of the dazzling, far-off realm of contemporary art. Along with this yearning was an equally strong belief that I didn’t deserve admittance to such a world. A typical provincial underachiever!

I did, however, love to draw every day and the scrawled sketches, never shown to anybody, started piling up. Like journal entries reflecting the events of each day, they sometimes intersected memories from the past. My little everyday world became a trigger for the imagination, and I learned to develop and capture the imagery that arose. I was, however, still a long way off from being able to translate those countless images from paper to canvas.

Visions come to us through daydreams and fantasies. Our emotional reaction towards these images makes them real. Listening to my record collection gave me a similar experience. Before the Internet, the precious little information that did exist was to be found in the two or three music magazines available. Most of my records were imported—no liner notes or lyric sheets in Japanese. No matter how much I liked the music, living in a non-English speaking world sadly meant limited access to the meaning of the lyrics. The music came from a land of societal, religious, and subcultural sensibilities apart from my own, where people moved their bodies to it in a different rhythm. But that didn’t stop me from loving it. I never got tired of poring over every inch of the record jackets on my 12-inch vinyl LPs. I took the sounds and verses into my body. Amidst today’s superabundance of information, choosing music is about how best to single out the right album. For me, it was about making the most use of scant information to sharpen my sensibilities, imagination, and conviction. It might be one verse, melody, guitar riff, rhythmic drum beat or bass line, or record jacket that would inspire me and conjure up fresh imagery. Then, with pencil in hand, I would draw these images on paper, one after the other. Beyond good or bad, the pictures had a will of their own, inhabiting the torn pages with freedom and friendliness.

By the time I graduated from university, my painting began to approach the independence of my drawing. As a means for me to represent a world that was mine and mine alone, the paintings may not have been as nimble as the drawings, but I did them without any preliminary sketching. Prizing feelings that arose as I worked, I just kept painting and over-painting until I gained a certain freedom and the sense, though vague at the time, that I had established a singular way of putting images onto canvas. Yet, I hadn’t reached the point where I could declare that I would paint for the rest of my life.

After receiving my undergraduate degree, I entered the graduate school of my university and got a part-time job teaching at an art yobiko—a prep school for students seeking entrance to an art college. As an instructor, training students how to look at and compose things artistically, meant that I also had to learn how to verbalize my thoughts and feelings. This significant growth experience not only allowed me to take stock of my life at the time, but also provided a refreshing opportunity to connect with teenage hearts and minds.

And idealism! Talking to groups of art students, I naturally found myself describing the ideals of an artist. A painful experience for me—I still had no sense of myself as an artist. The more the students showed their affection for me, the more I felt like a failed artist masquerading as a sensei (teacher). After completing my graduate studies, I kept working as a yobiko instructor. And in telling students about the path to becoming an artist, I began to realize that I was still a student myself, with many things yet to learn. I felt that I needed to become a true art student. I decided to study in Germany. The day I left the city where I had long lived, many of my students appeared on the platform to see me off.

Life as a student in Germany was a happy time. I originally intended to go to London, but for economic reasons chose a tuition-free, and, fortunately, academism-free German school. Personal approaches coexisted with conceptual ones, and students tried out a wide range of modes of expression. Technically speaking, we were all students, but each of us brought a creator’s spirit to the fore. The strong wills and opinions of the local students, though, were well in place before they became artists thanks to the German system of early education. As a reticent foreign student from a far-off land, I must have seemed like a mute child. I decided that I would try to make myself understood not through words, but through having people look at my pictures. When winter came and leaden clouds filled the skies, I found myself slipping back to the winters of my childhood. Forgoing attempts to speak in an unknown language, I redoubled my efforts to express myself through visions of my private world. Thinking rather than talking, then illustrating this thought process in drawings and, finally, realizing it in a painting. Instead of defeating you in an argument, I wanted to invite you inside me. Here I was, in a most unexpected place, rediscovering a value that I thought I had lost—I felt that I had finally gained the ability to learn and think, that I had become a student in the truest sense of the word.

But I still wasn’t your typical honors student. My paintings clearly didn’t look like contemporary art, and nobody would say my images fit in the context of European painting. They did, however, catch the gaze of dealers who, with their antennae out for young artists, saw my paintings as new objects that belonged less to the singular world of art and more to the realm of everyday life. Several were impressed by the freshness of my art, and before I knew it, I was invited to hold exhibitions in established galleries—a big step into a wider world.

The six years that I spent in Germany after completing my studies and before returning to Japan were golden days, both for me and my work. Every day and every night, I worked tirelessly to fix onto canvas all the visions that welled up in my head. My living space/studio was in a dreary, concrete former factory building on the outskirts of Cologne. It was the center of my world. Late at night, my surroundings were enveloped in darkness, but my studio was brightly lit. The songs of folk poets flowed out of my speakers. In that place, standing in front of the canvas sometimes felt like traveling on a solitary voyage in outer space—a lonely little spacecraft floating in the darkness of the void. My spaceship could go anywhere in this fantasy while I was painting, even to the edge of the universe.

Suddenly one day, I was flung outside—my spaceship was to be scrapped. My little vehicle turned back into an old concrete building, one that was slated for destruction because it was falling apart. Having lost the spaceship that had accompanied me on my lonely travels, and lacking the energy to look for a new studio, I immediately decided that I might as well go back to my homeland. It was painful and sad to leave the country where I had lived for twelve years and the handful of people I could call friends. But I had lost my ship. The only place I thought to land was my mother country, where long ago those teenagers had waved me goodbye and, in retrospect, whose letters to me while I was in Germany were a valuable source of fuel.

After my long space flight, I returned to Japan with the strange sense of having made a full orbit around the planet. The new studio was a little warehouse on the outskirts of Tokyo, in an area dotted with rice fields and small factories. When the wind blew, swirls of dust slipped in through the cracks, and water leaked down the walls in heavy rains. In my dilapidated warehouse, only one sheet of corrugated metal separated me from the summer heat and winter cold. Despite the funky environment, I was somehow able to keep in midnight contact with the cosmos—the beings I had drawn and painted in Germany began to mature. The emotional quality of the earlier work gave way to a new sense of composure. I worked at refining the former impulsiveness of the drawings and the monochromatic, almost reverent, backgrounds of the paintings. In my pursuit of fresh imagery, I switched from idle experimentation to a more workmanlike approach towards capturing what I saw beyond the canvas.

Children and animals—what simple motifs! Appearing on neat canvases or in ephemeral drawings, these figures are easy on the viewers’ eyes. Occasionally, they shake off my intentions and leap to the feet of their audience, never to return. Because my motifs are accessible, they are often only understood on a superficial level. Sometimes art that results from a long process of development receives only shallow general acceptance, and those who should be interpreting it fail to do so, either through a lack of knowledge or insufficient powers of expression. Take, for example, the music of a specific era. People who lived during this era will naturally appreciate the music that was then popular. Few of these listeners, however, will know, let alone value, the music produced by minor labels, by introspective musicians working under the radar, because it’s music that’s made in answer to an individual’s desire, not the desires of the times. In this way, people who say that “Nara loves rock,” or “Nara loves punk” should see my album collection. Of four thousand records there are probably fewer than fifty punk albums. I do have a lot of 60s and 70s rock and roll, but most of my music is from little labels that never saw commercial success—traditional roots music by black musicians and white musicians, and contemplative folk. The spirit of any era gives birth to trends and fashions as well as their opposite: countless introspective individual worlds. A simultaneous embrace of both has cultivated my sensibility and way of thinking. My artwork is merely the tip of the iceberg that is my self. But if you analyzed the DNA from this tip, you would probably discover a new way of looking at my art. My viewers become a true audience when they take what I’ve made and make it their own. That’s the moment the works gain their freedom, even from their maker.

After contemplative folk singers taught me about deep empathy, the punk rockers schooled me in explosive expression.

I was born on this star, and I’m still breathing. Since childhood, I’ve been a jumble of things learned and experienced and memories that can’t be forgotten. Their involuntary locomotion is my inspiration. I don’t express in words the contents of my work. I’ll only tell you my history. The countless stories living inside my work would become mere fabrications the moment I put them into words. Instead, I use my pencil to turn them into pictures. Standing before the dark abyss, here’s hoping my spaceship launches safely tonight….