The ‘Locations’ of Households within the Culture-Nature Hierarchy of Hualien County, Taiwan

Emergy science provides methods to evaluate any process in which inputs are transformed into some new output. Transformation processes are ubiquitous in nature and in the economies of people. To date, economic and natural processes of many kinds have been evaluated, but the production of humans and their cultural information has only begun to be explored. This paper investigates in detail the emergy inputs that lead to the production of people. From these results, it ‘locates’ people, households and other processes into a county-wide energy transformation hierarchy. The emergy inputs to people include essential household inputs (electricity, water, etc), and in addition inputs from nature, workplace, hospital, etc. Finally, inputs to people include informational inputs, from media, education, ritual, and regular discourse. These informational inputs have also been evaluated for the first time, as part of this county-wide study, and they have been found to provide large emergy inputs to people. It has been established that human production is a hierarchy, and it was expected that a range of households would be found. To address this issue, this study utilized a census sample of 350 households in Hualien County, Taiwan from which emergy analyses were conducted for each household. Results of the analysis present the most thorough picture of household and human production in emergy terms yet achieved. It is found that workplace emergy and informational inputs from media, education, even regular discourse, are highly significant contributions to all households. It is also affirmed that households assemble into a hierarchy, in which a series of scales exist with decreasing numbers and increasing emergy inputs per household.