Goh Sui Noi, Straits Times 29 Jul 09;
KOREANS like to think that they are natural environmentalists. They put forth the following argument to prove their point:
Chinese gardens are full of miniature mountains, forests and rivers, revealing the Chinese desire to conquer nature. The Japanese have walled-in, meticulously tended gardens, showing their tendency to domesticate nature and bring it into their abodes. The Koreans build houses with low roofs and low perimeter walls the better to view the landscape without, showing their wish to enjoy nature as it is.
All the same, South Korea's leading green activist Choi Yul, 60, came to be an environmentalist via a circuitous route. He started out in the 1970s as a student activist agitating for democratic reforms. He was jailed in 1975 - the year he graduated with a degree in agrochemistry - by the Park Chung Hee government.
Disallowed political reading material, he requested that civic groups send him books on the environment from overseas. After six years in prison reading 250 books on global environmental issues, he emerged as an environmental activist.
'I realised that South Korea's rapid industrialisation process would soon lead the country towards an ecological disaster,' he told the Unesco Courier, a publication of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation.
South Korea had embarked on an industrialisation programme in the 1960s, and by the 1980s was plagued by pollution problems. It is telling that the first environmental body Mr Choi set up - in 1982 - was the Korea Anti-Pollution Organisation, the country's first environmental non-governmental organisation.
The 1970s and 1980s were decades when people did not express themselves in South Korea, he told The Straits Times, not even when they were threatened by pollution or when development encroached on the land of farmers.
'I was under watch. When invited to give a lecture at a university, I was prevented from leaving my home (to give the talk),' he recounted.
He was also not allowed to travel overseas to attend international environmental conferences. The only broadcasting station that would invite him to give talks on the environment was the Christian Broadcasting System.
The oppression stopped only in 1987, when the pro-democracy movement forced reforms and South Korea had direct presidential elections. Still, in 1985, Mr Choi managed to draw attention to the pollution problem in Onsan town with a population of 10,000 where metals factories were contaminating the water with heavy metals such as copper, zinc and cadmium. Eventually, the government moved 8,800 households out of the area.
Mr Choi went on to found the Korean Federation of Environmental Movement, an umbrella body for environmental groups, in 1993.
He has since started another organisation, the Korea Green Foundation, to train professionals in the environmental movement and to raise awareness of climate change through education. The foundation also fosters regional cooperation and is planting trees in China and digging wells in Mongolia and Cambodia. Mr Choi's causes have changed through the years, from anti-pollution to food safety to anti-nuclear waste dumping to restoration of ecosystems and now to climate change.
Other environmental groups have sprung up in South Korea, such as the Citizen Movement for Environmental Justice which focuses on promoting children's environmental rights and stemming environmental degradation from large-scale construction projects initiated by the government. The Green Korea United, another umbrella organisation for smaller green groups, has worked with other groups to influence legislation.
Environmental groups also campaign tirelessly to encourage people to observe the 3Rs: reduce, reuse and recycle.
The work of the NGOs has borne fruit in the form of legislation to make it mandatory for retail outlets to charge for plastic bags. Koreans also have to pay for garbage disposal by volume, which encourages them to separate and recycle waste. More importantly, the NGOs have helped to raise awareness of the need to protect the environment and to have sustained development.
So there are individuals like Mr Ahn Young Hwan, 53, who restores old Korean houses both for their cultural value and their eco-friendly features such as utilising mainly natural building materials, minimal furniture and natural ventilation. The former computer engineer turns these hanok, as they are known in Korean, into guesthouses and restaurants.
When there was a major oil spill in 2007 in Taean on the west coast of the country, more than one million Korean volunteers helped in the clean-up.
The NGOs, though, have not stopped the government from developing nuclear power, and there are now 20 such plants in South Korea. Nuclear power is seen by some as an interim energy source bridging fossil fuels and renewable energy. But environmental groups are opposed to nuclear power because it generates dangerous nuclear waste, even though it does not emit greenhouse gases.
The groups have also failed to stop the Saemangeum project, the biggest land reclamation project in the world that started in 1991. It involved building a 33km sea dyke across an estuarine tidal flat to reclaim 44,000 hectares of land for farming to ensure the country's food security.
Environmentalists oppose the project because it will destroy an important habitat for migratory birds. As many as 400,000 shorebirds, including some endangered species, are dependent on it as a feeding ground.
The irony is that food production is no longer a major issue, for the country's grain output has outstripped demand. Land use of the reclaimed area has been changed to include an industrial area, recreational parks and a renewable energy zone. The dyke was completed in 2006 and land reclamation has started.
Had the environmentalists been able to convince the policymakers, would the wetlands of Saemangeum have been saved?
Said South Korea's Prime Minister Han Seung Soo: 'The environmentalists go too far ahead of us and we are sandwiched between the industrialists and the environmentalists.'
But Nanyang Technological University lecturer Chang Young Ho, who studies the economics of global warming and climate change, believes there is a possibility of bridging the gap if only environmentalists would think out of the box.
'Environmentalists emphasise the pricelessness of nature but can't convince the economists,' he noted. What they need, he said, is to understand the language of the economists and to use this language in order to persuade decision- makers and the public alike.
Perhaps environmentalists of South Korea and elsewhere need to rethink how they can convince the 'developmentalists' that environment protection and development can go together.
