Water from the Baekdu Daegan flows down the Pia Valley in Mount Jiri.

By Shawn James Morrissey
Contributing Writer

All the fresh water on our planet comes from the same source. High on mountains, clouds release as rain their burden of moisture evaporated from the sea.

This rain collects in pools and streams and begins the long journey from the highlands, racing down the slopes to form waterways and waterfalls, eventually slowing and widening into great rivers and lakes before returning to the sea.

It is a process of immense power, a movement of Nature upon which we depend like no other. All life on land depends on fresh water, and yet presently in South Korea this elemental process is at a crossroads.

President Lee Myung-bak's ineptly titled grand canal not only guarantees ecological change to the landscape by disturbing the vital water cycle, it challenges an ancient principle upon which life and prosperity on the peninsula were founded.

The Baekdu Daegan is the primary mountain system of the peninsula, running from Mount Baekdu in the far north to Mount Jiri in the south.

This 670-km-long mountain system is the source of all of Korea's fresh water. Traveling the main ridge, you would not cross any waterways, but instead would pass along the cradle from where all Korean fresh water is formed.

In centuries past, the Baekdu Daegan was revered as the people knew that all of their water flowed from its upper flanks. To them these mountains were sacred. When water came, the crops came, and with both came nourishment and life.

In a philosophical sense, the Baekdu Daegan was the energy center of Korea, the source of its life force, its ki, as underlined by the principles of Pungsu-jiri, Korean geomancy.

What these Koreans of ages past were actually worshipping was the natural water cycle. To view it ecologically, the Baekdu Daegan fed the rivers and lakes that provided sustenance and therefore maintained a healthy biodiversity.

Though they may not have understood the ecological relationship between them and the Baekdu Daegan, the people did realize the Baekdu Daegan's power of giving life and taking it away, and so deemed it worthy of worship.

To them, it was a physical god, though they did personify the peaks with metaphysical san-shin, mountain spirits. Still today many revere the mountains in animistic folk traditions via the only indigenous religious dogma of Korea.

And these processes, philosophical as well as ecological, go on. However, for the opposition, Lee's canal is a looming threat.

If it gets the green light, the 540-km-long canal, which is aiming to connect the Han and Nakdong rivers, will sever a southern portion of the Baekdu Daegan, effectively cutting off the flow of life energy, and destroying one of the last remaining elements of pure Korean culture.

The portion of the canal that will cut through the Baekdu Daegan will be an underground tunnel 26-km-long and a 17- km-long concrete channel.

Ecologically, the Baekdu Daegan is the last large region of wilderness left in South Korea. It houses many species of fauna and flora that are otherwise now absent from the landscape.

By cutting through the mountains, a vast threshold of habitat will be lost. In the rivers, the developing process alone will require vast reclamation that will alter the integrity of riparian and riverbed habitat.

Amazingly, the canal aims to accommodate multi-ton vessels. It is Lee's idea that a canal will relieve stress from roadways by providing a domestic cargo route on water. However, these ships release pollution via ballast water and exhaust.

Such pollution may compromise the properties and potability (drinkability) of fresh water needed to sustain natural systems of which we are a part. It would be of better interest to expand Korea's rail system, a cleaner, cheaper, and faster method of mass transport.

Needless to say, the proposal has been met with great controversy. The opposing side is spearheaded by the Korea Federation for Environmental Movements (KFEM), a group that has been hugely involoved in the Taean oil clean-up.

In conjuction with several other environmental groups including the Korean Mountaineering Foundation (KML), an NGO dedicated to the ecological preservation of South Korea's highlands, the KFEM has set up an international online petition, and has begun peaceful protests, the next large one of which will take place Sunday, March 30 at Seoul Station at 3 p.m., with a simultaneous peace march and candlelight vigil in Busan.

It is the hope of the opposition that Lee will come to realize that we are controlled by nature, not nature by us, and abandon his plans. We are in a constant state of borrowing, and so the waterways, mountains, and culture that we know are, in fact, not ours. They belong to our children, and we do not have the right to jeopardize their future by tampering with the sustaining and dynamic processes of nature.

For further information please see the following websites
www.kmleague.org ; www.foei.org/en.get-involved/take-action/great-korea-canal-project/ and www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=7935272621

highland-peace@hotmail.com

The writer is a Canadian naturalist and nature writer and is the founder of the environmental NGO, the Korean Mountaineering League. He has been living in South Korea for seven years.