What Green Growth Really Means
By Rick Ruffin
``Green growth'' is an oxymoron. The conventional definition of ``growth'' means job creation for an ever-growing human population.
Job creation comes in many forms, but traditionally at the expense of the environment: land cleared for real estate development; land cleared for roads and highways; land cleared for agriculture, etc.
Therefore, outside the parameters of the farming world, ``growth'' and ``green'' are mutually antagonistic concepts. They exclude one another.
But let's assume for the sake of this essay that there is such a thing as ``green growth," a system for job creation and human development that has little adverse effect on the environment.
What would ``green growth'' really be, then? Well, in its simplest and purest form it would be millions of people all over the world planting trees and picking up garbage and breaking concrete. That would be ``green growth'' in its purest sense.
But the one day that South Koreans did plant trees, Arbor Day, a former national holiday, no longer exists. Why? One person told me that there were simply too many public holidays in South Korea and some had to be eliminated. Arbor Day was given the axe.
Another person said that on Arbor Days of the past, many trees were planted, but also that many forest fires were started, so the practice was abandoned, as it caused more problems than it hoped to solve.
But the green growth that the present government of South Korea is actively promoting is really little more than a ploy to pour more cement.
Here in Gangneung, the city government has painted all the buses green, and adopted a new slogan: Gangneung, Solhyang Dosi, which translates into English as ``Gangneung, City of Sweet Pine Smell.''
But one can't smell pine trees anywhere in Gangneung for car exhaust fumes. And most of the pine trees one can see are on the backs of trucks, being moved from point A to point B because of massive construction projects.
Around these construction projects the city erects huge barriers, and on these barriers they paint pictures of green forests, and write empty slogans such as ``working toward a sustainable future.''
But inside these walls huge machines tear the earth to bits, making way for the hundreds of hectares of concrete sure to come. With this sort of ``development'' the future of South Korea is anything but green.
The reality is that there is nothing green about Gangneung, other than the buses. And in another 10 years Gangneung will resemble Bundang, a nightmare suburban enclave of concrete strip malls and tall buildings.
In fact, Gangneung isn't thinking very much about saving resources, the real objective of ``green growth.'' They recently built a public swimming pool, but none of the shower facilities were designed to save water.
There are no low-flow shower heads, and there are no automatic turn-off switches for the showers, both of which are drastically needed, because the individual is incapable of doing the right thing in nine cases out of 10.
President Lee Myung-bak is using ``green growth'' as a platform from which to launch his highly-touted but environmentally dubious ``river refurbishment'' project, in which four rivers will be ``upgraded,'' but nobody really knows what that means.
The plans are for creating green belts, surrounding four main rivers in South Korea with trees and bicycle paths. But the question we must all ask ourselves is ``how much concrete are they planning to pour?''
As stated previously, ``green growth'' is an oxymoron and a hollow slogan that governments around the world will use to create more jobs, many of which will prove to be ultimately harmful to the environment.
Here in South Korea, green growth has even less meaning than in Europe or the United States, a completely hollow slogan that the trend crazy masses are only too eager to embrace.
Rick Ruffin has been witnessing the concrete urbanization of Gangneung for the last two years, and that of South Korea for the last 13 years, under the name of ``progress.'' The writer, a graduate of University of Texas, Austin, now writes from Gangneung, Gangwon Province. He can be reached at rick_ruffin@yahoo.com.