Unite for Climate
By Kim Heung-sook
What happened to my lilacs? Fresh green leaves are appearing on the seemingly dead brown branches, while the dry remnants of the bygone summer crumble at the slightest touch, Hey, this is no spring, I murmur as I look into the tiny faces and a sudden chill whirls inside. Is this a sign of our losses to come? The demise of winter and all the fun and memories about wintering?
The Climate Change Information Center (CCIC) at the Korea Meteorological Administration issued a warning about warming Korea a month ago, but I didn't heed much. Perhaps, the national and global climate change aggravated the current state because the majority of people have been like me. We read, yet we don't feel the immensity and gravity of the problem.
The CCIC projected that most parts of the nation may be categorized as subtropical and temperatures in Seoul and other major cities will remain above zero all-year-round by the end of this century. The CCIC said that Korean winters are one month shorter than in the 1920s and summers are longer by 20 days. My lilacs may be just one vindication of the CCIC findings.
The Korea Research Institute for Human Settlement reported recently that pine trees would become the subject of reminiscing and apple trees would be hard to grow in the year 2050 in this part of the globe. During the past 100 years, temperatures on the Korean Peninsula have gone up 1.5 degrees Celsius, which doubles the global average of 0.74 degrees.
What a shame to lose pines and apples. How much of a void life would be without winter. You can't have the freezing wind cool off your head burning from computations and considerations. You can't walk on the virgin snow. You can't make the childlike promise to meet your lover on the first snow… Children can't slide down the slope of the neighborhood hills to the envy of the elderly, who are humbled by every step they take on the snowy road.
Then I realized that the situation could have become different if all of us had done something like the citizens of Gwangju, the metropolitan city neighboring South Jeolla Province. I have always respected Gwangju people: They most outstandingly struggled against the Japanese colonial rule in the late 1920s and against the persecution of democracy by Korean military generals in 1980. I have come to adore them more for what they have done about Mudeung-san over the past two decades.
Since 1989, they have been campaigning to preserve the 1,187-meter-high mountain. which they call Gwangju's mother. They launched the Mudeung-san National Trust to keep it from being exploited in the name of development or beautification. The mountain, covering 30.23 square kilometers, and shared by Gwangju (90 percent) and South Jeolla Province (10 percent), is not easy to protect as 79 percent of its ownership belongs to the private sector.
More than 56,000 citizens have joined the ``one lot for one person" campaign and purchased or secured through donations 533,000 square meters of the mountain and its vicinity. On the Trust's Web site www.mudeungsan.org, the proud donors are featured. Preservation of Mudeung-san (無等山) is drawing support and efforts of citizens of all classes or walks of life corresponding to the mountain's name ``Mudeung," which literally means ``no class or rank." I believe the mountain will survive these times of civil engineering after all.
For other parts of Korea, the prospects are bleak. The incumbent government is changing the entire territory from mountains to rivers, talking about green all the time but going against it in actuality, as shown in the formation of the Gwanghwamun Plaza in the heart of Seoul. We can see such paradoxes in other nations, too.
Our latest ancestors and my generation achieved material prosperity at the expense of our posterity's environment, and the younger people are burdened by the task of slowing or reversing the tide. It is, therefore, quite appropriate that a new initiative, ``Unite for Climate," was launched in Korea in August with younger people from 110 countries discussing the challenges of climate change, and demanding world leaders sign a proactive agreement at the U.N. climate change conference in Copenhagen in December. I sincerely hope the young voices will be heard. I hope winter will be around where it used to be.