The way our society should go

By Shin Chul-ho

One of my old friends is a high-school teacher. He is always heavily left-leaning in every respect of social affairs and finds fault with whatever the current administration has been doing.

During last winter vacation, he claimed that the joint investigation report on the ROK frigate Cheonan is not persuasive scientifically. I wonder whether he is capable of scientifically analyzing the report. I surmised that he simply echoed the words of pro-North Korean leftist forces rather than offering his own scientific analyses.

In May, I met him again. He condemned the four-river restoration project, saying, ``Where on Earth is a country that develops its land at the sacrifice of the environment?" He decried the project. He mentioned that he had visited a four-river project construction site, and witnessed environmental destruction on an unprecedented scale. His remarks sound like that of a martyr who loved Mother Nature dearly.

He does not know that his comment is full of contradiction. I feel like rebutting his criticism by asking him, ``Where on Earth is a country that develops its land without the sacrifice of the environment?" Land development entails the destruction of the environment. What matters is minimizing it.

The residential suburb of the Seoul metropolitan area where he has an apartment was a dense forest 40 years ago. According to his thinking, the forest should not have been demolished to build the apartment buildings. Without the buildings there being constructed, its residents might have spread across far broader areas and destroyed nature on a larger scale to make their roosting places.

As a similar example, some people protest against the construction of nuclear power plants, claiming that it brings about disaster to humanity as a result of radioactive contamination. When all the atomic power plants in this nation are shut down, have the protesters not thought about the environmental destruction that will result?

Production disruptions will entail economic loss. Air will get drastically polluted due to increased use of massive amounts of fossil fuels. Deforestation for heating will also bring this country back to the bare mountains of the 1950s and 1960s.

I will let him budge one billion miles and suppose that the place of four-river restoration project he visited was severely destroyed. What he saw was a tiny fraction of all the construction sites. If he judges that every construction site enormously gets damaged merely by his microscopic yardstick, he commits a fallacy of generalization.

I repeat that development is always followed by environmental destruction. However, if development protects the environment far more widely, minimizing its negative effects to dramatically enhance the quality of life, it is natural that such development should be done.

Many progressive forces are trying to use every possible means to interfere with the river-restoration project. Last year they argued that arable land for vegetable production decreased because of the project. Reports showed that the area for vegetable gardens is insignificant. They also raised their voices that the project would bring catastrophe during the summer rainy season. The opposite has taken place, at least so far. The dredging advanced so far lowered the four rivers' water levels so much that there was little flooding in their nearby areas, even though we experienced half of the average annual precipitation during such a short period.

We should make elaborate and firm progress like the four-river restoration project, with the right direction, so that irresponsible left-wing groups should not hobble society.

The writer teaches at an elementary school. He can be reached at heemy123@hanmail.net.