Hiking Around Wonju

My new co-worker and I got to hike around some mountains near the AK department store plaza. Although almost everybit of the valleys are taken up by residencies, stores or restaurants, in the mountains we can find relief from the noise below.

On a previous hike I had seen the clearings cut by Koreans to make use of the hills for growing vegetables. With the costs of vegetables so high in Korea, it is financially liberating for people to grow their own vegetables. Farming is stigmatized as dirty in Korea and that attitude keeps the younger generation off the land while the older people get the benefit of their own vegetables.

On this hike, I saw the clear cuttings for the ski resorts in the areas. Nature was replaced for tourism and recreation. It's become apparent to me that though human agriculture is is the cause for destructiveness of western civilization now even our recreations are destructive.

Korea as a country doesn't have enough land to support its current population and the major of the food is imported into the country, but that danger has been ignored because of technological optimism, the belief is that development of technology will make up for the unsustainable practices of western civilization. I say western civilization because primitive people and traditional agriculture societies starved when they overtook from the land, while as western civilization with industrialization developed technologies depended on fossil fuel to overcome taxed soil. When the price of gas goes up however, so does the price of fertilizer and even though the world is more aggressively digging for oil, to the pollution of our dwindling water supplies, there will be a point when people will have to go organic in their practices.

Yet, as I look out over the prime farmlands and grazing lands, now occupied by residencies, schools, stores, amusements and restaurants, it will be hard. The ideas of what farming is will have to change for the future by learning the ancestral wisdom of the past and move into the future.

I like living in Korea for all the lessons of regarding ancestral wisdom. Their is a lot of wisdom to access. The differences of the older generation and the young generation are rapidly different.  Because the 70 and 80 year old people are still gathering wild vegetables and farming, they have a subset of skills crucial in a post-oil age. The younger generation may not understand but coming from America and seeing the limitis of industrial civilization, I can appreciate this.