Pollution In Seoul

I flew over the southern outskirts of Seoul on a domestic flight some time ago. Looking down at the great city of ours, I noticed that the entire metropolitan area was enveloped in gray soupy smog. The smog was so thick that it was almost impossible to spot any landmarks or familiar buildings. It was unbelievable that until a few minutes before, I had been down there, breathing that foul air and yet survived.

What was more discouraging, though, was the thought that I would have to return to the city in a couple of days and live there, along with 20 million other residents, as though this really were a nice clean place on earth to spend the rest of my life. Actually, though, it is almost a miracle, I felt, that people can live in an environment like that without constantly struggling and panting for air, like fish out of water.

Then, I remembered a brief news item a few weeks before that lung cancer had replaced stomach cancer as the No. 1 killer in South Korea. Despite the report, no one—including city and health authorities or civic groups—seemed to have taken the finding seriously and try to do something about the worsening air pollution in the city.

It is true that we can get used to anything except death. Unless we get a chance to go up in an airplane and look down on the city, as I did, or ask newly arriving foreign visitors, most of us are unable to tell how awful the air we breathe is or how serious the problem of air pollution in Seoul and other major cities around the country is.

In our usual selfish and nonchalant way, each of us seems to think that even the quality of the air is none of their concern as long as they are not directly affected by it, i.e., suffering from asthma or other respiratory ailments.
And yet, we are unconcerned about our health. On the contrary, I can safely say that there are few people who are more health-conscious than Koreans.
Such animals as deer and otter are being hunted down to near extinction by poachers and sold to those who seem to believe that eating any and every wild animal is good for health and virility. Some people don’t even hesitate to eat earthworms or maggots while savvy businessmen are importing ostriches or other esoteric animals from other regions and breeding them for eventual human consumption.

It is heard to understand, therefore, how such health-conscious people can be so unconcerned about the dirty air we all breathe and, for that matter, the polluted water we drink and contaminated food we eat. They seem to think and act as though environmental pollution does not affect them, or at least that they are problems for other people to resolve.

In an effort to help reduce the amount of carbon monoxide in the air, produced by ever-increasing number of automobiles, government authorities urge people, among other things, to leave their cars home as much as possible and use public transportation to commute to work instead. But appeals like this fall on deaf ears as most of us obviously feel that such a campaign is directed at other people but “not me.”

Some people point out that air pollution in other parts of the world, especially Beijing and other major cities in China, is much worse than it is in Seoul. But we shouldn’t take comfort in the miseries and predicament of our neighbors.

It is true that air quality in Seoul has improved considerably over the past decade, thanks to the stricter enforcement of regulations on automobile exhaust fumes and the use of low-sulfur petroleum by industrial plants and private car owners. Seoul, however, still has a long way to go before the residents there can boast the air quality over their city to the rest of the world.
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