The World's Worst Air Takes Its Toll On Those Who Live in Seoul, Korea
During a flight to the East Coast a few months ago, I sat next to a pretty young girl – perhaps in her early 20s. During our conversation, I noticed she had a somewhat raspy voice, and I remember suggesting to myself that perhaps she was a cigarette smoker. When I asked her about herself, she told me that she was an American who had moved to Seoul to teach English to Korean kids, and she was home for a short vacation. I inquired about her experiences overall, and she gushed with excitement of how rewarding the whole thing was, how she loved the opportunity to travel to exotic places and meet different types of people. Then she paused and admitted something she didn’t like at all. “Do you notice my voice?” she asked sadly. I nodded. “It wasn’t like that 18 months ago when I arrived.”
When I came across this report on South Korean’s commitment to renewable energy, I thought immediately of that pretty young lady, the health of her vocal chords, and the plight of the 26 million people who live in the world’s second-largest city. I wish them a direct and speedy migration path from the coal-fired power plants that make their air the very worst in the world.
Beijing and Tokyo see much of the same issue as Seoul – much as LA and NY once did, and to a lesser degree still do.
As a species, we now burn filthy fossils at an annual rate equaling about 11.7 billion tons of oil (and nearly all of it is burned with rather poor efficiency). That figure’s not even counting the many factors like the carbon sink forests we foolishly slash and burn to raise cows.
Our lifestyle processes are spewing carbon and lethally toxic compounds into our living space in quantities unprecedented in the evolutionary history of our species. We can’t expect (though some few people still do) to continue that reckless behavior and not see a whole range of lethal and damaging outcomes.
We’re either Homo Sapiens Sapiens (wise, wise man), or a mildly sophisticated but essentially self-terminating infection within the utterly finite global petri dish. Nature’s jury is about done deliberating, and the universal sentence will not be commuted.
Character witnesses anyone?