Claw Me and I’ll Claw Thee!
The title of this article makes the case that help is a two-way street. It means the same thing as “One hand washes the other” and “Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” A simple paraphrase for the intended signification here would be something like “Treat me nice and I’ll treat you nice.” The principle of cooperation and collaboration conveyed here underpins the mission statement of many a corporate entity. “Doing well by doing good,” which sort of puts the same idea in a roundabout fashion, happens to be what Gwangju and the Gwangju International Center (GIC) already live by and up to. It may very well sum up the corporate social responsibility jointly assumed by these two closely related sister entities.
The GIC’s intercultural volunteering for the Gwangju-Chonnam region and beyond apparently exemplifies the lofty ideal of doing well by doing good. The Center’s intercultural volunteerism plays a huge role in making the region a shining example of a beautiful salad bowl of a community embracing residents from diverse cultures, many of whom are expat transplants from outside the country. Indeed, the Gwangju-Chonnam region is well on its way to becoming a utopia of multicultural pluralism. This surely is a big-time payoff for the Center’s home base of the Gwangju-Chonnam community.
It is interesting that this ideal also manifests itself in labor-management relations. Doing well by labor is also doing well by management. The modus operandi of the kind embodied here is at work to a far greater degree than is commonly realized by the general public. It is established beyond the shadow of a doubt that an equitable treatment of workers is a necessary condition for the normal functioning of any viable corporation or community. The powers that be, including policy makers, thus must always be quite clear-eyed about the pivotal role the working class plays in the creation of a community’s socio-economic wellbeing.
We are forever in debt to farmers, fishermen, delivery truck drivers, factory workers, construction crews, handymen, housewives, you name it. Toiling and moiling day and night, farm workers grow the lion’s share of what we consume for daily sustenance. The fact is that our very existence as earthlings would be at risk if not for their sweat, tears, and blood. That is basically why their work matters so very much to all of us.
Fishermen also serve to help feed billions of mouths around the world. They have been hauling in bountiful catches for countless generations since time immemorial. They bring in all sorts of seafood, lending a hand to help solve the global problem of hunger and poverty. According to Oceana, a foundation dedicated to ocean conservation, restoring the oceans to the traditional normal could feed one billion people a healthy seafood meal each day. That would amount to a substantive contribution to the alleviation of global hunger and poverty. And simultaneously to nutritional enrichment for everyone everywhere, to boot.
Thus, ocean-based food resources would count for almost as much as land-based food resources. Keeping both troves of resources from ever drying up is thus an urgent imperative of the day. We must do everything in our power to keep them both at the current level of availability at the very least. Admittedly, getting that done is a whale of a challenge calling on us all to do whatever we can.
This is where environmental protection comes in. If land and sea are to stay stable as the go-to sustainers of humanity plus all other living beings on earth, very good care must be taken of our environment both on shore and off. To that end, all our surroundings must be kept safe from overexploitation, deprivation, and contamination at any cost. Here, however, we are confronted with the uncomfortable truth that a thoroughly wholesome environment has become something of a luxury that comes with an enormous price tag.
In this connection, let me make the point that our whole future hangs on whether we are ready, able, and willing to foster and maintain a genuinely pristine environment. It goes without saying that such an environment must be completely free of any trace of contamination. For that to materialize, we must never ever shy away from giving any quarter to polluters, be they industrial farmers, livestock raisers, or slash-and-burn croppers. Whatever is powered by fossil fuels should also be similarly frowned upon. Airliners, ocean liners, automobiles, and coal-fired power plants are among the major villains that come to mind here. High rises follow close behind, nipping at the heels of these extreme fossil-fuel guzzlers.
When it comes to industrial farming and livestock raising as polluters, agricultural runoff naturally comes up as the dominant issue. It collects whatever pollutants it comes across on its way to nearby streams before reaching the sea, contaminating everything in its path and simultaneously getting itself contaminated thereby. Oftentimes, underground aquifers also suffer, tainting a whole bunch of precious water to the point of it becoming not quite fit for human consumption.
At this point, let us spare a moment and talk about the way parts of the environment are often linked inseparably each to the other. Insecticides sprayed on farms, fields, or forests often kill off plants there, flowering ones included, which eventually results in a total collapse of all bee colonies therein and not too far therefrom. The painful result of the whole thing here is very well summed up by the proverbial phrase: “No bees, no honey.” In fact, not just no honey but also no pollen, which happen to be two of the cleanest nutrient-loaded organic sweeteners ever known to humankind.
You can see that the culprit pollutants here contaminate not just soil but also water everywhere. The sad thing is that such wholesale environmental contamination can do irreparable damage to two of our most precious food resources, which respectively are land- and ocean-based. Furthermore, it can so utterly disrupt the environmental status quo as to expose us all to horrible consequences like an earth too hot and/or too cold for any living being to inhabit. This is what makes environmental conservation such an all-consuming issue for the entirety of humanity. Doing well by nature is, indeed, the ultimate form of doing well by all living beings, not just humans.
Every one of us must pitch in to the best of our ability or we shall all perish together. We cannot just stand by, can we? The alternative is to let a terrible apocalypse overtake us and upend all human civilization as we have known it. At the end of the day, ecologism apparently is thus just a super-sublime manifestation of egoism and altruism put together. To join in the do-or-die campaign for the environment is hence the noblest way to care about all living occupants of our home planet, including us humans.
Let me close this article by issuing a call to action to the GIC and the whole of the Gwangju-Chonnam region and beyond to once again renew our commitment to the environmental cause. If we at least let nature alone, nature will let us alone and leave us bask in peace and prosperity. Only a healthy natural environment can ensure a safe path for humankind to survive and thrive. And only when fully alive and kicking will nature be able to embrace and accommodate us all in her nest. Once diseased, nature will no longer be able to afford to shelter and nurture us the way she normally would.
The Author
Park Nahm-sheik has a BA in English from Chonnam National University, an MA in linguistics from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, U.S.A., and a PhD in applied linguistics from Georgetown University. He is now a Professor Emeritus after a long and illustrious career at Seoul National University as well as President Emeritus of the International Graduate School of English.