Since I am spending some time in this lovely country I looked into connecting to myenvironmental activism roots a few days ago and checked out what’s going on with tree huggers in theChaebol kingdom.

It came as a small surprise that green opposition politics don’t really exist here or are at least gravely underdeveloped for a country with recent annual GDP growth around 5%, dramatically growing energy needs and ever increasing urbanisation – a country that is member of the friendly G20 and that features beautiful nature all around.

There was an attempt to establish aKorean Greens party starting in 2003, which failed in 2008. Right now the party is re-establishing itself, after being terminated yet again following a meagre 0.43% result in general elections earlier this year. It looks like the general public in South Korea has no interest in a green party. Now, why is that?

It appears that the current government lulls the population with plans likeGreen Growth (which Green Korea hassolid criticism on) and tries to silence foreign critics of their nuclear energy strategy by simplynot allowing theminto the country. Details on the recentGreenpeace activist deportation also mention a30% budget increase to more than $10 million USD after the Fukushima disaster for KONEPA, the South Korean agency for promoting nuclear energy with faces ofplaying children. This money will most likelynot go into spreading information about incidents like the recentshut-down of two reactors in the south of the country on 2 Oct 2012.

The Energy Korea portal aggregates an interesting mix of general environmental news, including critical Greenpeace reports and at the same time greenwashes fossil fuels andnuclear energy, both of which -oops- the maintainer of the site, Daesung Group is heavily invested in.

However, there are people working on change for the better, for example prize-winningYul Choi, a white-collar activist involved invariousSouthKoreanenvironmentalprojects since many years. Aforementioned Greenpeace Korea twittersdaily, organic farming definitively exists and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Virtual Center for Korean Environmental Exchange (catchy name!) helps to flog off green technology. Friends of the Earth Korea also seem to be doing a lot of things including information centres and anorganic online shop, but unfortunately don’t have an English website at the moment.

Also you can contribute by either getting involved with existing groups, or for starters by signing theNuclear-free Samcheok petition. 🙂

When writing this I relied mostly on websites written in English. If you have pointers to websites in Korean or other languages, please send them to me and I will include links here!