Reporter Column: Extremely Dangerous & Incredibly Dull
Reporter Column: Extremely Dangerous & Incredibly Dull
  • Reporter Kim San
  • 승인 2022.09.14 20:06
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Reporter Kim San
Reporter Kim San

A year ago, I wrote a column addressing my despair towards humanity’s collective climate action – or the lack thereof. The column was a reflection of my “feeling like I must do something” but “completely clueless as to what to do”. That cluelessness is perhaps mutual for all of us involved because, for a fact, no single person alone can solve this crisis. Therefore, we feel powerless as individuals and decide not to take any action at all, because blaming the collective inaction is easier than putting all the burden on yourself. However, last time, I convinced myself that individual-level actions matter to a great extent because, to eat an elephant, you do so one bite at a time. But I am unsure of what specific actions I can take in my current situation.
Let us talk about diet. Going vegetarian, much less vegan, in Pohang is impossible – impossible without sacrificing my health, that is. So, by impossible, I mean not viable. I know that because I tried it myself and gave up a week later feeling hungry all the time, having deteriorating performances at the gym, and lacking overall motivation. When I am on campus, I rely on school cafeteria food for all of my nutritional intake. While it offers a healthy and balanced diet, virtually all of its sources of protein come from meat or seafood. So, to become vegetarian on campus means to strictly limit my protein intake to the factory-made hard-boiled eggs from GS25 which, to be honest, cannot be healthy. 
I recently had a close friend of mine visit Korea because she was doing an exchange semester in Seoul. She said to me that she was giving up on being vegetarian altogether during her stay here. So, I obviously asked why she decided to consume meat after so long – five years, in fact. She said, “you guys have all the amazing meat and seafood dishes, and I cannot miss out”. That day, I saw her eat pork for the first time in so many years, and I felt a little conflicted. Her response to my question was perhaps the pleasant version of the answer; the other, less-pleasant version would have been something like “being vegetarian/vegan in Korea is expensive, difficult, and uncommon”.
Realistically speaking, the only aspect of my student life that I can both control and have a meaningful impact on the environment is my diet. I do not drive; I do not fly often; and I do not have an extravagant lifestyle. So, my carbon footprint is virtually negligible – well, except for the fact that I am alive and that I eat meat. Yet, I am left with no choice but to consume animal products for the lack of dietary options.
I had some time lying around this summer, and that got me thinking about my long-term career/life plans – by that, I mean serious, making-solid-decisions type of thinking. And the crazy thing is that, in hindsight, never in my 20 years of life did I have to ask myself what I wanted to do. True, I had to ask myself that question growing up, but only in the broadest sense – like do I take geography or economics, or do I major in computer science or mathematics? What I realized is that these long-term plans are the defining, single-most-important blueprints of my life because, like how even the slight difference in angle determines whether the rocket lands on a moon or on mars, the slightest change in my twentysomething lifestyle will lead to a whole life’s difference down the line. But what is beyond crazy, shocking even, and immensely depressing, is that none of this matters if humanity can no longer sustain its life on Earth. For the first time in my life I felt a genuine hope and excitement for what my future had to offer, but to have those hopes torn apart and burnt down to ashes by a very real and existential threat is, conservatively speaking, devastating.