When I visited Yongyeon Elementary School in Ulsan in the Republic of Korea (South Korea) in 1995, I found a mountain of bags in a corner of the playground stacked as high as the nearby three-story school building.
Although the bags were covered with a black net, if the heap collapsed it would have covered the entire playground where children were running about.
I was told the bags contained industrial waste from the nearby Ulsan industrial complex. Not only were children playing just feet away from an avalanche of waste, they were breathing it in. Depending on the wind, smoke from the nearby incinerators would hit the school grounds. The stench was so strong it felt like my mouth was filled with chemicals.
That was seven years ago, when South Korea was in the grips of high economic growth. According to a local nongovernmental organization (NGO), nothing has been done since then to remove the heap.
Since the Ulsan industrial complex was built in 1962 as the first of its kind in South Korea, it has kept expanding. Now many metal, petrochemical and high-tech factories stand close to each other. Although it is an important production center that supports South Korea's remarkable economic growth, it has also become a source of massive environmental destruction.
Before, the area around the elementary school depended on underground water for drinking purposes. But as pollution advanced, the water became undrinkable. Because of the expansion of the industrial complex, residents in the neighborhood were being evicted. Rubble of torn-down homes could be found here and there.
Around the same time, a serious pollution-related illness called ''Onsan disease,'' characterized by such conditions as pain in the joints, skin trouble and digestive-system disorders, emerged.
In countries across Asia, many serious pollution problems have occurred on a massive scale in the last 10 years. Some are the repetition of Japan's four major pollution-related diseases--itai-itai disease in Toyama Prefecture caused by cadmium poisoning, Minamata mercury poisoning in Kumamoto and Niigata prefectures and Yokkaichi asthma in Mie Prefecture caused by air pollution. Other cases are even more serious.
Asia is the region most severely hit by the wave of economic globalization that has been raging since the mid-1990s. The advancement of multinational capital based in industrialized countries gave rise to major development and economic growth.
At the same time, the situation caused serious environmental pollution. The scope and complexity of widespread pollution are unprecedented.
According to professor Akio Hata of Osaka City University, environmental destruction affecting an area several times larger than that of the Ashio mining pollution that occurred when Japan was a rising economy, is developing in the Indonesian province of Papua.
In developing the Grasberg copper mine, the U.S. copper mining company Freeport McMoran cleared the jungle. Mining refuse accumulated in the rivers, causing the government to close down a local national park.
Compared with industrialized nations, developing countries are said to enjoy the ''benefits of latecomers.'' They have the advantage of using the experiences and technologies of industrialized countries, and thus can achieve economic growth more rapidly and efficiently.
It is true that since the late 1980s, many Asian nations have achieved nearly double-digit economic growth on a year-on-year basis. The phenomenon has even been likened to the Asian miracle. It shows they have indeed enjoyed the benefits of latecomers. But Asian economies became unstable with the 1997 financial crisis.
The benefits of latecomers include that of using environmental conservation technology developed by industrialized countries that suffered pollution, allowing latecomers to avoid the same mistakes.
Caught in the waves of global economic competition, Asian countries had no choice but to give first consideration to development, leaving no room for them to put to use the lessons of industrialized countries that underwent environmental pollution.
The 1990s left a double negative legacy in Asia in terms of both the environment and the economy. In other words, the 1990s were a ''lost decade'' for the Asian environment as well as economy.
If there was hope in the lost decade, it was the move to build an international framework to tackle environmental issues. Since the 1992 Earth Summit in Brazil, five treaties dealing with environmental problems, including the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity and U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification, have been concluded. They all have a large number of signatories and require them to make efforts to conserve the environment.
The underlying idea is that economic activities should only be carried out to a point that does not disrupt the environment.
The future of the global environment depends on whether Asian developing nations can learn from the lessons of industrialized nations and come up with effective environmental policies based on these treaties.
Up to now, governments of developing economies in Asia have been attaching greater importance to development than environmental conservation. NGOs and citizens are expected to play a major role in reversing these policies and creating ones that give first priority to environmental protection.
Asian late bloomers must heed development lessons
