IMD 2009 Speech

This speech was given by KMPL president Shawn James Morrissey at the International Mountain Day seminar, December 11, 2009.

Thank you. On behalf of the other organizers, I’d like to thank everyone for coming today. This is the third time we’ve held this seminar marking International Mountain Day, and just like myself, it seems to be getting better with age.

IMD was designed as a way to bring awareness to the necessity of montane environments. Mountains provide incalculable sustenance to living things. They are ecosystems that function within the greater ecosystem of our Planet Earth. They are roughhewn and harsh places, but they just as equally sensitive and fragile. Without mountains, the water cycle wouldn’t function, deserts wouldn’t exist, and Earth would be devoid of a vast percentage of its biodiversity.

To know these things is paramount. To protect them is indisputable. It is not a matter of being a mountaineer; it is a matter of being aware. It is a matter of education. And it is education and awareness that I wish to talk about today.

When I was a very young boy, I often went on Sunday drives with my parents. I hated these drives because I had a tendency to get car sick. We would drive for not much more than an hour, but to me at the time it seemed like eons. Despite the car sickness, there was a definite joy in these Sunday drives. We would more often than not end up at the head of some forest trail. With my parents, I would walk along those trails in absolute bliss. Everything seemed so big, so vast, and powerful, but it was all quiet and calm; danger was no where to be found. If a log crossed the trail, I would take my father’s right hand, my mother’s left hand and they would lift me and swing me over the fallen tree. Birds chirped in the thousands, and I would try to mimic their calls – though at that age I could barely whistle. At times we would see deer, through the trees and off in the distance. We would watch them silently.

Looking back on my life, these were the earliest events that planted the seeds that have grown into my complete reverence for Nature. These Sunday drives took me on adventures – big ones for a six year old – that helped design who I am. I was being educated in the purest sense of the word. And I was a straight A student. As I got older and was able to go into the wilderness on my own, Nature consumed me completely, especially those lands set in higher places.

I am an advocate of education, and a staunch advocate at that. I believe the potential of the human intellect and rationality is the core of our inherent freedom. I believe firmly that education can lead humanity out of the foolishness and irrationality that we’ve embraced for a long, long time. I also believe that the way we socially educate and are educated is archaic, and we need to truly embrace the nature of things, the nature of ourselves. This is the seed that will bring us to a better way of taking care of our mountains and our planet as a whole; and I can’t help but think it could help us fix some of our other problems as well. But we have education systems that don’t always allow us to engage our intellect or utilize our rationality. The natural curiosity of a child is not always encouraged, and if it is it is not always nourished outside of school walls.

I’m against this kind of education. I am against kids staying in all day on a Sunday afternoon watching cartoons or some other buffoons prancing about on the television, when they could be in the park. And what I am particularly against is parents who allow their kids to do this, and parents who don’t make the effort to take their children to the park and actually play with them. Unfortunately, there seems to be some pressure against parents who do let their children play freely outside, especially since so many parents in Korea today feel their children must attend private academies. This comes back to the faults of the education system and the mentality toward education. I have students who are ten years old and don’t return home at the end of their day until 7:00, 8:00, and 9:00 at night.

A good Korean friend of mine and KMPL member once told me that he and his wife are for the most part outcasts in their neighbourhood. He said it all in good humour, but with a hint of disdain, because the reason his family is outcast in his neighbourhood is because he and his wife don’t send their young daughter to private academies after she finishes school. They let their daughter go to the park when she comes home, and because all of her friends are off studying English, or violin, or microwave cookery, or whatever other subject is the popular choice these days, her mother joins her in the park, and they play together. A mother is considered strange because she prefers to play with her daughter when the girl comes home from school rather than sending the child off to a half dozen private academies. This may just be my “foreign” opinion, but there’s certainly nothing strange about that.

The common education system and its inability to provide a more outdoors based method of teaching children is failing us. I find it unfortunate that kids would prefer to stay in on rainy days, and more so that parents and teachers would prefer their kids to stay in on rainy days. Our society is so fear-based that we shake with worry about our kids getting a sniffle. As anyone whose purposely gone to the mountains or to a park on a lush rainy day can probably confirm, rainy days are often the most intriguing and incredible days to go to the outdoors.

The trend is growing that kids are less and less aware of their surroundings; less knowledgeable about Nature, because kids, for the most part, stay in. Some argue that Korean children have less access to Nature and are at a disadvantage. Kids in Korea are not at a disadvantage. Even the kids in urban Seoul have parks nearby. I live in Ilsan, and in Ilsan the kids have Jeongbalsan City Park, Lake Park, and hundreds of parkettes. There’s no good excuse to justify Korean kids staying inside and not being in natural surroundings and learn about them, and learning in them.

But Korean kids, like Western kids these days, mostly do stay in. Or if they go outside, they prefer to play on a concrete playground rather than in the trees and among the grasses. I live not far from Jeongbalsan, and on three occasions I’ve seen raccoons there. And some of my students, who all live in Ilsan, think raccoons don’t even exist in Korea.

I once had a ten year old student who I was teaching the classic nature book Sign of the Beaver. For his homework one weekend, I asked the boy to go to Jeongbalsan City Park and see how many different kinds of trees he could find. I wanted him to collect one leaf from each different tree and try to find the Korean name, the English name, and the binary nomenclature of each tree. The boy, who was very smart and enjoyed studying Sign of the Beaver, was openly excited about what he considered unique homework. On the following Monday, the boy’s mother came to be, steaming. She complained that what I had given was not practical and she couldn’t understand the whole point of it. Since the mother was so opposed, the boy didn’t do this homework, and within a week his mother had pulled him out of my class.

Too many people, and far too many kids, are becoming more and more disconnected from Nature. They are becoming farther and farther removed from Natural experiences, experiences that teach, experiences that enlighten, experiences that have the potential to captivate and stir creativity and wonderment. Studies show that Nature is essentially good for kids. More and more research, such as a study at the University of Illinois, is indicating that symptoms of ADD in inflicted children improve when those children have even a small amount of contact with Nature.

According to recent studies, about 10% of Korean children have been diagnosed with ADHD. I cringe to consider how many of these kids are treated with medications without even been given the chance to wade in a mountain stream. Then there are the health issues. A study released just last October by the Korean Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology has indicated that elementary and secondary school students are less fit now than students a decade ago. The study revealed that this mostly due to poor eating habits and a dysfunctional education system that puts undue stress on students to achieve in an impractical way, prohibiting them from getting exercise. Students are so busy with school work, that in any free time they may have, they’re too tired or too disinterested to go outside. Too many of them prefer PC rooms and online games, and there’s little being done by the education system, the government, and most unfortunately parents, to discourage this aimless behaviour and promote inquisitive, unstructured play in Nature.

Nature is essential, there’s no way around that. Knowing about Nature is just as essential, and in Korea Nature means the mountains. Knowing these mountains is to have true knowledge of the landscape. It isn’t necessary for a child to look up at Samgaksan just here to the north and know the names of the three main peaks. That’s something only a geek like me knows – and some of the geeks on our panel, and perhaps some of the geeks in the audience. But it is important for a child to look up at a mountain and know what it does. It’s important that a child knows the inner-workings of that mountain, and it’s important that a child go to that mountain and get, as John Muir said, its good tidings. By educating our youth about Nature today, we secure the conservation of Nature in the future.

So are we facing a big problem? Maybe, but there are big solutions, and the best thing about them is that they’re easy. Big solutions start small. Get educated. Educate. Get inspired, and then turn that inspiration into action.

Thank you and tread lightly.

© Shawn James Morrissey. All rights reserved. 2009-2010