Jeju Island is often called ‘Pure and Clean Jeju’ for its well preserved natural environment. However in recent years, the beautiful natural landscapes and forests of Jeju are vanishing. What does it take to protect Jeju’s environment and animals from disappearing?

We are told to recycle and reduce the amount of energy by the media and environmentalists. How effective are these actions in actually saving the planet? Interestingly the starting point to answering these questions are found in World War Ⅱ.

  Environmentalists try to protect nature just like how the doctors in concentration camps tried to help their patients. Robert J. Lifton writes about doctors who worked in concentration camps in his book The Nazi Doctors. The doctors would do the best they could to help the inmates. They would do everything except question the concentration camp itself and the racism and system that led to the concentration camps. So, they would hand someone an aspirin to lick if they were sick. Or they would hide them from selections to be taken to the gas room as much as they can. Inside the system, they are doing everything they can. However outside the system they are prolonging the inmate’s suffering.

This seems the case for the current environmental crisis as well. What we can do is pathetically little within the system of capitalism itself. In the capitalist system the worker produces commodities, the amount of wages and surplus value. The capitalist takes everything that the worker produces. The worker is paid only enough to survive and keep working. Ways that are recommended to reduce CO2 emissions like recycling or taking public transport looks very trivial compared to the amount of CO2 factory gives off. Is this the best we can do? Without questioning the existence of the capitalist system itself, we cannot find the fundamental solution only temporary stop-gaps.

Why does it get harder and harder to make a living by the passing years? We are forced into a fierce completion without ever having a chance to acknowledge life does not have to be this way. There is an alternative. We will never know what we lost along the way because we did not know it existed in the first place.

Who does the system really benefit? Without changing the way we perceive planet Earth, nature, animals, plants and non-humans, we cannot turn our way around.