Questioning Growth, Interrogating Pollution: South Korea’s Political Economic Approaches to the Environment in the Early 1970s

There is a growing interest among historians in South Korean society’s engagement with the environment. Yet, many studies tend to accept a narrative based on a type of ‘post-materialist value’ thesis: Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the South Korean public, preoccupied with basic economic sustenance, showed minimal interest in the escalating environmental degradation. Environmental issues gained prominence only after the 1990s, it is presumed, as South Korea’s economic growth reached a certain threshold, accompanied by the rise of a substantial middle class that showed interest in quality-of-life and supported the expansion of the new environmental movement. Recent historical studies have challenged this narrative, revealing that ‘pollution’ problems had already surfaced as routine societal concerns in the 1970s. However, there remains a need for a critical examination of how the meanings and nature of environmental issues, including pollution, were understood and contested prior to the 1990s. Moreover, the assumption that environmental awareness naturally arose in response to a given trajectory of ‘development’ needs to be interrogated. This study addresses these limitations in previous studies. It investigates the intertwining concerns and discussions about pollution with those regarding the negative consequences of ‘high growth’ in South Korea from the late 1960s to the early-to-mid 1970s. Specifically, the study focuses on the emergence of radical political-economic perspectives on the environment, later embraced by the anti-pollution movement of the late 1970s and 1980s. The paper also explores the transnational influence and connections within these discussions regarding the problematic relationships between ‘growth’ and ‘pollution.’