PARENT SESSION
Symposium #15: Philosophy of ecology in the eastern and western civilizations.
Sponsored by ESA Asian Ecology Section
Organized by: Y.D. Choi and J. Carter.
Wednesday, August 8, 2001. 8:00 AM to 11:35 AM. Madison Ballroom B
Ecological philosophy and concepts in old Korean cultural landscapes.
Lee, Dowon1, Jung, Jaeseo2, 1 2
ABSTRACT- Understanding traditional Korean ecological philosophy is complicated as old documents were dominantly written in Chinese characters, and there are delicate difference between Korean and Chinese implications for the same characters. Furthermore, additional misconception appears when Korean philosophical concepts are expressed in English. Hence, we introduce part of traditional Korean ecological knowledge, which may or may not be shared with Chinese counterpart. Then, we illustrate some ecological concepts extracted from old Korean documents and landscape paintings. For example, old maps shows that Korean people hierarchically divided the Korean Peninsula into many watersheds as early as in the 15th century. The concept of landscape configuration is also identified in the typical arrangement of village and surrounding landscape elements. Agricultural landscapes contained vegetative buffer strips which kept village wells and streams from being polluted with surface and subsurface runoff leaching from a cemetery and cultivated areas, respectively. Landscape complementation was also secured in the configuration. As sustainable society is warranted in only a closed system or an open system with balanced input/output of essential elements, the balance was maintained by dominant internal cycles operated at a watershed scale in the past landscapes. In modern society, however, intensive land use activities have disturbed the internal cycles, posing a threat to the sustainability.
KEY WORDS: ecology, philosophy, Korea, landscape