Slow Days·말로만 듣던 마흔

How is this land being used? Autumn 2019

June 12, 2021·3 min read

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How is this land being used

They say the environment has improved a bit because of COVID, but this damned fine dust is blasting alerts almost daily.

Because of COVID we wear masks, but there have been plenty of stretches where, without masks, the readings would have made headlines. The news only runs short "be careful" advisories, without actually covering the important question of why it's happening in the first place.

So I started wondering: how is our country's land actually being used? In particular, where are our thermal power plants and nuclear plants concentrated?

Honestly, if I could have found any article or information during this COVID era that investigated why the fine dust keeps going so long, I wouldn't have bothered going out of my way - tired as I am - to do this pointless research and turn it into a blog post...

Then one day, out of nowhere, I thought "today feels like a good day for this," opened my laptop, and got started.

Korea's power plants and major factories (as of September 2, 2019)

Ironically, most of the locations are in places ordinary people think of as "great water, great mountains."

Across regions known for good water and good soil, I found chemical plants, coal and thermal power plants, and many of them are in the same places where mass culling of pigs, chickens, and cattle happens periodically due to avian flu, mad cow disease, and similar outbreaks.

Mapping power plants, factories, and mass-culling sites onto regions known for tourism, healing, or clean agricultural produce was more than a little jarring.

Given that certain kinds of factories and power plants really do need water, soil, and broad land... on reflection, maybe the result above is almost inevitable.

As I gathered and organized the material, part of it did start to make sense (the water-and-land dependency, etc.), but what was actually more scary was this: the accurate locations of the large-scale facilities - power plants and factories - covered by major media outlets were, for a substantial part, not being provided in any of the popular national map apps, Naver Map and Daum Map.

Is that just coincidence?

Is it because plant or factory operators just didn't register location info with Naver Map or Daum Map? Or is it for national security? The local economy? The power of money? The influence of votes? I ran through various theories. And... even while doing this research and writing this post, I kept thinking: what good will any of this do?

Maybe that's why the collated material has only a handful of items on it.

It wasn't easy to find specific locations for thermal power plants, nuclear plants, chemical factories, semiconductor plants, industrial complexes, and burial sites for culled livestock. And relying only on articles from several years ago, I was limited in how I could represent the specific numbers or their actual impact. Beyond what I mapped, there are plenty of tire plants and manufacturing facilities clustered on the outskirts of mid-sized and smaller cities, but I couldn't even attempt to compile those.

Personally, I use a tumbler and a stainless-steel straw. When I do take out, I wash and reuse the plastic cup. But while doing this research... ah - I started to feel doubts even about these small inconveniences the general public takes on.

Plastic's impact on the environment isn't zero, of course, but compared with the impact of the factories and power plants above, what would the numbers look like?

I also imagined this:

What if the data for the above items were offered as open APIs through the public-data portal? (Maybe it already is...) And what if, on top of that data, we could overlay the region's resident population, real-estate prices, local economy, medical information, age of residents, and meteorological data?

While sitting at the computer, researching and writing this with my backside getting warm, facing the uncomfortable truths I didn't really want to acknowledge, I felt a brief but genuine respect for the documentary filmmakers and journalists.