Facts and Values in Controversy over the "Pan-Korea Grand Waterway"

Sungook Hong

Program in History and Philosophy of Science

Seoul National University, Korea

The "Pan-Korea Grand Waterway" is the biggest and the most ambitious engineering project in the modern history of Korea. It aims at transforming existing rivers into canals and creating their networks. The entire network of canals (the Grand Waterway) would be 3,100 kilometers long, the longest canal among them being 540-kilometer "Kyung-Bu Canal." The Kyung-Bu Canal connects Seoul and Busan, the two largest cities of Korea. To construct the Kyung-Bu Canal, one would have to connect two distinct rivers, the Han River and the Nakdong River, which are 40-kilometer distanced by a chain of mountains.

In 2007 and 2008, the project provoked a series of heated controversies among experts and citizens, since it was one of the major election promises of Mr. Lee Myung-bak, the current president of South Korea. Its supporters claimed that the Grand Waterway would booster the Korean economy, reduce pollution, and promote the tourism business of local cities. However, opponents criticized these claims, since they thought that the Grand Waterway would be totally useless in economic terms, destroy environmental conditions, and produce unprecedented man-made risks. Scientific and engineering facts were in dispute, but my paper will also show that behind these conflicting facts, there existed different values on the utility of nature, the idea of progress, and the role of technological projects for the future of the nation.