Interview About Past Energy Use In South Korea

 My family is South Korean, and in approximately 50 years, South Korea has gone from a rural country to a highly developed and industrial power nation, similar to America. So, when I asked my parents about how their parents used energy back in the 1940’s, they were more than glad to explain the drastic difference of then and now. In South Korea’s past, there was no such thing as electricity. People would live in homes with paper/wood doors and clay walls. The only source of light would be sunshine in the morning and candle light at night. Refrigerators did not exist, so food would be heavily salted, fermented, and then stored in underground pits in traditional Korean pottery. There were no such things as gas stoves, nor was there coal. So my grandparents’ generation used wood to fuel their fire to cook. Flushing toilets were not invented, so bathrooms would be shacks directly outside of homes. These were just holes in the ground. Since there was no such thing as toilet paper, people used leaves or newspaper cut outs instead. Everything was very rudimentary. In order to shower or wash anything, water would be drawn from the local wells and then transferred into buckets or wash basins. Instead of using mowers and weed whackers to maintain their land, people would use bulls to till the soil and hand pick any weeds. Today, we have electricity, clean running tap water, and flushing toilets so the past looks so crude. However, my parents told me that South Korea used to have fresh air, clean water, and a lot of plant life. Today, South Korea is much more polluted. It is not even safe to be exposed in rain without an umbrella for the acid content is so high. Technological improvements are great and convenient, however it required societies to sacrifice our environment and health.