Tag Archives: by Alex Kew

Fixing This Garbage Fire May Be More Work Than We Thought

Letter to the Editor

To the Editor,

Your recent article, South Korea’s Plastic Problem is a Literal Trash Fire itself reflects the careless way in which we treat environmental issues worldwide. The story it tells of this black market garbage pile is not the one begging to be told —  a story of systematic neglect. Rather, we read a tale of simple Band-Aid fixes, paired with lamentations of if only we had known.

This massive combusting garbage pile in Uiseong did not spontaneously appear; it was the result of a series of poor attempts to mitigate pollution. The article highlights a number of regulations — from strict cutbacks in waste incineration to international waste import bans — but nowhere in this list of pollution mitigation strategies do we see an attempt to solve the underlying problem of South Korea’s surplus waste. These so-called solutions only address the symptoms, and have resulted in a combusting trash pile rather than a decrease in waste.

The exploding trash heap that’s given the spotlight here is a story that is replayed by many nations that have failed to fix a broken system. Your writer succeeds in highlighting the ways environmental policies fail, but like these policies, it doesn’t conclude with a call for a true fix. What’s needed is a systematic change — a deep industrial restructuring and an effort to reduce waste before it’s created, not once it’s spontaneously combusting and threatening lives.

You get points for telling this story, but like so many others it will fade into oblivion as more waste piles up, and frankly, there are more important things to take away from a 170,000 ton garbage heap than a lone fist shaking at the ‘what ifs.’

 

https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/02/asia/south-korea-trash-ships-intl/index.html

 

Armenia!

Feature Report

Armenians made an unusual pilgrimage this year. Although many diasporan Armenians do try to return to the homeland during their lifetime, this year the journey was a bit shorter for many of them. From September 2018 to January 2019, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City held an exhibit titled Armenia! to celebrate the art and culture of this small nation.

I made the pilgrimage this year, albeit by accident. For the past three years, I have been making a different kind of pilgrimage. Ever since working at an Armenian summer camp, I have been getting more involved with my Armenian heritage, and have been making my way down to New York City each January to reconnect with my friends from camp. This year, my voyage serendipitously coincided with the MET’s Armenia! exhibit. Looking for something to do, and figuring that as American-Armenians we really ought to go, my five friends and I made our way to Manhattan.

The exhibit featured the largest collection of Armenian art ever displayed in a museum. The exhibition hosted over 140 objects from medieval Armenia, including intricate stone work pieces, gilded reliquaries, illuminated manuscripts, woven silk textiles, impressive carved woodwork, and altar frontals. A common element among the pieces, and in Armenian art and culture in general, are the deep Christian roots of the nation. Armenia was the first nation to adopt Christianity, and as such, the religious spirituality is deeply ingrained in the culture of the people, and is reflected in the artwork. Some of the most entrancing pieces of the show were the stone crosses, or khachkars. These crosses were so intricately carved that I found myself staring and wondering about the artists who devoted their lives to creating these expressions of faith. As I made my way through the exhibit, I paused to admire the delicate textiles, ornate reliquaries, and detailed carved wooden doors. But what most caught my eye were the inscriptions on the illuminated manuscripts. These elaborate manuscripts were brought to life through vibrant and gilded images as well as the calligraphically written Armenian alphabet. The Armenian alphabet was developed around 405 AD by the linguistic and ecclesiastical leader Mesrop Mashtots, and is still used today. Though I cannot read Armenian, the experience of seeing the language of my people on display in one of the nation’s greatest museums was a moving one, for myself, as it must have been for the many others who passed through this exhibit.

Armenia! did not exude the same glamour as some other installations at the MET – it was a simple exhibition structured like many others devoted to the medieval period or Christian artwork – but what brought life to this exhibit was the overwhelming feeling of representation in the room. Armenians have faced a long history of persecution and strife. Slaughtered and forcibly removed from their homeland by Ottoman forces during the – still unrecognized – Armenian Genocide of the early 20th century, Armenians have not had it easy. Armenians were a minority Christian people living under the Muslim Ottoman rule in the early 20th century when World War I broke out, and a systematic extermination of the Armenian people began. The genocide drove tens of thousands of Armenian people to escape their homeland, creating the widespread diasporan communities we see today. Though forced to flee far and wide across the globe due to their religious beliefs, the Armenian people have never lost their sense of self and their ties to the homeland.

This exhibit served as a beacon of hope, for the first time displaying the art of this small and turbulent nation on a such a large platform. I looked around and listened in on the overlapping chatter of voices. I heard families speaking Armenian, some who had moved to America over 100 years ago to flee the genocide, and some who had recently immigrated. I saw older people, young children, and even ran into a different friend from camp. More astonishing, however, were the crowds of non-Armenian people in this space, looking on with the same wonder as those whose culture these artifacts represent. Speaking with my friends afterward, I found they shared my sense of pride at seeing the story of our small nation get told through artwork not only to our people, but to such a diverse audience. One of my friends told us how her parents visited the museum as often as they could, and how her father became emotional when he observed the many enchanted non-Armenians and saw his culture projected on such a large platform through a lens of wonder and admiration.

The history of the Armenians may be one of erasure, but the persecution has been unable to stop our people and culture. Our story, like the Christian roots of the nation, is what ties together the many people worldwide who claim this small nation as home, and is what has fostered such a strong community. Art is a way of celebrating a people, and so to the Armenians, seeing their art displayed alongside some of the greatest works in history was a glorious recognition and uplifting of a people once almost wiped off the map.

Uluru

Blog Post

A rickety bus crammed full of sweaty backpackers rolls through the hot red landscape. The desert extends out flat as far as the eye can see. We ride along, each of us trying to catch the first glimpse of the spectacle we flew out here to see. A gasp escapes from a woman in the back of the bus. We all turn. A red shape emerges from the distance. Driving closer and closer along this lonely road, we look in awe as the formation pierces the flat landscape, the shape growing at each turn the bus takes. Cameras snap, but the bright blue sky against the red landscape is impossible to capture. We pull up and look out the window, it’s so much bigger than we could have ever imagined. A location dripping with history and tradition. An icon of Aboriginal culture. We step out of the bus and marvel at the gorgeous natural wonder of Uluru.

Uluru, or as it is known by its colonial name, Ayers Rock, is the largest single rock in the world. It rises 1,142 feet out of the ground, with the bulk hidden like an iceberg underground. The awe-inspiring grandeur of the natural formation is nothing compared to the magnificence of the history and culture surrounding the place. The Aboriginal people, one of the longest-continuing cultures on earth, and the traditional owners of the land we now call Australia, have used this rock for communal ceremonies and food and water collection for tens of thousands of years. Before we even begin walking around the rock we sit down and our tour guide tells us about the sacred nature of the place. She tells us about how we are embarking on a journey around this location laced with culture. But, she says, we are not allowed to learn all of its stories.

Unlike their counterparts in many Western cultures, the Aboriginal people pass on knowledge through oral tradition. To ensure that the wrong stories are not passed on to future generations, the lessons of the land are kept only by respected elders of the communities. The Aboriginal community limited our tour guide, a white woman, to the knowledge that a child in the community would be given – enough to survive and appreciate the culture – but nothing more. The community allows her to pass on only certain stories to our group, leaving us mystified and eager to learn what we could.

As we begin walking around Uluru, we are struck, not only by the beauty of the striking red rock before us, but by every additional morsel of knowledge our guide can offer us. She tells us about traditional ceremonies, stories of creation, and weaves tales of the gods and spirits of the land into our journey. Though we are denied deeper knowledge, we quickly come to understand the significance of this place. She asks us not to take photographs at certain religious sites and to be silent at pools of water. We respect the culture of the traditional owners of the land enough to do so. We continue our walk, listening and learning with reverence.

As we conclude our journey, we are appalled to see a blatant act of disrespect for Aboriginal culture before our eyes: people hiking up the side of Uluru. When the British colonists discovered this sacred space hundreds of years ago, they decided this it must be climbed and conquered, and not long after that they began to promote massive tourism to the outback by advertising Ayers Rock climbs. In the 1960s a handrail was added, which made the ascent more accessible but only increased the level of disregard towards the traditional owners of the land. Today, despite the efforts of the Aboriginal people and the giant signs at the base detailing the reasons not to hike on this sacred space, many tourists still climb the rock. Our group looks on, horrified at the contempt people show for this long standing culture. Although it may seem like only a rock, this site is a sacred one and deserves to be treated with respect by all visitors. One surely does not need to know much about the Aboriginal people to realize it is not acceptable to walk past the huge signs urging visitors to refrain from climbing the rock – we certainly didn’t.

When we pile back into our bus, the mood has shifted. No longer are we looking out the dusty windows at a grand rock seemingly dropped in the middle of a boundless desert. We see a different place. We see a sacred space, entwined with stories and secrets and the lifeblood of a people. But we also see a scar. A scar left by years of footprints eroding away the face of the rock, and by decades of profaning the space through these continued colonialistic actions. As the bus drives further and further away, the cameras still snap – an attempt to somehow capture one last look at the rock in all its might. But this time what they have trouble capturing isn’t the red land or the blue sky. It’s this feeling, a mix of awe at the magnificence and sadness at the defacement – an understanding of a place we can never truly understand.