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[Letters]When is green not Green?

Published: 26 Feb. 2009, 01:05

“Commission lays out detailed plan for green growth” (Feb. 17), reports that President Lee’s government has a plan to increase bike paths, cap carbon dioxide emissions and introduce daylight saving time. Near the end of the article President Lee is quoted as saying, “Green growth is not a matter of choice. ... This is something we must do for survival.” That sounds like a sound bite from Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” a film that has done much for the environmental movement.

But then something strange is said in the very next sentence: an indirect quote from Lee, that “the public often confuses green growth policy with the environmental movement.” I’m left scratching my head, wondering what this means. Does it mean green policy - that moves to help the environment - has nothing to do with the environmental movement? Does it mean a democracy movement has little to do with the founding of democracies? Does it mean the neoconservative agenda of the George W. Bush years has little to do with neoconservatives - divorcing cause from effect?

There is a logical link between green policy and the environmental movement in the same way that democracies come from democracy movements and neoconservative governments from neoconservative movements. I wish the writer quoted President Lee directly or with an explanatory sentence to give such a muddied statement some clarity.

Brett Conway, lecturer, Hansung University