Abstract

This article investigates how in 1967 South Korea’s local elites, developmental regime, and American park planners jointly designed South Korea’s first national park around Mt. Jiri as a recreational park. In so doing, this article asks what it meant to preserve nature in the 1960s South Korea in the context of the developmental populism of the Park Chung-hee regime and Cold War preservationism. After the end of the Korean War, Mt. Jiri’s forest suffered overlogging by garrisoned soldiers and non-native timber traders. In response, local leadership actively sought to bring in another industry in which they could participate, such as large plantations. By the mid-1960s, several government survey teams explored the mountain, aiming to set up large plantations on Mt. Jiri at the request of local society. However, due to the inhospitable environment to alpine agriculture, the South Korean government abandoned the food colony project and opted instead for a national park in 1965. In this context, the South Korean government designed a new national park to maximize the profit for the government and local society, with consultations with economists of US foreign aid agencies. Paradoxically, this model made Mt. Jiri less attractive to IUCN’s preservationist park planners seeking to establish well-preserved natural reserves in the Third World, and eventually helped the opening of a recreational national park in 1967.