What we can learn from North Korea.

I’ve noticed lately that a lot of Western video productions are unfairly biased about North Korea.

So Western journalists have a big gripe about not being able to film certain parts of North Korea. But North Koreans, okay, like all nations, want to be portrayed in a good light. Because North Koreans are smart enough to know that some journalists are unscrupulous…

What if I made a video documentary about Sydney and filmed all the homeless people, the junkies, the graffiti, the rubbish, the wastage, the consumerism, the violence, the poor distribution of wealth, the relentless urbanisation, interviewed all the aboriginal people in our jails, filmed the chopping down of forrests in the Laird state forest to make way for a new coal mine? Well okay.

But what if the Tourism Industry Association of New Zealand came to Australia for example and then used that to infer that “New Zealand was better”? Maybe we’d be able to take it like a joke (even if it were all true).

But I am pretty darn sure that if our tourism industry was proven to have suffered economically because of that documentary, then we’d promptly ‘react’ by banning such films. I’m sure the Sydney council or tourism board would stop people filming the dirtier parts of town. And I wouldn’t really have a problem with that. It doesn’t make me ‘evil’.

What if I want to film the extensive mining operations around Australia? Am I allowed to do that on the spot, without the proper authorisation? Actually, professional filming is already prohibited on the Sydney waterfront ¹It means nothing.

Am I allowed to film in the Police headquarters? What about filming day-to-day ASIO operations? Would it be right of journalists to portray all of Australia in a negative light because of that? My first point is, there is always going to be a limit to the extent that you can film in a country.

My second point is that just because you are forbidden to film parts of a country doesn’t make one culture ‘inferior’ or ‘superior’ to another. I’m actually rather tempted to make that video production of how fucked up Western culture is. Because I’m sure that If North Koreans knew the full true story about us, they’d probably want to stay right the way they are! In that sense, it’s a bit like how how I don’t want to be a billionaire, because I don’t want to be associated with what it represents.

I don’t think it’s fair to only look at the negatives. How many North Korean terrorist attacks are there in the rest of the world anyway? None. I repeat, none. Well not since 1987. So I really don’t think we have anything to worry about²

I could argue that we ourselves are brainwashed into a life of consumerism. I could argue that North Koreans are simply more sustainable than their Western counterparts. And I’d be abolutely, one-hundred-percent right. But aren’t we ourselves now aiming to be more sustainable? Isn’t that now the goal of humanity, to live in harmony with nature?

In North Korea, they sell human waste as fertiliser for crops. That is certainly more sustainable in the long-term than what we do in the West. Please allow me to explain why.

To all the people in agriculture and soil science going to North Korea to ‘tell’ them how to farm the right way, to those people, I ask this: where does all of our fertiliser come from? First let’s talk nitrogen. That’s an element that farmers love, isn’t it? Nitrogen. One very basic fertiliser, sodium nitrate, we used mine from the Atacama desert in Chile and Peru. What happens when that runs out? That’s not very ‘sustainable’, is it? What about the carbon emissions from the giant supertankers that have to transport all of these mining materials everywhere? Today we get a more modern form of nitrogen fertiliser from ammonium nitrate, using both the the Haber process and the Ostwald process. The major source of hydrogen is methane from natural gas. Is all if this sustainable? With no net carbon emissions?

What about phosphate? Where do we get phosphate fertilisers from? I’ll tell you where we get them from. In Australia, we get our phosphate from Nauru. And look what has happened over there — ecological and financial collapse. Good luck growing agricultural crops on Nauru. Does anyone ever bother to raise this point when they look at North Korea’s agricultural industry? Again, what do we do now? Go and mine somewhere else and destroy another island culture?

In 2007, at the current rate of consumption, the supply of phosphorus was estimated to run out in 345 years.^[4] However, some scientists thought that a “peak phosphorus” will occur in 30 years and Dana Cordell from Institute for Sustainable Futures said that at “current rates, reserves will be depleted in the next 50 to 100 years.”^[5]

What about potassium? We get that from potash.

Potash deposits can be found all over the world, at present deposits are being mined in Canada, Russia, China, Belarus, Israel, Germany, Chile, United States, Jordan, Spain, United Kingdom and Brazil.^[12]

PotashCorp imports phosphate rock from Western Sahara via the government of Morocco. According to the United Nations, Western Sahara is a territory illegally occupied by Morocco.

And so it is like this: we mine all over the world, we turn other countries into vertiable dumping grounds. We take advantage of poorer countries. This eventually leads to wars. Does anybody ever think of this when they criticise North Korea agricultural practises?

So I’ll tell you a secret. I piss on my parsley (indirectly) right on my own front lawn here in suburbia. As such, I don’t *ever* buy fertilister. Do I eat my own parsley? Well yes I do (but usually after the rain). Would I want you filming me pouring my own urine onto the parsley plants out of an old teapot? Absolutely not.

I think if more people lived like the average North Korean citizen, we wouldn’t be in the environmental mess that we’re in now. Would we? The fact is, no one can argue otherwise. I’m not saying that I want to forgo some Western luxuries and live all gung-ho like that (because although I am a minimalist, I still like to own one computer connected to the internet). I’m just defending the North Koreans here because they can’t do it for themselves.

I’m not saying that Kim Yong-Un is the nicest guy in the world. I’m not saying that. I don’t personally know the dude. All I get is what the media feeds me. But I do know already that I like him a lot better than the leaders of ISIS…

I think that Westerners in general would get better pictures if they said to their guides that they wanted to portray North Korea in a good light, photos like the one above. That way, North Koreans would see us as their friends, not “the enemy”. Maybe it’s time that we ourselves lived a bit more like North Koreans? I am sure that it would open up a whole new world and maybe usher in a new era of peace.

1. I too was prevented from filming Mt Teide national park in the Canary Islands because we didn’t have a proper permit.
2. The flip side is: how many foreign people do Westerners kill?