Luncheon Forum

South Korea mastered the game of development economics, rising to become the world’s eleventh largest economy by producing cars, ships and electronics. Now, with climate change a major global issue, the game has changed. From desertification in Mongolia to increased flooding in North Korea, to car emissions, development and air pollution within its borders, South Korea is already wrestling with the effects of global warming on its economy. Can it successfully integrate with the new environmental paradigm?

Hall Healy, president of The DMZ Forum, Inc., believes South Korea can thrive in this new era of green economics, and that the DMZ, untouched by 50 years of development, may be one of its biggest assets. If developed responsibly, the pristine environment of the DMZ could provide clean drinking water to millions of Koreans, trillions of won in income and an untold number of jobs in eco-tourism, sustainable agriculture and ecosystem services. Healy will also discuss other strategies that could help South Korean industries re-tool for the future with landscape ecologist John Mickelson and William B. Shore, secretary of The DMZ Forum. Christine Kim, Yale's program director for the Environmental Performance Index will discuss North and South Korea's rankings.

This forum is jointly presented by The Korea Society and the DMZ Forum (www.dmzforum.org)

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

with

Hall Healy
President, DMZ Forum

William B. Shore
Secretary, DMZ Forum

John Mickelson
Landscape Ecologist

Christine Kim
Program and Research Director, Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy


About the Speakers

Hall Healy is the president of The DMZ Forum, Inc., a U.S.-based nonprofit organization dedicated to helping the Korean people preserve the biological and cultural resources of the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). He is assisting in the creation of a global DMZ Coalition of experts in diverse fields to support preservation efforts. He has traveled to Korea as well as to Russia and China to meet with South and North Korean scientists, central, provincial and local government ministers, governors, mayors and environmental officials, academics, business leaders and non-governmental organizations to garner support for DMZ preservation. He has helped organize several international conferences on DMZ preservation in Korea, one of which included a trip to Mt. Keumgang, in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Healy helped establish conservation partnerships between organizations in the U.S., Mexico and Russia.

Healy has a BA degree in Political Science from Colgate University and an MBA from the University of Chicago, Executive Program. He has written the “Environmental Management” chapter for American Management Association’s (AMA) Manufacturers Handbook; co-authored Packaging and Solid Waste, a booklet published by AMA and written several published articles on DMZ preservation. He is a principal of the consultancy Facilitated Solutions International, which is dedicated to empowering stakeholders worldwide to enhance and protect their natural resources.

William B. Shore is the secretary of the DMZ Forum. He also is the founder and executive secretary of Nature Network, a consortium of about 50 education and research organizations in the NY-NJ-CT metropolitan area concerned with the environment. He was a senior staff member of Regional Plan Association (RPA) from 1961 to 1996. The RPA is a nonprofit organization planning for the NY-NJ-CT metropolitan area (for which there is no government planning organization). Shore has also served as a publications director for the American Society for Public Administration, and as an editor of Public Administration Review.

Shore holds a BA from the University of Minnesota and an MA from Manchester University, England.

John Mickelson is a landscape ecologist and geospatial services consultant with sixteen years of experience designing, developing and implementing applied geospatial and ecological research and conservation planning applications. For the past seven years at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, his research and application work has supported a wide range of NASA, USGS and original research projects throughout the U.S., South & Central America., Asia and the Caribbean.

He holds bachelors and graduate degrees from the University of Connecticut in the fields of forest ecology and natural resource management and engineering. His work in Connecticut played a major role in securing permanent protection for nearly 20,000 acres of Connecticut's forest and open space lands, at a combined funding level of about $100 million dollars.

He specializes in the integration of conservation science with geospatial technologies to improve land use and resource mapping, geospatial decision support, and the analysis, management and modeling of built and natural systems. He serves on the boards of several collaborative watershed and environmental groups witin the Northeastern US, and provides ecological, geospatial, research and program development expertise to the DMZ Forum, Inc.

Christine Kim is a program director for the Environmental Performance Index and a research associate at the Yale Center of Environmental Law & Policy. She also serves as the associate director for the Global Environmental Governance Project.

Her research focuses on issues of equity, leadership, and political will in international environmental governance and United Nations reform. Kim has previously worked for the Korea Environment Institute (KEI), the Ministry of Environment of South Korea, and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) – Regional Office of Asia and the Pacific (ROAP). She was also the program director for the Air Pollution in the Megacities of Asia Project, a collaborative initiative between KEI, the Stockholm Environment Institute, UNEP, and the World Health Organization (WHO). Kim also worked as a policy consultant for the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank's Clean Air Initiative for Asian Cities and organized their Better Air Quality in Asia conferences. She is the co-author of Benchmarking Urban Air Quality Management in the Megacities of Asia and the Pilot 2006 Environmental Performance Index. Christine attended Yale University where she studied international relations and ethnicity, race & migration.

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