How to Preserve Seokguram: Heritage Sites in the age of Climate change

Up in the mountains of Toham in Gyeongju, the Seokguram grotto sits alone, separated from the main Buddhist by as much as 3 kilometers. Last summer I made my way there amidst wind and rain. In the past you could enter the shrine and go around the great Buddha, who had been sitting in his lotus for well over a thousand years. But, when I arrived there, we were only allowed to visit the Buddha across a glass wall, like a parent looking through the glass at a nursery of new born babies. So fragile has it become that the thousand year old Buddha is treated with kid gloves.

Experts say that preservation is becoming more difficult each year because of the radically changing climate. Winters are colder, summers are hotter; one year we have floods while the next we have draughts. It doesn’t take a researcher to tell us that the climate is becoming unstable. With every step of the way, the 21st century seems like something out of a science fiction novel. Spaceships on mars, computers win chess, viruses fought with DNA. It seems that AI will change our lives, while leaving us behind in the dust. People are beginning to feel they have lost purpose. What’s the use of studying when AI will write better, make music and draw art. It seems like the Earth is going to become a burning ball of fire, but we will not be able to do anything. This is simply not true. All these things, from all the bad, like climate change, to all the dubiously good, like AI, are all human problems. We have to understand this. The hot summers and blistering winters are man made. It was humans who changed the world to make it like this, and it has to be humans who must change it back. We have to understand that the problems we face today are our own, and we are the ones to solve them. AI, genetics and space exploration are all simply the tools that we have to make this happen. Good. It simply means more power to us. But what is fundamentally more important is that we are the ones who must make the change. Humans cannot change history, but we can change the future. By understanding our human history, and open communications with each other, not just among nations, and states, and religions, but also between ages, and sexes, and vocations; between scientists and politicians, and laborers and planners. There is no simple answer to the question of who must we be to face the challenges of the future. But it also doesn’t have to be a complicated one. We just have to understand our problems, take courage, and make a change. By Justin