From Price staff reports
When USC Price School of Public Policy Professor Eric Heikkila delivered the keynote address in May at a symposium in Yeosu, South Korea, his remarks were nearly a year in the making.
Last summer, Heikkila visited Yeosu as part of a Pacific Rim Council on Urban Development forum, which he helped organize. During that trip, he learned that Yeosu, a coastal city in the southern part of the Korean Peninsula, has 365 islands within its municipal boundaries — and that’s when he got a bright idea.
“Because there are also 365 days in a year, I suggested that they could launch an environmental awareness campaign on the theme, ‘Yeosu: Where every child has his/her own island,” said Heikkila, who is the director of international initiatives at USC Price.
The mayor of Yeosu, Chung-seog Kim, not only agreed, but invited Heikkila to be the keynote speaker at a special symposium.
On May 22, speaking at Yeosu City Hall to an audience of more than 200 representing government, academia and civil society, Heikkila addressed his idea for this unique public awareness campaign.
“One can assign a specific island to each day of the year,” Heikkila said during his speech. “Everyone has a birthday, so in this way each person is associated with the island that matches their day. This should be especially pleasing to children.”
He added, “This seemingly simple act of association creates a dynamic human linkage between an observed phenomenon and those who are observing it… through this campaign of ‘Every child has his/her own island,’ we all become part of what we are observing.”
Heikkila proposed that such a campaign may have broad implications for energizing tourism as well as for promoting education, as young students could be encouraged to learn more about the island connected to their birthday.
“The most important benefit from this campaign, however, is that of general awareness,” he said in the speech. “These same islands are there… day after day, year after year, with seawater lapping at their shores while most people go about their business without giving much thought to these islands collectively or individually. Now that will change, because in Yeosu, every child has his/her own island.”