First Impressions

This text below was slightly abridged and translated into Korean for an article published in the Mosim Magazine No. 18.

I have recently begun an EU funded project,¹ in collaboration with Mosim and the University of Sussex, to spend 3 years researching Hansalim and its role in the cooperative food movement in South Korea. In this article I want to introduce myself and the project and share something of my initial perspective on the Hansalim movement and the Hansalim Manifesto.

As far as my academic background² goes, I have studied environmental and social science and my doctoral and post-doc research has focused on urbanization and sustainability in food systems. I have learnt mandarin Chinese and spent time in Wuhan, China investigating issues of resilience and sustainability in peri-urban food systems.³ I have also worked with colleagues in Delhi, India to understand the impacts of urban development on farming livelihoods and ecosystems. More recently I have become interested in the role of cooperatives in food and farming and the potential for sustainable and regenerative farming techniques to replace environmentally harmful industrialized farming systems.

The origin of this research project

As a British person married to a Korean, I have, for many years, had an interest in Korea and a hope to one day live and work in Korea with my family. So a couple of years ago, as I started applying for funding to pursue further research I looked for examples of food cooperatives in Korea that could be interesting to study. That is when I came across Hansalim.

The first thing that surprised me when I read about Hansalim was the size of the cooperative. I had never heard of a cooperative of consumers and farmers together that had reached more than a few hundred members. I was astonished that Hansalim had grown to over 750,000 members in just over 30 years and I wondered how such growth was possible and whether it could be replicated elsewhere.

The second thing that surprised me was that the cooperative was part of a social movement with an ecological philosophy based on the spiritual concepts of the Korean religion of Donghak. From what I had read about cooperatives, generally the central motivations for cooperation seemed to be more economic and focused on the material conditions of life rather than a specific philosophy of what it means to be human. The idea that cooperation could be motivated directly by a spiritual worldview was fascinating to me. Intuitively I felt that there was something very significant about going beyond materialistic justifications for cooperativism to draw on deeper motivations.

That is how I decided to apply for funding to spend 3 years researching and writing a book about Hansalim and to partner with Mosim to investigate what lessons Hansalim’s experience holds for other cooperative movements seeking to transform future food systems. I called my project ‘Living Together: Hansalim as a model for solidarity pathways towards sustainable food systems.’⁴ I chose this title because I wanted to communicate the idea that a ‘sustainable’ food system is one that enables people to live and thrive together in community with one another and with nature in a way that is mutually beneficial.

A brief summary of the project

During the first 6 months of my project - September 2021 to February 2022 - I am learning Korean after which I will begin participating in Hansalim’s activities and carry out extensive fieldwork to learn about Hansalim’s history and how the cooperative works in practice. In year two I will continue with fieldwork and also work on a short collaborative research project with the team in Mosim on a topic which we will decide on together. During the 3rd year of the project I will return to the UK to engage with cooperative and solidarity movements in the UK and Europe and help them build connections with Hansalim and share learning.

The goal of my research is to study the experience of Hansalim and draw out lessons for other cooperative groups and movements in the UK and EU as we strive to transform our food systems away from industrialized models towards a fairer and more sustainable future.

My first impressions of Donghak, Hansalim and the Manifesto

In preparation for the project I have been learning more about the Hansalim Movement by reading the Chondogyo scriptures⁵ and helping with the Hansalim Manifesto translation as a proof reader. It has been a very interesting way to start to learn about the big ideas behind the formation of Hansalim.

As I read the Chondogyo scriptures and the Manifesto I came across many similar themes with other religious and philosophical ideas that I am more familiar with such as the intimate presence of God in all things, and contemplation and inner stillness as the doorway to embodying the divine Spirit in daily life. These similarities seem to me to be consistent with Suun’s own claim that the Heavenly Way he taught was a universal truth for all humanity. He seemed to see it as containing the same truth that lay at the heart the major world religions but that which mainstream expressions of those religions had all but forgotten. Indeed, I think it is encouraging that there are resonances between Suun’s ideas and the often suppressed voices within cultures and religions across the world that speak out against the destructive and oppressive tendencies of dominant political, economic and religious power structures.

In the Chondogyo scriptures I read Suun’s incantation which I think encompasses the central teaching of Donghak that the Divine Spirit (Hanullim) is in all things and therefore humans also bear God within them. However, through selfishness and negative outside influences, people have forgotten this truth that they are fundamentally one with God and habitually act in opposition to the Way. This is the cause of human suffering and evil. To recover oneness with God one needs to cultivate the mind of God within oneself and to act justly towards others. As people cultivate this Heavenly Way then a new world begins to dawn, a ‘kingdom of heaven on earth’ which will ultimately come to encompass the whole cosmos, not through violent revolution but by ’natural becoming’.

I find this worldview very inspiring and it resonates deeply with my own life journey. The deep concepts contained within the Chondogyo scriptures and writings are fascinating to me and I look forward to exploring them further as my research continues. I am particularly interested in the practical implication of these ideas for daily life and especially in relation to food and farming.

Having read the Chondogyo scriptures I began proof reading the translation of the Hansalim Manifesto and found the ideas of Suun and his early followers developed into a call to practical action for the renewal of the world. I was impressed by how the Manifesto highlighted the mechanistic world view as the common source of the destructive features of contemporary capitalist and communist systems. I had read similar ideas in the writing of the British philosopher Mary Midgley.⁶ However, in the Manifesto the mechanistic worldview and an alternative spiritual worldview are explained with reference to different philosophical and cultural ideas which produces a complementary argument to Midgley’s and goes further by developing a specific ethic for living with one another and nature.

There are two things that left a deep impression on me after reading the Manifesto and getting to know Hansalim and the Mosim team over the past few months. First, the attitude of reverence towards oneself and others; second, the attitude of reverence towards the non-human world which is expressed in the symbolism of eating and providing food which unites humans to the non-human world through farming as an activity of cooperation with nature and Hanullim.

Reverence for oneself and others

The Manifesto urges people to revere all people and all things as Hanullim and to cultivate the mind of Hanullim within oneself as a seed that needs to be nurtured to grow to maturity. This displays an attitude of radical respect of oneself and of others as individuals while also recognizing the fundamental unity of all as carriers of the same divine life. In the words of the Manifesto it means that society is:

“not simply an aggregate of individuals but has to be a community where individuals as parts and society as a whole become holistically integrated. While humans live symbiotically by cooperating with their neighbors, they should not lose their autonomy but find a path that leads to true self-actualization.” (Manifesto V.3⁷).

I think one of the great strengths of the Manifesto is that it doesn’t stop at saying what is wrong with the world but goes further to offer a vision of a better world that is deeply appealing and inspiring. One of the sentences in the Manifesto that moved me the most was the following:

“Choe Sihyeong says that when people treat other people as Hanullim, they can make the world sublime…” (Manifesto V.3)

I think this statement points towards a central truth that the world really can be made better, not by owning more things, but by working together to mend the world and learning to be kinder to ourselves and one another - to truly learn what it means to treat other people as Hanullim.

Cooperation with the non-human world

The Manifesto describes food as an offering to oneself as Hanullim which should be received with gratitude to nature and the people who collaborated with nature to obtain it. Thus, eating is seen as an act of unity with the whole of life and symbolic of the cooperation between the whole of human society because that food is a contribution made by the labor of others and received by the one who eats. Prayerful eating is then the act of eating as pledge of gratitude to feed back what one has received from Hanullim, the land and ones neighbors.

I see this principle expressed in Hansalim’s approach to agriculture. By promoting regenerative farming methods Hansalim is creating a virtuous cycle between people and the land that re-builds the health of soils and local biodiversity and which in turn can make the land increasingly fruitful and resilient.

This is a fundamentally different form of agriculture to conventional systems. Conventional agriculture treats the land as a resource and seeks to control and manipulate natural process with machines and chemicals and extract everything of value from the land. This ultimately destroys ecosystems and reinforces dependence on artificial inputs and control measures such as pesticides and antibiotics and releases carbon and methane into the atmosphere which contributes to global warming.

One of the things I find most exciting about Hansalim is that it is a pioneer of regenerative agriculture. In recent years the concept of regenerative agriculture has become increasingly visible in Europe and North America.⁸ As a broad term it includes farming methods that seek to cooperate with nature by moving away from simplified agro-ecosystems towards more biodiverse farming systems that integrate multiple elements such as trees, food crops, cover crops, animals and zero-tillage cultivation to create productive food landscapes where each element works symbiotically with the whole and nothing is wasted. Regenerative farming methods are increasingly seen as potentially viable alternatives to industrialized food systems. They can be implemented at small and medium scales which makes them uniquely suitable to be used in cooperative farming situations. Further, instead of releasing carbon, these methods can return carbon to the soil, potentially shifting agriculture from a net CO² emitter into a CO² sequestration technique.

The value of Hansalim’s experience

Hansalim’s experience of building a large consumer-producer cooperative around regenerative farming principles places it in a unique position. Hansalim has a wealth of collective experience around the opportunities and challenges of cooperation as a movement to transform minds and relationships between people and with nature. Equally valuable is Hansalim’s experience of developing and managing regenerative farming systems that can efficiently provide high quality food to hundreds of thousands of people.

I believe that by sharing and reflecting on this experience Hansalim can make a huge contribution to promoting a powerful synergy between cooperative food system approaches and regenerative farming principles across the world. Not only that, but I believe Hansalim has the potential to build on its scale, experience and expertise to lead the way as an innovator in solidarity based regenerative food systems. I am thrilled to be able to play a small part in this endeavor through my own research project.

Conclusion

Today we face what seems like the final crisis for humanity. An apparently apocalyptic combination of catastrophic climate change, ecological extinctions, widespread poisoning of our air and water, contamination of almost every habitat on earth with micro-plastics, the worsening fragmentation of societies driven apart by anger and hatred, and all made worse by what looks to be a new era of pandemics driven by industrialized agriculture and our own destruction of natural habitats.

One key insight I take from the Manifesto is that the fundamental solution to these multiple crises lies not in the panacea of technological fixes but in a deeper transformation of human consciousness and the ways we live together.

“A genuine communal awakening is required of us today - one that pursues frugality over waste, cooperation over competition, spiritual maturity over material growth, symbiosis over selfishness, social justice over egotistical self-assertion, unification over division.” (Manifesto V.3)

I find hope in the signs that there is a growing movement of people and groups like Hansalim around the world who are, in their own unique ways, working towards just such an awakening.