The Pacific Shift

At 6 am, Eddie woke up and gave an early start to this my third Chuseok in Korea. For the coming three days, almost everything will be closed in otherwise crazy busy Seoul as millions of Koreans head back to their “home villages” to celebrate this traditional harvest festival or “Korean thanksgiving” as my American friends like to call it.

The coming of Chuseok also means that we have made it to the autumn equinox and that everything is a busy is it always is at this time of the year with a long list of new exciting projects, including an invitation to write a book review for the journal Environmental Values. This year I am offering three classes, including one new class called “Development and Inequality in a Globalizing World” which so far has been a stunning success with students from countries as diverse as Afghanistan and Bolivia bringing a lot of real-life experience into the classroom.