VOL.83/2025.06

 

Professor Choe Jae-Chun

The world of an ecologist, in which all things are beautiful for being alive

 

2025.06.02

 

There are a number of people who argue that humans are inherently selfish and that life is a struggle of every man against every man. A growing number of people even recognize that it is wise to choose individual survival over coexistence. However, there is a biologist who believes that humans, and indeed all life, can never live alone. His observations over the years have given people great solace and hope. Through scientific evidence that we are, after all, “dependent beings.”

 

 

It’s an honor to have you with us on K-Book Trends. Please say hello to our readers along with a brief introduction of yourself.

 

I have been spying on other animals all my life, running into the mountains, fields, oceans, and rivers to see what they are doing. I am also a scholar studying animal behavior or ecology. I currently teach at Ewha Womans University, and I co-founded the Biodiversity Foundation with Dr. Jane Goodall about 10 years ago and I am serving as its chairman. I’m Choe Jae-Chun.

 

You have written over 50 books and translated more than 20. How have you been able to write so many books that always resonate with so many people?

 

I have always made it a rule to get home before 6pm to be with my family, even on the weekends. This allowed me to spend time with my kids before they went off to college, sitting next to them until 9pm and helping them with their studies. And, when it turned 9pm, I put them to bed, no matter what. And then, I worked on my book until 1am - and these days, until midnight. I could have three or four hours a day, just to myself. That’s how I ended up writing so many books over the decades, both teaching and writing.

 

 

When you get to know them deeply, they are all lovely, beautiful beings.

 

 

You say in your book that “every living being is beautiful.” Is there a reason that living things, or the pursuit of life, seemed particularly beautiful to you as a scholar observing living beings?

 

Perhaps because I was born in the year of the snake, it’s weird, but everywhere I go in the woods, I’m greeted by snakes. A lot of people are scared and grossed out by snakes, but for me, they aren’t terrifying. It’s cool to pick one up and wrap it around your arm or around your neck. However, people are overly afraid of snakes because they don’t know much about them.
Let me tell you another story. When I was at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, there was a scorpion that roamed the cafeteria. One day, it came up to the table, and I fed it with a fork. A female student saw it and got very angry at me for doing something so inappropriate in public. A month or two later, the same girl was lying on her stomach on the floor of the cafeteria, feeding the scorpion something. The scorpion was carrying its young, and the girl turned to me and asked how beautiful this act of motherhood was.
At that moment, I realized, “Oh, people are afraid and hateful because they don’t know.” I have spent my whole life in the jungle, seeing so many things that people are afraid and grossed out by, but when you get to know them deeply, they are all lovable. They have their own values, they are all beautiful creatures. I don’t think it’s right to label them as beautiful or ugly, or good for us or bad for us, from a human perspective. Now, how can I explain this to someone who is not a biologist? Well, it’s not an easy thing. That’s why, since then, I have been working hard on the “knowledge is love” idea and trying to help people learn more about nature.

 

 

When you served as the first director of the National Institute of Ecology, you organized the Children’s Eco Library and the National Institute of Ecology Publishing Department to publish ecological books.

 

The library was more about the noise than the books. The lobby was so big that when kids were running around and screaming, it would echo and get really loud. When I was thinking about what to do about it, I realized that it would be nice to have a glass-walled library in the back of the lobby, because it was kind of a dead space anyway. I thought that if there were a library, kids would be interested in it instead of running around screaming. Once the library was built, I could see that I was right. More kids would head towards the library from the lobby when they saw the books on the shelves. It became less bustling, and parents would stop kids from talking by saying, “We are in the library.” This was the most direct reason for the library.
For the publishing department, the idea came from the thought of “how about reading a book in the library about what we saw in the exhibition, and then going back to see the exhibition again?” We promoted this idea a lot, and I think the response was pretty good. It worked out quite well. In the meantime, we got all the books on nature that were available in Korea and filled them up - it was about two or three thousand books. Then, I thought, “Why don’t we make our own books?” Another dream I had was to make a lot of books. I said, “If people in Korea reach for a book from the National Institute of Ecology whenever they are curious about nature, then it is never going to fall out of business. Let’s do it.” We started with three members, and now we are a publishing house with many publications, even taking up a corner of the Seoul International Book Fair (SIBF). It’s something I’m very proud of.

 

 

Books are a medium that is more directly related to learning than any other. You have stressed the importance of constantly absorbing a wide range of knowledge through books. Why should one choose books over other mediums?

 

Books are one of the greatest inventions we humans have ever made. It’s something that animals can never do, because biologists think that almost every animal in the world has the ability to learn, even flatworms like planaria. However, when it comes to learning, I always say, “Here’s the difference between us, homo sapiens, and other animals: we are the animals that carry the starting line.” Other animals have to learn everything from scratch when they are born, but we invented the book, which allows someone to pass on what they have learned to someone else. Books have played a huge role in making homo sapiens the dominant species on the planet.
Also, I think there’s a definite difference in the taste and charm between digital media and paper books. With paper books, you can mark things up, put them away for a moment, and then go back to them again - and the information you input reinforces the learning. I think that happens on the internet, too, but in my experience, it’s much more often that it’s just skimmed over. There’s definitely a unique appeal to paper books, and I don’t think they will go extinct for that reason alone.

 

 

Books are what make humans different from other animals.

 

 

When we read Choe Jae-Chun’s Study (Gimm-Young Publishing), we get the impression that your studies are going in so many different directions. What were your secrets to achieving world-class results?

 

My friends from high school don’t remember me as being particularly good at studying, but now I’m considered one of the most intellectually brilliant people among my classmates. It’s kind of weird when you think about it, but one of my friends gave me a brilliant answer: “He just studied for a long time.” And, that was the answer. Studying isn’t something you do for a short period of time just to get into college. It’s not necessarily a lifetime of studying with a book. It’s any activity that helps you learn something new to survive, to make you more adaptable to your environment. Other animals do it, too. Efforts to find food quickly, that’s all studying. But, we weirdly think of studying as something you do only for entrance exams. I wanted to break that idea somehow.

 

 

We believe that books for young adults, such as The Table of Consilience (Moving Study), A Scientist’s Study (Moving Study), Discourse (Gimm-Young Publishing), and Choe Jae-Chun’s Hope Lesson (Samtoh), are beloved by readers because they are imbued with your compassionate and caring mind. We wonder how you feel about the current trend of “I don’t need to be nice to others in order to survive” as an ecologist.

 

I think it’s actually changing a little bit lately. Of course, there’s an unscrupulous mindset among people that goes, “I’m going to get what’s in front of me faster than anyone else, so that I can somehow survive in this challenging society.” However, a lot of the books that are coming out these days are actually explaining the opposite.
People look at Charles Darwin’s struggle for survival and say, “You have to take down your opponents to survive,” or “There are only so many resources and so many people who want them, so competition is inevitable in this world.” There’s nothing wrong with that, but I think readers just focused on the struggle part of Darwin’s many stories and emphasized it to others, which led to a lot of people thinking that nature is a harsh place, a place where unforgiving laws are at work.
However, as scientists went out into nature in the last two or three decades and made objective observations, they found something unexpected: all the living things that were doing well were cooperating with other organisms. So, biologists who confirmed this started to make a conscience statement. Ten years ago, I wrote a book called No Life Has Survived Alone (Samtoh) as part of that confession. I think the way we look at nature is changing a lot now. We are not so nasty - we help each other every day in a relatively friendly way. Of course, when things get tough, we can do brutal things, but it’s not always like that. I think people will slowly change their minds. I’m seeing a lot of books written by biologists being read lately, and I’m hopeful that we can teach people something new.

 

 

A growing number of youth say they have “nothing they want to do.” Challenging spirit and desire have long been words that symbolize youth - why is this happening?

 

I don’t know if I have the ability to accurately determine the cause and effect, but I think it’s natural. Animals learn things, too. But, other animals learn things because they need it right now. For example, when a chimpanzee’s mom cracks a nut, she puts a stone underneath, and then puts the walnut or something on top of it. Then, she cracks it open with another stone. And, she doesn’t really teach it to her baby, she just cracks her own, and then the baby learns by watching her. The first time the baby tries to crack a nut, it puts it on a round stone, not a flat one. The nut obviously rolls off, because it can’t stay on the round stone. If it were a human mom, she would instantly get mad. Then, when she calms down, she’d explain it to the child in a gentle voice, or she’d give the child her rock. Or she’d crack it open instead and feed it. However, a chimpanzee mom would never do any of those things. The child would just keep going through trial and error, and then one day, it just catches on.
I think humans are supposed to grow up in the same way: learn to read out of necessity and read books because it’s fun. However, it seems to me that our young people become so tired of trying things out in this world where parents start preparing them at an early age to get into med school. The current lethargy and lack of interest in our children is our fault. The young animals I have observed, the children of homo sapiens, can have so much fun that the day goes by so quickly if they are left alone. Kids have the right to do so, and that’s the environment they should be living in. But, it is us, the adults, that created this environment where they don’t find it interesting. I think that’s the most frustrating part.
So, I went to a lot of middle school and high schools to tell kids about what I think. I told them, “Don’t just roll around in your room effortlessly, this is something that you will have to work through, there’s a limit to what parents can do for you,” and “So please don’t just cower in the corner, go for it, find out what you like to do, look around, explore, get your hands on it, do everything, and if you find something interesting, go find someone who does it, watch them do it, read books written by people who do it, keep looking, and one day you will find the one you want to do.” If you take the pressure off, all the baby animals in the world will start playing around.

 

 

Earlier this year, you published Conscience (The Class), a book that takes a deeper look at seven of the controversial topics you addressed on your YouTube channel “Choe Jae-Chun’s Amazon.” What inspired you to write the book?

 

I have spent my whole life observing animals - and homo sapiens is an animal, too. I always observe the people around me. One of the things that struck me the hardest as I observed Korean society was that, at some point, there seemed to be too many people who were acting unconscionably by any standard. I began to think that, at some point, this was not right. While thinking about this for a long time, I was honored to receive an invitation from my alma mater, Seoul National University, to give the commencement address at their graduation ceremony. So, I chose the topic of “conscience.” I found other keywords around the word conscience, and they were “equity” and “fairness.”
In the speech, I said, “Too many of your seniors talk about fairness just in words,” and “Equity plus conscience equals fairness.” I urged them to pursue cordial and noble justice, not perfunctory fairness. I told them, “Turning a blind eye to those who benefit and those who don’t is only fair at best. There are too many cases where fair treatment is not fair to the socially disadvantaged; in such cases, if anyone should be more attentive and warm, it should be you, the most chosen students in Korea, students of Seoul National University.” The response was very good, so I took the courage to write a book. Of course, I don’t think a book can create a conscientious society, but I thought I could at least revive the word conscience, which I heard every day when I was a child.

 

 

Last but not least, do you have any new books in the works or topics you would like to write about in the future?

 

I have over 300 videos that I have made with my YouTube crew. I am thinking of picking out keywords from those and doing a book a year or so around them. My next book is going to be about “diversity,” because, as a society, we say that diversity is important, but in reality, it’s not. That’s something that I’m trying to shed some light on.

 

 

 

 

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