world’s longest sea wall; a whole ecosystem annihilated. And standing here gazing upon it, at what it has become, and hearing at first hand exactly what it had been, I find welling up in me an unaccustomed emotion which I register with a shock as rage.
Nial Moores, British birder turned Asian environmentalist, discovered Saemangeum’s true riches in 1998 when he carried out the first full assessment of the waterfowl and waders of South Korea’s wetlands and coastline on behalf of a number of Korean environmental groups. It was genuine exploration, as military restrictions had previously made much of the coast inaccessible (South Korea being still officially at war with the North), and as he went round the country, sleeping in farmhouses, living on rice and seaweed and kimchee, Korea’s signature condiment of pickled cabbage, feeling his way down unmapped tracks to the water’s edge with a local activist and a taxi driver, he found nineteen sites that were of international importance for the numbers of shorebirds they held. In Saemangeum, he came upon El Dorado. ‘It was quickly clear that the bird numbers were overwhelming. Eventually, we found a roost at the Okgu salt pans on the northern side of the estuary that was absolutely miraculous. The roost was of fifty to a hundred thousand birds. Just miraculous.’
But Saemangeum was already under threat. South Korea had decided in the 1980s to reclaim two-thirds of the tidal mudflats which fringe the coastline on its western side, and develop them for industry and agriculture; in 1991 it singled out the doubleestuary for the biggest reclamation project of all, to be facilitated by building, from its northern to its southern points, a sea wall more than twenty miles long which would cut it off from the tides and so choke the life out of it. The decision sparked a bitter fifteen-year battle between the South Korean government and the country’s environmental activists. The environmentalists lost, and the resultant obliteration of this unparalleled habitat can be seen as one of the most egregious examples of environmental vandalism the modern world can offer. And yet, hard to credit though it may be, it is only part of a greater calamity still, the unfolding tragedy of the Yellow Sea.
The world has not yet woken up to this, but even in our terrible twenty-first century, it is likely to have few equivalents in terms of wildlife destruction. Peer at a map of east Asia and you will observe, enclosed by China on the left and the Korean peninsula on the right, what looks like a giant bay; and in effect, it is (albeit one 600 miles long by 400 miles wide), having once been a plain with a very gentle slope, which was covered by the rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age. It is called the Yellow Sea because it is coloured by the yellow-brown silt of the Yellow River, China’s second longest, which carries a heavy sediment load; and the gentle slope of the shoreline and the silt load it receives combine with another factor, a very high tidal range, to give the Yellow Sea quite extraordinary wildlife value, which has only been recognised in recent years.
They mean that around much of its coastline there are tidal mudflats which are unusually extensive, and indeed may stretch for miles when the tide is out; and just as on the Dee, these black mudflats are the richest of all environments in terms of the invertebrates they harbour, the numberless congregations of molluscs and marine worms, of tiny crabs and crustaceans. For shorebirds, for waders, they have priceless, life-giving importance, and in fact the Yellow Sea tidal flats form the principal pit stop,the most important shorebird staging post, on one of the world’s great migratory flyways.
The concept of the flyway is also fairly recent: it is a representation of the routes migrant birds use, shorebirds especially, on their annual journeys from the warm south in the winter to the insect-rich Arctic in the summer
Nial Moores, British birder turned Asian environmentalist, discovered Saemangeum’s true riches in 1998 when he carried out the first full assessment of the waterfowl and waders of South Korea’s wetlands and coastline on behalf of a number of Korean environmental groups. It was genuine exploration, as military restrictions had previously made much of the coast inaccessible (South Korea being still officially at war with the North), and as he went round the country, sleeping in farmhouses, living on rice and seaweed and kimchee, Korea’s signature condiment of pickled cabbage, feeling his way down unmapped tracks to the water’s edge with a local activist and a taxi driver, he found nineteen sites that were of international importance for the numbers of shorebirds they held. In Saemangeum, he came upon El Dorado. ‘It was quickly clear that the bird numbers were overwhelming. Eventually, we found a roost at the Okgu salt pans on the northern side of the estuary that was absolutely miraculous. The roost was of fifty to a hundred thousand birds. Just miraculous.’
But Saemangeum was already under threat. South Korea had decided in the 1980s to reclaim two-thirds of the tidal mudflats which fringe the coastline on its western side, and develop them for industry and agriculture; in 1991 it singled out the doubleestuary for the biggest reclamation project of all, to be facilitated by building, from its northern to its southern points, a sea wall more than twenty miles long which would cut it off from the tides and so choke the life out of it. The decision sparked a bitter fifteen-year battle between the South Korean government and the country’s environmental activists. The environmentalists lost, and the resultant obliteration of this unparalleled habitat can be seen as one of the most egregious examples of environmental vandalism the modern world can offer. And yet, hard to credit though it may be, it is only part of a greater calamity still, the unfolding tragedy of the Yellow Sea.
The world has not yet woken up to this, but even in our terrible twenty-first century, it is likely to have few equivalents in terms of wildlife destruction. Peer at a map of east Asia and you will observe, enclosed by China on the left and the Korean peninsula on the right, what looks like a giant bay; and in effect, it is (albeit one 600 miles long by 400 miles wide), having once been a plain with a very gentle slope, which was covered by the rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age. It is called the Yellow Sea because it is coloured by the yellow-brown silt of the Yellow River, China’s second longest, which carries a heavy sediment load; and the gentle slope of the shoreline and the silt load it receives combine with another factor, a very high tidal range, to give the Yellow Sea quite extraordinary wildlife value, which has only been recognised in recent years.
They mean that around much of its coastline there are tidal mudflats which are unusually extensive, and indeed may stretch for miles when the tide is out; and just as on the Dee, these black mudflats are the richest of all environments in terms of the invertebrates they harbour, the numberless congregations of molluscs and marine worms, of tiny crabs and crustaceans. For shorebirds, for waders, they have priceless, life-giving importance, and in fact the Yellow Sea tidal flats form the principal pit stop,the most important shorebird staging post, on one of the world’s great migratory flyways.
The concept of the flyway is also fairly recent: it is a representation of the routes migrant birds use, shorebirds especially, on their annual journeys from the warm south in the winter to the insect-rich Arctic in the summer
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