– ‘from the tropics to the tundra’ – and back again; and BirdLife International, the worldwide partnership of bird protection bodies, recognises and publishes maps of eight of them, eight mass transit systems, as it were, strung like thick vertical stripes around the globe. The Dee estuary, for example, is bang in the middle of the East Atlantic Flyway, the main route for the hosts of migrants which winter in sub-Saharan Africa and migrate in the spring up the Atlantic coast or over the Mediterranean, to breed in Europe and points north.
The Yellow Sea is also bang in the middle of a flyway, in this case the East Asia/Australasia Flyway, which may be something of a mouthful – it’s easier to call it the EAAF – but which is, out there in the natural world, a wondrous phenomenon, older than history, as big as the weather, and something we are only now able to comprehend and visualise. It is the annual coming together of all the migrant shorebirds of the eastern half of Asia and all the migrant waders of Australia and New Zealand, in the stupendous springtime trek they make northwards to the tundra and coastline of Siberia to breed. Imagine it, looking at a map with China at the centre: two great streams, one from the bottom left, one from the bottom right, both pouring north and meeting halfway up, then flowing as a single stream to the top. Fifty million birds are thought to be involved.
The Yellow Sea is where the two streams join because it is the key staging point on the whole journey. Extensive areas of intertidal habitat, of mud exposed at low water where the birds can feed and replenish their energy levels, are actually quite rare, all around the world, and the Yellow Sea’s concentration of themis essential both for the wader which has wintered in Burma and the wader which has wintered in New Zealand. The springtime flight these birds make to nest in Siberia is more than five thousand miles, and it cannot be done without refuelling. The Yellow Sea tidal flats are where the refuelling takes place. They are the fulcrum around which the whole flyway is balanced. Fifty million wading birds, including some of the world’s rarest species, depend utterly upon them. And they are being rapidly destroyed.
Reclamation is the process, and Saemangeum, which sits on the Korean side of the Yellow Sea, may be the most notorious example; yet what is happening cannot properly be understood without reference to China, whose Yellow Sea coastline is far more extensive. Modern China will have many impacts on the twenty-first century, but one of the most significant is the threat it poses to nature, which is ghastly. Nowhere on earth is the relentless process of wrecking the natural world being carried on more thoroughly than in the People’s Republic, which, at the time of writing, seems poised to overtake the United States as the world’s biggest economy (at least, by the measure of purchasing power parity). The phenomenal growth upsurge set off by Deng Xiaoping in 1978 has had two extraordinary results: it has pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, and brought about the most concentrated burst of environmental destruction, desecration and pollution the world has ever witnessed. In somewhere like Shanghai, the wealth and the filth can be seen simultaneously. If you stand on the Bund, the elegant waterfront boulevard, and look across the Huangpu river to the skyscraper skyline of Pudong, the financial district, you behold a sight to compare with your first glimpse of Manhattan (it certainly took my breath away). Yet the Huangpu is not a waterway you would want to dip your toe in: in March 2013, for example, the local authorities recovered more than fourteen thousand dead pigs which had been dumped in it. Nor is the air ofShanghai air you would always want to breathe: in December 2013 pollution hit such record levels that the cross-river panorama of Pudong could barely be seen in the smog, and parts of the
The Yellow Sea is also bang in the middle of a flyway, in this case the East Asia/Australasia Flyway, which may be something of a mouthful – it’s easier to call it the EAAF – but which is, out there in the natural world, a wondrous phenomenon, older than history, as big as the weather, and something we are only now able to comprehend and visualise. It is the annual coming together of all the migrant shorebirds of the eastern half of Asia and all the migrant waders of Australia and New Zealand, in the stupendous springtime trek they make northwards to the tundra and coastline of Siberia to breed. Imagine it, looking at a map with China at the centre: two great streams, one from the bottom left, one from the bottom right, both pouring north and meeting halfway up, then flowing as a single stream to the top. Fifty million birds are thought to be involved.
The Yellow Sea is where the two streams join because it is the key staging point on the whole journey. Extensive areas of intertidal habitat, of mud exposed at low water where the birds can feed and replenish their energy levels, are actually quite rare, all around the world, and the Yellow Sea’s concentration of themis essential both for the wader which has wintered in Burma and the wader which has wintered in New Zealand. The springtime flight these birds make to nest in Siberia is more than five thousand miles, and it cannot be done without refuelling. The Yellow Sea tidal flats are where the refuelling takes place. They are the fulcrum around which the whole flyway is balanced. Fifty million wading birds, including some of the world’s rarest species, depend utterly upon them. And they are being rapidly destroyed.
Reclamation is the process, and Saemangeum, which sits on the Korean side of the Yellow Sea, may be the most notorious example; yet what is happening cannot properly be understood without reference to China, whose Yellow Sea coastline is far more extensive. Modern China will have many impacts on the twenty-first century, but one of the most significant is the threat it poses to nature, which is ghastly. Nowhere on earth is the relentless process of wrecking the natural world being carried on more thoroughly than in the People’s Republic, which, at the time of writing, seems poised to overtake the United States as the world’s biggest economy (at least, by the measure of purchasing power parity). The phenomenal growth upsurge set off by Deng Xiaoping in 1978 has had two extraordinary results: it has pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, and brought about the most concentrated burst of environmental destruction, desecration and pollution the world has ever witnessed. In somewhere like Shanghai, the wealth and the filth can be seen simultaneously. If you stand on the Bund, the elegant waterfront boulevard, and look across the Huangpu river to the skyscraper skyline of Pudong, the financial district, you behold a sight to compare with your first glimpse of Manhattan (it certainly took my breath away). Yet the Huangpu is not a waterway you would want to dip your toe in: in March 2013, for example, the local authorities recovered more than fourteen thousand dead pigs which had been dumped in it. Nor is the air ofShanghai air you would always want to breathe: in December 2013 pollution hit such record levels that the cross-river panorama of Pudong could barely be seen in the smog, and parts of the
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