For a Swede, the 2018 winter olympic games got of to a good start with Swedish cross country skier Charlotte Kalla being awarded the games first gold medal. But while we salute her and continue to watch the olympic competitions, there are other things to think about. Sadly, it might be hard to host winter olympics in the future due to climate change. But I want to tell you about another story, little known but of great significance.
Even though it’s still winter, the light is slowly returning at northern latitudes and we start to look forward to the coming spring. One of the most revered signs of spring is the return of migratory birds on their way to breeding grounds high up in the Arctic. The long summer days will help them as they feast on the abundant food they need to bring up their offspring and prepare them for the long flight southwards when autumn comes. It is hard to understand how a bird, 15 cm in length can endure a journey of 5-6000 km. A crucial factor is the availability of “refuelling stops” on their journey. For wading birds, such as the spoon-billed sandpiper these pitstops are found along the shores and especially on tidal mudflats, where the coming and going of the tide both replenishes and makes available food in the form of snails, mussels and other invertebrates.
So what has this to do with Korea? More than 10 years ago, on the altar of economic “development”, a man made ecological catastrophe occurred in South Korea. To foster “economic growth” an area of “useless land” was reclaimed from the sea. Across the mouth of the great Saemangeum estuary a sea wall was built that closed it of from the sea. Many square kilometres of the estuary's tidal mudflats were turned into a desert of dry grass. Where previously the calls from hundreds of thousands of wading birds had been heard as they made a stop over on their way to and from the Arctic, there was now silence and rotting carcasses of birds that had starved to death. At the end point of their flight to winter quarters, ornithologists found numbers of birds suddenly plummeting.
I was myself completely unaware of this catastrophe until I started reading Michael McCarhty book “The Moth Snowstorm”. McCarthy grew up by an estuary close to Merseyside in England and fell in love with the wilderness and the birds coming to feed on the mudflats richness of food. Knowing in his heart what the Saemangeum estuary had looked like and witnessing how it now had been turned into a deadscape was nauseating for him, causing a combination of grief and anger. All the more since it was a both a manmade and a totally unnecessary accomplishment, since the reclaimed land still lay barren a decade after the sea wall had killed it.
The Saemangeum sea wall is an unseen tragedy since the effects are mostly felt far from its origin. It is also one of many causes for the ongoing thinning of biodiversity and species. Long before a species goes extinct, it starts to decline in numbers, but we often don’t notice it. Only when a species like the spoon-billed sandpiper becomes critically endangered do we act, putting breeding programs in place if this species its deemed important or attractive enough for us, humans, to keep. Then it is often to late and even if we “succeed” we don’t know how many other species that disappear unseen.
Saemangeum is on the east side of the Yellow Sea, a semi enclosed bay with China on one side and the Koreas on the other. Both China and South Korea have been very active in draining and building in their coastal zones, turning them into ports and industrial parks. Paradoxically for the migratory birds in Asia, North Korea might be their best hope for the future, because the lack of industry and low tech agriculture has left large areas of the North Korean cost in a more natural state. Therefore, a future democratic North Korea must be given guidance to protect what is left of nature in order not to succumb to the growth and development paradigm.
We should not put all the blame for the Saemangeum tragedy or what has and is happening in other areas around the Yellow Sea on South Korea and China. We are complicit. As we watch the olympics on our Samsung mobile, we are fuelling the powers of consumerism, growth and economic development. We have a choice. Do we want future children to grow up and like Michael McCarhty be awed by the contact with nature, or do we want to show them what nature once looked like on our new flat screen TV? In order to even be able to make that choice, stories like that of Saemangeum needs to be told.
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