The World Without Us

The site he selected for what qualifies as the United States’ national magnum opus, Mount Rushmore, is a 5,725-foot uplift composed of fine-grained Precambrian granite. When Borglum died in 1941 of a brain hemorrhage, he’d barely begun work on the presidential torsos. But the faces were all indelibly carved in stone; he lived to see the visage of his personal hero, Teddy Roosevelt, officially dedicated in 1939.

He’d even rendered Roosevelt’s trademark pince-nez in rock—a rock formed 1.5 billion years ago, among the most resistant on the continent. According to geologists, Mount Rushmore’s granite erodes only one inch every 10,000 years. At that rate, barring asteroid collision or a particularly violent earthquake in this seismically stable center of the continent, at least vestiges of Roosevelt’s 60-foot likeness, memorializing his Canal, will be around for the next 7.2 million years.

In less time than that, Pan prior became us. Should some equally ingenious, confounding, lyrical, and conflicted species appear on Earth again in our aftermath, they may still find T.R.’s fierce, shrewd gaze fixed intently upon them.

CHAPTER 13 The World Without War

WAR CAN DAMN Earthly ecosystems to hell: witness Vietnam’s poisoned jungles. Yet without chemical additives, war curiously has often been nature’s salvation. During Nicaragua’s Contra War of the 1980s, with shellfish and timber exploitation paralyzed along the Miskito Coast, exhausted lobster beds and stands of Caribbean pine impressively rebounded.

That took less than a decade. And in just 50 years without humans….

THE HILLSIDE IS heavily booby-trapped, which is why Ma Yong-Un admires it. Or rather, he admires the mature stands of daimyo oak, Korean willow, and bird cherry growing wherever land mines have kept people out.

Ma Yong-Un, who coordinates international campaigns at the Korean Federation for Environmental Movement, is climbing through cottony November fog in a white propane-powered Kia van. His companions are conservation specialist Ahn Chang-Hee, wetlands ecologist Kim Kyung-Won, and wildlife photographers Park Jong-Hak and Jin Ik-Tae. They’ve just cleared a South Korean military checkpoint, slaloming through a maze of black and yellow concrete barriers as they entered this restricted area. The guards, in winter camouflage fatigues, set aside their Ml6s to greet the KFEM team—since the last time they were here, a year earlier, a sign was added stating that this post is also an environmental checkpoint for preservation of red-crowned cranes.

While waiting for their paperwork, Kim Kyung-Won had made note of several gray-headed woodpeckers, a pair of long-tailed tits, and the bell-like singing of a Chinese bulbul in the dense brush around the checkpoint. Now, as the van ascends, they flush a brace of ring-necked pheasants and several azure-winged magpies, beautiful birds no longer common elsewhere in Korea.

They have entered a strip of land five kilometers deep that lies just below South Korea’s northern limit, called the Civilian Control Zone. Nearly no one has lived in the CCZ for half a century, although farmers have been permitted to grow rice and ginseng here. Five more kilometers of dirt road, flanked by barbed wire filled with perching turtle doves and hung with red triangles warning of more minefields, and they reach a sign in Korean and English that says they are entering the Demilitarized Zone.

The DMZ, as it is called even in Korea, is 151 miles long and 2.5 miles wide, and has been a world essentially without people since September 6, 1953. A final exchange of prisoners had ended the Korean War— except, like the conflict that tore Cyprus in two, it never really ended. The division of the Korean Peninsula had begun when the Soviet Union declared war on Japan late in World War II, on the same day that the United States dropped a nuclear warhead on Hiroshima. Within a week, that war was over. An agreement by the Americans and the Soviets to split the administration of Korea, which Japan had occupied since 1910, became the hottest point of contact for what became known as the Cold War.

Abetted by its Chinese and Soviet communist mentors, North Korea invaded the South in 1950. Eventually, United Nations forces pushed them back. A 1953 truce ended what had become a stalemate along the original dividing line, the 38th parallel. A strip two kilometers on either side of it became the no-man’s-land known as the Demilitarized Zone.

Much of the DMZ runs through mountains. Where it follows the courses of rivers and streams, the actual demarcation line is in bottomland where, for 5,000 years before the hostilities began, people grew rice. Their abandoned paddies are now sown thickly with land mines. Since the armistice in 1953, other than brief military patrols or desperate, fleeing North Koreans, humans have barely set foot here.