The World Without Us

In their absence, the netherworld between these enemy doppelgängers has filled with creatures that had practically nowhere else to go. One of the world’s most dangerous places became one of its most important— though inadvertent—refuges for wildlife that might otherwise have disappeared. Asiatic black bears, Eurasian lynx, musk deer, Chinese water deer, yellow-throated marten, an endangered mountain goat known as the goral, and the nearly vanished Amur leopard cling here to what may only be temporary life support—a slender fraction of the necessary range for a genetically healthy population of their kind. If everything north and south of Korea’s DMZ were suddenly to become a world without humans as well, they might have a chance to spread, multiply, reclaim their former realm, and flourish.

Ma Yong-Un and his conservation companions have no recollection of Korea without this geographic paradox binding its midriff. Now in their thirties, they were born in a nation that grew from poverty to prosperity while they themselves were growing. Immense economic success has made millions of South Koreans believe—like Americans, Western Europeans, and Japanese before them—that they can have everything. For these young men, that means having their country’s wildlife, too.

They arrive at a fortified observation bunker where South Korea has cheated. Here, the 151 miles of double fencing topped with coiled razor wire makes a sharp northward jog, following a promontory nearly one kilometer before looping back. That’s nearly half the distance that the truce obliges the two Koreas to maintain from the Demarcation Line, a faint string of posts down the DMZ’s middle that neither side is ever to approach.

“They do it, too,” Ma Yong-Un explains. Any place where a landform offers a view too irresistible to pass up, both sides seem to welcome opportunities to encroach and stare the other down. The camouflage paint on this artillery placement’s cinder blocks serves not to conceal but to display, like a belligerent cock bristling with threats and munitions in lieu of combs and feathers.

At the promontory’s northern edge, the DMZ opens into rugged fullness and vast emptiness for miles in either direction. Although each side has held fire since 1953, large loudspeakers atop South Korea’s positions have blasted regular insults, military anthems, and even strident themes like the William Tell Overture across the divide. The din has bounced off North Korean mountainsides that, over the decades, have been increasingly stripped bare for firewood. The inevitable tragic erosion has led to flooding, agricultural disasters, and famine. Should this entire peninsula one day be bereft of people, its ravaged northern half will take far longer to resuscitate biologically, while its southern half will leave far more infrastructure for nature to disassemble.

Korean DMZ.

PHOTO BY ALAN WEISMAN.

Below, in the buffer separating these vast extremes, are 5,000-year-old rice paddies that have reverted to wetlands during the last half-century. As the Korean naturalists watch, cameras and spotting scopes poised, over the bulrushes glides a dazzling white squadron, 11 fliers in perfect formation.

And in perfect silence. These are living Korean national icons: red-crowned cranes—the largest, and, next to whooping cranes, rarest on Earth. They’re accompanied by four smaller white-naped cranes, also endangered. Just in from China and Siberia, the DMZ is where most of them winter. If it didn’t exist, they probably wouldn’t either.

They touch down lightly, disturbing no buried hair-triggers. Revered in Asia as sacred portents of luck and peace, the red-crowned cranes are blissfully oblivious trespassers who’ve wandered into the incandescent tension of 2 million troops faced off across this accidental wildlife sanctuary in bunkers every few dozen meters, mortars poised.

“Babies,” Kyung-Won whispers, and the lenses fix on two juvenile cranes wading in a streambed, their long bills rooting underwater for tubers, their crowns still juvenile brown. Only around 1,500 of these birds still exist, and each new birth is momentous.

Behind them, in a North Korean version of the Hollywood sign, the hills sprout whitewashed Korean characters that proclaim the supremacy of Dear Leader Kim Jong-il and loathing for America. Their enemies retort with giant marquees whose thousands of lightbulbs flash messages visible for miles about the good life in the capitalist South. Every few hundred meters between observation posts bursting with propaganda is another armed bunker, with eyes peering through a slit at some opposite number across the chasm. The confrontation has burned through three generations of enemies now, many of them blood relatives.