The World Without Us

“Think of a Korean Gettysburg and Yosemite rolled together,” says DMZ Forum co-founder, Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson. Even with the expensive prospect of clearing all the land mines, Wilson believes that tourism revenue could trump agriculture or development. “A hundred years from now, of all the things that happened here in the last century, what will matter most will be that park. It will be the legacy most treasured by the Korean people, and an example for the rest of the world to follow.”

It’s a sweet vision, but one on the verge of being swallowed by subdivisions that already crowd the DMZ. The Sunday after he returns to Seoul, Ma Yong-Un visits the Hwa Gye Sah Temple in the mountains north of town, one of Korea’s oldest Buddhist sanctuaries. In a pavilion adorned with carved dragons and gilded Bodhisattvas, he hears disciples chant the Diamond Sutra, in which Buddha teaches that all is like a dream, an illusion, a bubble, a shadow. Like the dew.

“The world is impermanent,” the gray-robed head monk, Hyon Gak Sunim, tells him afterward. “Like our body, we must let go of it.” Yet, he assures Ma Yong-Un, to try to preserve the planet isn’t a Zen paradox. “The body is essential for enlightenment. We have an obligation to take care of ours.”

But the sheer number of human bodies now makes caring for the Earth a particularly perplexing koan. Even the once-sacrosanct tranquility of Korea’s temples is under assault. To shorten the commute into Seoul from outlying suburbs, an eight-lane tunnel is being dug directly beneath this one.

“In this century,” insists E. O. Wilson, “we’ll develop an ethic of letting population gradually subside, until we reach a world with far less human impact.” He says this with the conviction of a scientist so steeped in probing the resilience of life that he claims it for his own species as well. But if land mines can be swept for tourists, real estate mongers will scheme for the same prime property. If a compromise results in developments surrounding a token history-nature theme park, the only viable species left in the DMZ will likely be our own.

Until, that is, the two Koreas—together nearly 100 million humans on a peninsula the size of Utah—finally topple under the weight of their resident Homo population. If, however, people simply vanish first, even though the DMZ may be too marginal to sustain Siberian tigers, “a few,” muses Wilson, “still prowl the mountains of the North Korean-Chinese borderlands.” His voice warms as he envisions them multiplying and fanning across Asia while lions work their way up southern Europe.

“Pretty quickly there would be a tremendous spread of remaining megafauna,” he continues. “Especially the carnivores. They’d make short work of our livestock. After a couple hundred years, few domestic animals would remain. Dogs would go feral, but they wouldn’t last long: they’d never be able to compete. There would be a huge shakeout involving species introduced wherever there’s been human disturbance.”

In fact, bets E. O. Wilson, all human attempts to improve on nature, such as our painstakingly bred horses, would revert to their origins. “If horses even survived, they would devolve back to Przewalski’s horse”—the only true wild horse remaining, of the Mongolian steppes.

“The plants, crops, and animal species man has wrought by his own hand would be wiped out in a century or two. Many others would also be gone, but there would still be birds and mammals. They’d just be smaller. The world would mostly look as it did before humanity came along. Like a wilderness.”

CHAPTER 14 Wings Without Us

1. Food

AT THE WESTERN end of the Korean DMZ, on a mud-pancake island in the Han River estuary, nests one of the rarest large birds of all: the black-faced spoonbill. Only 1,000 remain on Earth. North Korean ornithologists have clandestinely warned colleagues across the river that their hungry comrade citizens swim out to poach spoonbill eggs. The South Korean hunting ban is no help, either, to geese that land north of the DMZ. Nor do cranes there banquet on rice kernels spilled by mechanized harvesters. The reaping in North Korea is all by hand, and people take even the smallest grains. Nothing is left for birds.

In a world without humans, what will be left for birds? What will be left of birds? Of the more than 10,000 species that have coexisted with us, ranging from hummingbirds that weigh less than a penny to 600-pound wingless moas, about 130 have disappeared. That is barely more than 1 percent, almost an encouraging figure if some of these losses hadn’t been so sensational. Moas stood 10 feet tall and weighed twice as much as an African ostrich. They were extinguished within two centuries by Polynesians who sometime around AD 1300 colonized the last major planetary landmass that humans discovered, New Zealand. By the time Europeans appeared some 350 years later, piles of big bird bones and Maori legends were all that remained.