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
“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
Other massacred, flightless birds include the dodo of the Indian Ocean’s Mauritius Island, famously clubbed and cooked to death within a hundred years by Portuguese sailors and Dutch settlers it never learned to fear. Because the penguin-like great auk’s range stretched across the upper Northern Hemisphere, it took longer, but hunters from Scandinavia to Canada managed to exterminate them anyhow. The moa-nalo—flightless, oversized ducks that ate leaves—went extinct long ago in Hawaii; we know little about them, other than who killed them.
The most stunning avicide of all, just a century ago, is still hard to fathom in its enormity. Like hearing astronomers explain the entire universe, its lesson gets lost because its subject, when it was alive, literally exceeded our horizons. The postmortem of the American passenger pigeon is so fertile with portents that just a brief glance warns—screams, in fact— that anything we consider limitless probably isn’t.
Long before we had poultry factories to mass-produce chicken breasts by the billion, nature did much the same for us in the form of the North American passenger pigeon. By anyone’s estimate, it was the most abundant bird on Earth. Its flocks, 300 miles long and numbering in the billions, spanned horizons fore and aft, actually darkening the sky. Hours could go by, and it was as though they hadn’t passed at all, because they kept coming. Larger, far more striking than the ignoble pigeons that soil our sidewalks and statuary, these were dusky blue, rose breasted, and apparently delicious.
They ate unimaginable quantities of acorns, beechnuts, and berries. One of the ways we slew them was by cutting their food supply, as we sheared forests from the eastern plains of the United States to plant our own food. The other was with shotguns, spraying lead pellets that could down dozens with a single blast. After 1850, with most of the heartland forest gone to farms, hunting passenger pigeons was even easier, as millions of them roosted together in the remaining trees. Boxcars stuffed with them arrived daily in New York and Boston. When it finally became apparent that their unthinkable numbers were actually dropping, a kind of madness drove hunters to slaughter them even faster while they were still there to kill. By 1900, it was over. A miserable few remained caged in a Cincinnati zoo, and by the time zookeepers realized what they had, nothing could be done. The last one died before their eyes in 1914.
In succeeding years, the parable of the passenger pigeon was retold often, but its moral could only be heeded in part. A conservation movement founded by hunters themselves, Ducks Unlimited, has bought millions of acres of marshland to insure that no game species they value will be without places to land and breed. However, in a century in which humans proved more inventive than during the rest of
2. Power
