The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (10 page)

‘In the telescope they were dark lines out on the flats,’ says Nial. ‘Then as the tide rushed in they would lift off, they would rise above the horizon and come in towards the shoreline in waves. Wave after wave. Great clouds of birds.’

I gaze at the extent of it, the estuary that is now dead, its flat surface of brown grassland like a vast empty dance floor stretching to that horizon, where it disappears in the mist. I find it hard to take in just how big it really is. Or was. I look to my left, I look to my right: in each direction it is all there is to see, before its distant vanishing. ‘Yeah,’ says Nial, ‘makes the Dee look kinda cute, huh?’

There are a few cisticolas, small warbler-like songbirds, twittering in the grasses, and a solitary grey heron circling far away: that’s it. All that remains of one of the earth’s most remarkable concentrations of life, where the wader numbers reached four hundred or even five hundred thousand, where some of the most captivating creatures on the planet, curlews of different species, dunlin, great knot, bar-tailed godwits, grey plovers, Kentish plovers, Mongolian plovers, Nordmann’s greenshanks, spoon-billed sandpipers, gathered in a profusion that was almost dreamlike. Now the monochrome monotony of the grass is broken only by scattered slabs of concrete and leftovers of rusty iron. The distant lorry trails a dust cloud. ‘Know what you call this?’ says Nial. ‘A deadscape.’

Saemangeum in South Korea: the biggest destruction of an estuary that has ever taken place. It was a double estuary, in fact, of the Dongjin and Mangyeong rivers, in the province of
Jeollabuk-do, or North Jeolla, 160 miles south of Seoul, the capital, and it was 40,000 hectares in extent – three times the area of the Dee – with 29,000 hectares of this being tidal mudflats which at various times of the year hosted so many waders that it was by far the most important shorebird site in Korea . . . perhaps in all of Asia. It was phenomenal. It was one of the wonders of the bird world. Now it is gone, snuffed out by a giant engineering vanity project, the building of the world’s longest sea wall; a whole ecosystem annihilated. And standing here gazing upon it, at what it has become, and hearing at first hand exactly what it had been, I find welling up in me an unaccustomed emotion which I register with a shock as rage.

Nial Moores, British birder turned Asian environmentalist, discovered Saemangeum’s true riches in 1998 when he carried out the first full assessment of the waterfowl and waders of South Korea’s wetlands and coastline on behalf of a number of Korean environmental groups. It was genuine exploration, as military restrictions had previously made much of the coast inaccessible (South Korea being still officially at war with the North), and as he went round the country, sleeping in farmhouses, living on rice and seaweed and kimchee, Korea’s signature condiment of pickled cabbage, feeling his way down unmapped tracks to the water’s edge with a local activist and a taxi driver, he found nineteen sites that were of international importance for the numbers of shorebirds they held. In Saemangeum, he came upon El Dorado. ‘It was quickly clear that the bird numbers were overwhelming. Eventually, we found a roost at the Okgu salt pans on the northern side of the estuary that was absolutely miraculous. The roost was of fifty to a hundred thousand birds. Just miraculous.’

But Saemangeum was already under threat. South Korea had decided in the 1980s to reclaim two-thirds of the tidal mudflats which fringe the coastline on its western side, and develop them for industry and agriculture; in 1991 it singled out the double
estuary for the biggest reclamation project of all, to be facilitated by building, from its northern to its southern points, a sea wall more than twenty miles long which would cut it off from the tides and so choke the life out of it. The decision sparked a bitter fifteen-year battle between the South Korean government and the country’s environmental activists. The environmentalists lost, and the resultant obliteration of this unparalleled habitat can be seen as one of the most egregious examples of environmental vandalism the modern world can offer. And yet, hard to credit though it may be, it is only part of a greater calamity still, the unfolding tragedy of the Yellow Sea.

The world has not yet woken up to this, but even in our terrible twenty-first century, it is likely to have few equivalents in terms of wildlife destruction. Peer at a map of east Asia and you will observe, enclosed by China on the left and the Korean peninsula on the right, what looks like a giant bay; and in effect, it is (albeit one 600 miles long by 400 miles wide), having once been a plain with a very gentle slope, which was covered by the rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age. It is called the Yellow Sea because it is coloured by the yellow-brown silt of the Yellow River, China’s second longest, which carries a heavy sediment load; and the gentle slope of the shoreline and the silt load it receives combine with another factor, a very high tidal range, to give the Yellow Sea quite extraordinary wildlife value, which has only been recognised in recent years.

They mean that around much of its coastline there are tidal mudflats which are unusually extensive, and indeed may stretch for miles when the tide is out; and just as on the Dee, these black mudflats are the richest of all environments in terms of the invertebrates they harbour, the numberless congregations of molluscs and marine worms, of tiny crabs and crustaceans. For shorebirds, for waders, they have priceless, life-giving importance, and in fact the Yellow Sea tidal flats form the principal pit stop,
the most important shorebird staging post, on one of the world’s great migratory flyways.

The concept of the flyway is also fairly recent: it is a representation of the routes migrant birds use, shorebirds especially, on their annual journeys from the warm south in the winter to the insect-rich Arctic in the summer – ‘from the tropics to the tundra’ – and back again; and BirdLife International, the worldwide partnership of bird protection bodies, recognises and publishes maps of eight of them, eight mass transit systems, as it were, strung like thick vertical stripes around the globe. The Dee estuary, for example, is bang in the middle of the East Atlantic Flyway, the main route for the hosts of migrants which winter in sub-Saharan Africa and migrate in the spring up the Atlantic coast or over the Mediterranean, to breed in Europe and points north.

The Yellow Sea is also bang in the middle of a flyway, in this case the East Asia/Australasia Flyway, which may be something of a mouthful – it’s easier to call it the EAAF – but which is, out there in the natural world, a wondrous phenomenon, older than history, as big as the weather, and something we are only now able to comprehend and visualise. It is the annual coming together of all the migrant shorebirds of the eastern half of Asia and all the migrant waders of Australia and New Zealand, in the stupendous springtime trek they make northwards to the tundra and coastline of Siberia to breed. Imagine it, looking at a map with China at the centre: two great streams, one from the bottom left, one from the bottom right, both pouring north and meeting halfway up, then flowing as a single stream to the top. Fifty million birds are thought to be involved.

The Yellow Sea is where the two streams join because it is the key staging point on the whole journey. Extensive areas of intertidal habitat, of mud exposed at low water where the birds can feed and replenish their energy levels, are actually quite rare, all around the world, and the Yellow Sea’s concentration of them
is essential both for the wader which has wintered in Burma and the wader which has wintered in New Zealand. The springtime flight these birds make to nest in Siberia is more than five thousand miles, and it cannot be done without refuelling. The Yellow Sea tidal flats are where the refuelling takes place. They are the fulcrum around which the whole flyway is balanced. Fifty million wading birds, including some of the world’s rarest species, depend utterly upon them. And they are being rapidly destroyed.

Reclamation is the process, and Saemangeum, which sits on the Korean side of the Yellow Sea, may be the most notorious example; yet what is happening cannot properly be understood without reference to China, whose Yellow Sea coastline is far more extensive. Modern China will have many impacts on the twenty-first century, but one of the most significant is the threat it poses to nature, which is ghastly. Nowhere on earth is the relentless process of wrecking the natural world being carried on more thoroughly than in the People’s Republic, which, at the time of writing, seems poised to overtake the United States as the world’s biggest economy (at least, by the measure of purchasing power parity). The phenomenal growth upsurge set off by Deng Xiaoping in 1978 has had two extraordinary results: it has pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, and brought about the most concentrated burst of environmental destruction, desecration and pollution the world has ever witnessed. In somewhere like Shanghai, the wealth and the filth can be seen simultaneously. If you stand on the Bund, the elegant waterfront boulevard, and look across the Huangpu river to the skyscraper skyline of Pudong, the financial district, you behold a sight to compare with your first glimpse of Manhattan (it certainly took my breath away). Yet the Huangpu is not a waterway you would want to dip your toe in: in March 2013, for example, the local authorities recovered more than fourteen thousand dead pigs which had been dumped in it. Nor is the air of
Shanghai air you would always want to breathe: in December 2013 pollution hit such record levels that the cross-river panorama of Pudong could barely be seen in the smog, and parts of the city had to close down.

Nothing like China’s current growth explosion has happened in history. It is hard to get your head around the scale of it: during the first quarter of this century, half of all the world’s new buildings will be erected in China, and fifty thousand of them will be skyscrapers – the equivalent to ten New Yorks. It is similarly hard to take in fully the terrible environmental price that is being paid for this, which began to become visible to the outside world about a decade ago (a key moment being in 2007, when China surpassed the US in carbon dioxide emissions and thus became officially the world’s biggest polluter). It is now increasingly documented, though, and you can pick out jaw-dropping figures at will: in 2006 the heavily industrialised provinces of Guangdong and Fujian discharged nearly 8.3 billion tonnes of sewage into the ocean, without treatment, a 60 per cent increase from 2001; by 2020 the volume of urban rubbish in China is expected to reach 400 million tonnes, equivalent to the figure for the entire world in 1997; and so on. But perhaps a single example should stand for all, that of the baiji, the legendary freshwater dolphin, a true wildlife treasure, ‘the goddess of the Yangtze’: by 2006, so gross and extreme had the industrialisation and pollution of the great river become that the baiji had been driven to extinction.

A major concern, however, is not only what China’s frenzied growth is doing to its own environment, but what it is also doing to environments beyond its borders. The country is now not only the world’s biggest importer of timber, it is also the biggest importer of illegally logged timber, and thus ‘exporting deforestation’; its insatiable demand for wood is the major driver of rainforest destruction around the world. Its demand for ivory, especially since it was allowed to take part in the international
ivory auction of 2008, is behind the renewed upsurge in the slaughter of African elephants; its demand for pangolins, or scaly anteaters, prized both for their meat and their scales, used in traditional Chinese medicine, has meant that all eight pangolin species are now threatened with extinction; its demand for tiger bones for medicinal use is similarly threatening the world’s surviving wild tigers, while its demand for shark fins is behind the booming and unsustainable slaughter of the world’s sharks (one estimate is that 73 million are killed annually for shark fin soup, increasingly served or ordered as a wealth-displaying dish by the burgeoning Chinese middle class). But the most far-reaching effect yet beyond its borders may be in what it is doing to the Yellow Sea, the vital flyway stopping place for the migrant shorebirds of twenty-two countries.

For China’s wholly unchallengeable growth imperative, and the fact that six hundred million of its people, nearly a tenth of the world’s population, live in river catchments which drain into the Yellow Sea, mean that the pressure to reclaim the tidal flats along its coastline is irresistible, and it is proceeding with ever-increasing rapidity. You can argue that such reclamation has always been done, but as a report by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 2012 makes clear, it is the speed and the scale at which it is being done now which is the problem. Since 1980 China has reclaimed no less than 51 per cent of all its coastal wetlands (this includes habitats such as mangroves and sea grass beds), and South Korea, 60 per cent (of a lower base). Of the key areas of tidal mudflats on which the shorebirds of the flyway depend, around the Yellow Sea as a whole, 35 per cent has already gone, and the remainder will go soon. It is likely that every major Yellow Sea tidal flat now has a development plan attached to it.

The situation, barely noticed by the world at large, is regarded by environmentalists involved as a wildlife catastrophe in the making, indeed, it is already happening, with the bird populations
starting to fall: ‘Observed rates of declines of waterbird species of five to nine per cent a year,’ says the IUCN report, ‘are among the highest of any ecological system on the planet.’ Referring to the general effect on the flyway, the report says: ‘The EAAF is likely to experience extinctions and associated collapses of essential and valuable ecological services in the near future.’ The future of fifty million wading birds, and let it be said, of coastal fisheries on which thousands of people depend, is hanging by a thread.

There is perhaps one ray of hope for them, in terms of alerting the world before it is too late: the East Asia/Australasia Flyway has a poster species. The spoon-billed sandpiper is not only one of the most charming of all birds – the tiny wader has a spatulate bill, unique among sandpipers, which gives it a slightly comic air and the consequent endearing appeal of a puffin, while in its russet breeding plumage it is extremely pretty – it is also one of the rarest, and has long been at the top of the wish-to-see list of many birders (it certainly was with Nial Moores, and was one of the reasons for him coming to Asia). Breeding only in Chukotka, the Siberian province in Russia’s far north-east, it winters five thousand miles away around the coastlines of Burma and Bangladesh, dependent like the other waders of the flyway on the Yellow Sea stop-over, and although it was never very common, by the millennium it was clear that it was declining catastrophically. In 2008, with the entire population now thought to be under two hundred pairs and falling at the rate of 26 per cent a year, it was listed as Critically Endangered.