The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (11 page)

Extinction seemed to be looming for ‘the spoonie’, but an international group of ornithologists decided on a desperate last throw to save it: they would establish a captive breeding population half the world away from its normal nesting sites, at Slimbridge in Gloucestershire, the wetland reserve founded by the painter and naturalist Sir Peter Scott, which is the leading
centre of expertise in the conservation breeding of endangered waterbirds. And this was duly done. In 2011 eggs were taken from the wild in Chukotka and hatched locally in incubators, and the chicks were then successfully transported, not without taxing difficulties, to Gloucestershire. It was a wonderful wild-life story, one full of enterprise and hope and a certain amount of controversy (not everybody agrees with captive breeding), with at its heart as engaging and photogenic a creature as you could wish for, and I wrote about it, as did many other environmental journalists: it was all over the BBC. As I researched the background, though, I started to see the larger picture and began to comprehend the apocalyptic threat hanging over the millions of migrant birds which depended on the Yellow Sea, with the rapid destruction of its tidal flats; and I came across this most extraordinary example of all of large-scale reclamation, this place called Saemangeum.

I’d never heard of it. The long battle to save it had passed me by entirely. But reading about it, I was gripped by the story of the giant sea wall which had done such harm to the natural world, especially after I looked it up on Google Maps and clicked on the satellite photo and suddenly there it was – the colossal barrage, seen from space, a bright white thin ribbon of concrete in the sea and behind it the huge dying estuary with its drying mudflats, no longer washed by the tides, no longer alive with shellfish and millions of other invertebrates, no longer peopled by numberless waders with their wild cries. It was astounding in its scale. It was unparalleled in the damage it had done. But more than any of that, it was everything I had always feared might happen to the Dee.

I know I was lucky. For a young person to fall in love with a place is surely one of life’s greatest blessings, almost as remarkable a stroke of good fortune as being born into a happy family. It gives an electric charge to life and a sense of purpose which carries forward: existence henceforth cannot be seen as merely
flat, boring, or meaningless. Whatever or wherever the place, whatever the nature of the love, it almost certainly involves an early acquaintance with beauty; an early acquaintance with worth; an early acquaintance with joy. And so it was with me at fifteen, with my parcel of wilderness.

For after I began to love it, in that sunlit October of 1962 when the world brushed up against Armageddon, the smiling old Pope threw open the worn-out shutters of the Church, and the Beatles began their dizzy ascent, I loved it dearly; I loved it as you might love a relative, an uncle, say, whom you had met for the first time in your teens, and who turned out to be quite exceptionally kind and intelligent and warm and wise: all at once there was something more, an unexpected and blessed presence in your life. I knocked a lot on that uncle’s door, I went many times to the Dee and its untamed marshes throughout the rest of my adolescence, and I always went alone; my feeling was too personal to share. I think I almost saw it as a secret, the wildness of the estuary, although of course it was available to anyone; perhaps I mean, the nature of the feeling it produced in me, perhaps that was the secret, for you might expect to find that only in dramatic landscapes in distant lands, but I had stumbled upon it a mere bike ride from my suburban home.

I have tried to articulate it here with reference to the nineteenth-century Americans who understood so deeply why wilderness mattered, although I have to say in doing so, I have taken something of a liberty with timescales, for it was years before I read Thoreau and those who followed him; yet not long after my deep attachment to the Dee began, I did find my own expression of what the estuary meant to me in reading Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Victorian Jesuit whose poems, unpublished until thirty years after his death, had given some comfort to my mother in her distress, and who was himself torn between an overflowing joy in the natural world and a tortured guilt in the face of God (perhaps because of an unadmitted homosexuality).
I loved all his stuff, especially the famous poems like ‘Spring and Fall’ and ‘The Windhover’ and ‘Pied Beauty’, but one day I came across a lesser-known Hopkins quatrain which leapt off the page into my mind and has been present in the forefront of my consciousness ever since:

What would the world be, once bereft

Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,

O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

There was my Dee, in ringing verse. Let them be left . . . I had no doubt then that they would be, the wet and the wildness. Just as the defining experiences of our youth, the ones which assume semi-mythical status in our own minds, stay with us all our lives, so it is natural to suppose that the places and circumstances which gave rise to them will similarly remain. Yet as the years passed such certainty faded, and I started to fear for the wetland that I loved. I started to fear that it might be destroyed.

There were two reasons for this. One was, that concrete proposals were put forward for its destruction. In 1971 a full-scale study was undertaken for a Dee Crossing and Reservoir Scheme, which would have turned it into two enormous artificial lakes behind a barrage topped with a new motorway from Merseyside into north Wales. It was a time when civil engineers were keenly attracted to the idea of throwing barrages across Britain’s estuaries and reclaiming them: several of the biggest were in their sights, including Morecambe Bay, the Wash and the Severn, and over the following years, various versions of a Dee barrage were proposed, all of which would have meant an end to the wilderness and the untouched landscape, an end to the saltmarshes and the cries of the waders on the wind: an end to everything. Turned into reservoirs. Or farmland. Or housing. Or an industrial estate. I could easily see it happening. Why
not? For the other reason I felt anxiety was a realisation that had begun to dawn on me: basically, nobody cared about estuaries. I had fallen in love with an anomaly. Most people saw the mouths of rivers as neither one thing nor another; they were the poor relations among landscape features, not remotely figuring in popular culture.

Don’t you think?

I mean, know any estuary songs? Plenty about mountains and rivers and the sea, about forests and meadows and lakes. But estuaries? No. No one would ever speak up for them. No one would write their elegies when they were gone. They were regarded merely as between-areas, not here, not there, and their attractions were invisible; they were instinctively discounted.

So for much of my life I have had a nagging feeling that the landscape I fell in love with as a teenager was living on borrowed time, that somewhere so special could not really last, that sooner or later they would stick a barrage across its mouth like a giant gag and that would be that – telling my wife Jo, for example, when I first brought her to the Dee in 1991 and let her see it in panorama from the sandstone summit of Thurstaston Hill, that I was astounded I was still able to show it to her; and therefore, it is a cause of no small satisfaction to me that, partly because no barrage scheme ever did get off the ground, and partly because they did build the motorway to north Wales but they built it further south, and partly because the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds began buying up huge chunks of the estuary to defend it, and partly because formidable legal protection eventually arrived in the shape of the environmental laws of the European Union, the wilderness I stumbled upon all those years ago has not been destroyed, and every time I come round the corner on to the Parkgate promenade and see it stretching away, my heart lifts, as despite all the threats, despite all the plans for reservoirs and road crossings, despite all my fears, more than half a century on, the Dee is still there.

But Saemangeum is not. Saemangeum is gone. Extinguished. Rubbed out. The whole thing. It haunted me. I kept going back to Google Maps, spellbound by the satellite photo: so simple it seemed, the thin white line in the sea, stretching neatly from one point to another; such destruction it had done. There, but for the grace of God, went the Dee.

Yet no one seemed to be bothered about it.

It was over.

It was finished.

It was history.

It was only an estuary.

Who writes elegies for estuaries?

In the end, after thinking about it for three years, and seeking out some of the few people in Britain who knew about it and had actually been there, and hearing their stories, I resolved I would do it myself, I would go and bear witness to it, which is why, at the start of April 2014, I am standing with Nial Moores on the headland at Simpo, a small settlement in the centre of Saemangeum between its two now canalised rivers, the Dongjin and Mangyeong, looking out incredulously at the deadscape.

He is fifty, chunkily built. He runs Birds Korea, the conservation body he founded a decade ago, with a website in Korean and English. He speaks fluent Korean; his partner is a Korean woman; he seems to be almost morphing into a Korean himself, but not quite. He remains a British birder, a recognisable type (his brother Charlie is also a bird conservationist, back in Britain) with a passion that dates back to his early childhood in Southport, on the other side of Liverpool from my Dee, which he knows; among his first memories, from the age of five, are the calls of the wild geese, the pink-feet, flying out at night from the marshes behind Southport to roost on the Ribble estuary. (‘I thought at first it was angels’ trumpets.’) He came to Korea in 1998 by way of Japan, where he had spent eight years, shifting from his teaching career to become a full-time conservationist; he learned
Japanese and became deeply involved in environmentalists’ struggles to save threatened Japanese wetlands. Eventually, Korean environmentalists invited him over to share his birding expertise in the survey he carried out for them, which disclosed the full wonder of Saemangeum; and he stayed.

He tells me the history of the fight to save the estuary, a determined and bitter battle, involving lengthy court cases and many demonstrations, most movingly, the
samboilbae
of 2003. The word means ‘three steps and a bow’ and refers to a procession thus performed, with those taking part taking three steps, dropping to their knees and bowing down to the ground – touching it with head and elbows – then getting back up and repeating the process. It is enormously demanding, spiritually as well as physically, but to express their sympathy with the creatures that would die in the estuary’s destruction, in the spring of 2003 two Korean Buddhist monks and two Korean Christian ministers led a samboilbae all the way from Saemangeum to Seoul. It took them sixty-five days to complete, in all weathers, and eight thousand people met them in the capital. But even that was not enough. In April 2006 the final gap in the sea wall was closed, and the estuary’s fate was sealed. There were demonstrators at the barrage that day, but Nial went birding elsewhere: he could not bear to watch it.

He is torn between his love for his adopted country and what he sees it doing to the natural world. It has already obliterated three-quarters of its tidal flats, he says, and he thinks reclamation is being carried out now for reclamation’s sake. ‘It’s so sad. I feel love for Korea. I want to be part of Korea. But this . . . it’s just so disastrous. It’s on an unimaginably huge scale. It’s hard to get my head around it even now, and I look at it hundreds of times.’ I was in agreement with him. My impressions of South Korea were unhappy ones. I liked the Koreans I met and I enjoyed the different, fiery food, but I beheld a country rapidly destroying its own beauty by its economic growth
mania: it was China writ small. They had performed a similar trick, they had pulled their people out of poverty, from a national income of less than $100 a head in 1960, on a par with some countries of sub-Saharan Africa, to $33,000 a head fifty years later, when it had become the twelfth largest economy in the world; but the environmental price, as with China, was appallingly high. The frenzy of construction struck me most forcibly. The country seemed obsessed with building things, with piling up more and more infrastructure; it had to be constructing new roads everywhere even though an extensive national highway system had been in place for years and it didn’t seem to need them; it had to be not only putting up new bridges and dams and industrial complexes and ports left, right and centre, and block after block of office buildings, but to be tearing down what was there already and rebuilding it, whatever it was. There were very, very few old buildings; most if not all of the ones I saw, even the tourist attractions, turned out to be replicas: new old buildings. Historic villages, ten years old. ‘If they have a nice river, with meadows by it, where people like to walk,’ said an English acquaintance in Seoul, the capital, ‘They can’t just leave it alone. They’ll develop it, and turn it into an eco-park. That’s the Korean way.’ I felt the construction mania had reached the stage where it was blighting the land, which is not vast and cannot absorb an unlimited pummelling without showing the bruises: I only spent a week there and I only travelled a few hundred miles, so of course I missed huge amounts of the country, but I did not come across a single landscape in my time in South Korea that I would describe as unspoiled.

Saemangeum exemplified it all – that is, what you get sooner or later if you are wholly consumed by the obsession with economic growth: the deadscape. We looked at it from several places and from several angles and it never ceased to amaze, the scale of it, and the scale of what had been lost, recounted to me vividly by Nial, and also the fact that the estuary might
have been reclaimed, but eight years on, the reclaimed forty thousand hectares had still not been put to use. It was just an empty brown plain of rough grass. No industry, no agriculture, no housing. Nothing whatsoever. Why had this colossal project been so essential, if eight years after completion, the authorities were still wondering what to do with it? It seemed more than anything to be development for development’s sake, a view which was strongly reinforced when we went to see the ostentatious artefact that had caused all the trouble.