The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (12 page)

There was no doubt that it was very big, the Saemangeum Sea Wall. Bigness, you would have to say, was its basic, unignorable characteristic. It took half an hour to drive from one end of it to the other, non-stop, with the Yellow Sea on one side and the extraordinary estuary which it had extinguished, now the deadscape, on the other; when you started out along it, you could not see the finish. But the more I saw of it, the more I felt it had another characteristic I had never before in my life associated with a piece of civil engineering: there was something false about it.

For a start, it was boastful: it not only stretched for 33 kilometres, so yes, it can be seen from space, but it had purposely been constructed 500 metres longer than the Afsluitdijk, the barrage which turned the tidal Zuiderzee in the Netherlands into the freshwater Ijsselmeer, with the specific object of replacing this latter in
The Guinness Book of Records
as the longest sea wall in the world. (There is doubtless a bragging press release somewhere with the figure of just how many million tonnes of concrete went into its construction, although it has passed me by.) It was as if the purpose of the whole development was not need, but vanity. Look what we can do! Biggest on the planet! Yet there was something worse than that, something repellent: the whole thing was dressed up, and it was dressed up in lies. All the signage along the sea wall strove to create a sort of ersatz enthusiasm, a sort of gimcrack cheerfulness, beginning with the
road signs themselves, which were a bizarre combination of stern safety exhortations with what was meant to be homespun Asian folk wisdom:

No Stopping On The Road

Fishing Is Forbidden

Be Happy For A Hundred Years

They were complemented by sizable roadside advertising hoardings with slogans which were pitiful in their speciousness, such as:

Saemangeum – Land Of Hope

or

Saemangeum – Dream Of The Future

or

I ♥ Saemangeum

Most grating of all were the frequent attempts to portray the project as green, in the environmental sense of the word, ranging from labelling the concrete parking places Dolphin Bay or Sunset Bay to publicity posters illustrating smiling, attractive young families looking admiringly on plans for Green Saemangeum, which displayed housing schemes with watercourses and flying creatures vaguely resembling wading birds, of no recognisable species.

This, to portray the project which had done more damage to shorebird habitat than any comparable project in history; this,
to gild the image of the narcissistic construction which had wiped out an estuary that was wondrous, for no discernible purpose.

I thought the whole thing had been put together by people who had a substantial part of their moral compass missing.

It was public relations at its most pathetic.

It was nauseating.

•

Nial wanted me to get a feel for what the birdlife had been like in the estuary before the sea wall snuffed it out; and so, if I write Saemangeum’s elegy here, it is not without having some personal sense of what has been lost.

He took me to the next estuary going northwards, that of the Geum river. The tidal flats on its south side have been consumed by the expanding port of Gunsan, but on the north side, which is in a different administrative district, Seocheon county, the remainder had up till then been protected by the environmentally minded Seocheon mayor, Na So-Yeol, although schemes were constantly being put forward for the remaining flats to be reclaimed; and on the drive there, we came across a half-built road which was pointing directly towards the estuary, as if its promoters were just waiting for the moment when they could finish the job and share in the development bonanza which another tidal flat reclamation would provide.

Nial took me to watch the high tide come into Janggu bay, on the estuary’s outer edge; there was a tiny concrete quay where inshore fishing boats brought in substantial cargoes of what seemed to be cockles, which made a perfect observation platform for the bay as a whole. Almost the first bird we saw was a far-eastern curlew, which is the world’s biggest wader, its decurved bill being even longer than that of its cousin the
Eurasian curlew, the curlew of the Dee with its melancholy bubbling song – numbers of which were also in the bay.

We watched the far eastern curlew catch a crab from the black mud and with eye-catching deftness, snap off its legs on one side, turn it around in its bill, and then snap off the legs on the other, before swallowing it. The bird, Nial said, bred in Arctic Russia and wintered in Australia. It had a global population of just 41,000, which, in the IUCN categorisation of threatened species, made it Vulnerable; there were eight species breeding or refuelling on the South Korean tidal flats which were now threatened, he said, with Saunders’s gull and the relict gull, the Chinese egret and the great knot also being classed as Vulnerable; the black-faced spoonbill and Nordmann’s greenshank being classed as Endangered; and the spoon-billed sandpiper, Critically Endangered. All depended absolutely on the Yellow Sea flats which were being so speedily destroyed, he said. ‘Here is a group of species really heading towards rapid extinction, and no one’s talking about it.’

As the sea crept in over the outer flats, wader flocks began to drift into the bay in a steady stream, shimmering clouds of birds settling on the high tide line; Nial, who was expert in counting them, ultimately reckoned there were more than 13,000, including 500 grey plovers, 2,000 great knot, 2,500 far eastern curlews, 3,000 dunlin and more than 5,000 bar-tailed godwits, these last having just arrived from Australia and New Zealand, en route for Siberia. The waders with their wild allure, and their paradox – the gift to us of mud. The mud which will not long remain now. Thinking of the mortal threat to them, I took delight in their abundance, even if the numbers were but a fraction of those which Saemangeum, the living estuary, the wonder of the shorebird world, had once hosted. I mourn Saemangeum’s passing; may its memory remain.

We watched the birds in their nervy congregations, skittish, flickering in the sunshine, for an hour or more; then the tide
retreated, and the flocks began to take off in colossal whisperings to return to their feeding grounds on the outer estuary; and as they did so, I became aware of a plangent metallic noise. It was the rhythmic clanging of a hydraulic hammer, a pile-driver banging in the piles for some major piece of construction somewhere in the vicinity, perhaps even the road, the half-completed road which pointed towards the Geum estuary and its tidal flats, waiting for development to be given the green light. And then I became aware of another noise: a Eurasian curlew was simultaneously bubbling its melancholy spring song, the song I learned to love half a century ago, on the Dee:

Ho, hullaballoing clan

Agape, with woe

In your beaks . . .

The two noises combined in my ears and seemed to coalesce into the whole tragedy of Saemangeum, of the fact that even the natural world’s most remarkable sources of life are now being steamrollered by development, by the frenzied and unchallengeable rush for growth, by the monstrous uncontrollable runaway scale of the human enterprise: here was the curlew, bubbling the spring, and accompanying it the hammer, clanging and tolling its doom.

4
The Great Thinning

So South Korea has destroyed Saemangeum, the bay with its wealth of shorebirds almost beyond imagining, and China has destroyed the baiji, its dolphin, its treasure, the goddess of the Yangtze, in its remorseless fouling and desecration of so much of the natural world . . . but my own country of Britain is no better. In my lifetime, it has wiped out half its wildlife.

This is a quite remarkable historical event which, although it is now at last understood by experts in conservation, has by no means fully penetrated the public consciousness. People may think of how Britain has changed in the last half-century as a country which has lost an empire but become in the meantime more wealthy, more multicultural, more tolerant, and less class-bound – yet hardly anyone would instinctively think of it as a country which, in that same relatively short time, has annihilated half its biodiversity. It is too recent a realisation. Asked to dash off a portrait of the modern United Kingdom for a sophisticated audience, a writer-at-large from
The New York Times
or
Le Monde
or
Corriere della Sera
would never in a million years home in on this change, which to me has altered the character of my
native land as profoundly as has immigration, or the end of social deference, or the coming of sexual equality.

In wildlife terms, the country I was born into possessed something wonderful it absolutely possesses no longer: natural abundance. There was a profusion of life forms all about us, from house flies to house sparrows, even in the suburbs: there was a richness of weeds, there was a richness of pests, there was a richness of organisms that were glorious – the August buddleia of suburban Sunny Bank was covered in glories – and in the countryside, of course, all this was enhanced a thousandfold. Abundance gave exhilarating substance to life, to normal life, which we took entirely for granted: it seemed to be the natural order of things. Indeed, it had been there for untold centuries. It was one of the reasons I fell in love with nature, when I first sauntered out into the countryside of the Wirral as a skinny kid in the fifties to collect birds’ eggs and catch butterflies and fill glass jars with newts (to live in a washing-up bowl in our garden shed until they died, God forgive me) – and the Wirral possessed nothing of the wildlife opulence of somewhere like Dorset. But it was rich enough, and nature so rich was easy to love. Now the riches have gone, and the wildlife that surrounds us in our everyday lives in Britain, and beyond us in the greater part of the rural landscape, is, with a few exceptions, impoverished, scanty, and sparse; wildlife that is worthwhile can still be found, but it must be sought out. Abundance, blessed, unregarded abundance, has been destroyed.

That this should happen, that a country should lose half its wildlife in little more than half a century seems unimaginable, scarcely to be believed – is there a historical parallel? – but the figures are there, in the most comprehensive datasets in the world for the changing status of at least three major groups of species: birds, wild flowers, and butterflies. Their British populations have all been devastated. The key period of loss was probably between 1960 and 1990 (although it began before and
has continued strongly since), yet the scientific recognition of the true scale of the losses, taken in the round, has only come about since the start of the new millennium. Some of my generation, the baby boomers, felt it in their bones, some of them sensed things were changing profoundly, but mostly their lives were too full, privileged, and enjoyable to stop and look closely, and anyway, they were approaching retirement before the full astonishing picture emerged of what had been destroyed.

The engine of this destruction took British society by surprise: it was farming. One of the key characteristics of wildlife in Britain, especially in the lowlands of England, is often overlooked because it is so obvious: it exists on farmland. It has nowhere else to go. This is by no means the case in tropical countries, say, or even in the United States, where you would not think of taking a wildlife holiday in somewhere like the grain prairies of Kansas; you would go to a wilderness area such as Yellowstone, the national park. America is so big that it can happily have separate locations for large-scale agriculture and for wild things. But Britain cannot. It is small and its countryside has long been an intimate mix of habitats where wildlife and farming have had to coexist and traditionally did so; indeed, this is what gave the scenery its celebrated loveliness and charm. A cornfield did not just contain corn, it contained blood-red poppies and glowing blue cornflowers as well, and clouded yellow butterflies flew about it and skylarks sang above. It was a landscape that delighted.

In my boyhood, people worried about threats to the countryside, but the concerns focused on development, on the siting of new factories and new towns, on piecemeal ‘ribbon development’ of new housing along rural roads, and especially on such excrescences as American-style advertising hoardings, or the march of tall electricity pylons across cherished views. Thus in 1947 the Town and Country Planning Act set up a legal system specifically to keep all this in check, to make sure that the actions of individual persons or companies, in development
terms, were in line with the wishes of society as a whole. No one, no one at all, foresaw that agriculture itself would be the wrecker. Farmers were respected and seen in the public mind as the eternal guardians of the countryside and its wildlife, and consequently excluded from the planning system and in no way bound by its constraints. As Mr Schwarzenegger would say:
Big Mistake
.

For after the Second World War two major changes came to farming in Britain. The first was new technology: immensely powerful new agricultural machines, chemicals and techniques. The second, even more important, was the economic pressure to use all this to the uttermost, to squeeze every last penny of profit from the land. The whole process is referred to as intensification, and the shift to intensive farming was initiated by the government itself, by the post-war Attlee administration, which was obsessed by how close the German U-boats had come to cutting off Britain’s imported food supplies during the war. Britain needed to be self-sufficient in food, they felt, and production needed to be expanded drastically. So British farmers were for the first time given a guaranteed price for whatever produce they were minded to grow, and if their guaranteed minimum price fell below the market price, then they would get payments to make up the difference.

This price support meant that for the first time it became profitable to plough up any marginal land, any piece of down-land or moor or scrub or damp pasture which had not previously grown crops, but which, conversely, might be very wildlife-rich. Furthermore, generous capital grants were made available to do this, and to get rid of any pesky obstructions in the way of the big new modern machines, such as hedges, copses, woods, ponds, and ditches – landscape features where wildlife, of course, had also long flourished. A frenzy of subsidised bulldozing began, of hedgerows especially, thousands of miles of them disappearing, some of them hundreds of years
old, as the landscape, especially in eastern England, was reshaped from the traditional patchwork-quilt of small to medium-sized fields variegated with their hedges and woods and quirky corners, to vast plain prairies of wheat and barley, Kansas-style. And let’s not forget the orchards. Age-old orchards, atmospheric groves of gnarled, lichen-covered trees which had borne fruit time out of mind. They were grubbed out by the hundred.