Where wildlife thrives without man
Jun 10, 2009
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There’s one little area of the world where man barely exists, where rare wildlife is actually abundant, and is a hope for some scientists to create a “gene bank” where wild animals could be reproduced and reintroduced to other parks and wildlife refuges?
Yosemite? Nope. ANWAR? Nope. The Amazonian rain forest? Not exactly.
The DMZ. Yes, I’m talking about the no-man’s land between North and South Korea, where a testy ceasefire has been in place since 1953. There almost 400 square miles of land cradling a zone of several miles that’s dividing the Korea peninsula. When you have about one million landmines, people are going to be discouranged from traipsing about, so now the DMZ has become a de facto wildlife park, with rare cranes, mammals including wildcats, and even seals.
I visited the area twice when I took part in the requisite Panmujom DMZ tour in Korea. I was struck by how the landscape changed drastically as we approached the outpost that has served as the one meeting point between the two Koreas. Trees suddenly became tall and were densely packed, green was the only color I could see, and the air was fresh.
This special little swatch of pristine land is threatened, however. Residential development in South Korea is sprawling, while the North Koreans continue to build workers’ villages that produce worthless goods and even worse pollution. Between the hard stance of South Korea’s current president and the missteps of his predecessor, and North Korea sabre rattling once again (and trusting its future to a 26 year old who seems capable of doing little else than playing video games), talks of cooperation between the two sides to establish a wildlife refuge has languished.
It’s sad because when I lived in Korea, frogs and squirrels were considered exotic wildlife. I even had a friend who cried when he saw a frog at a national park cause he had never seen one.
Yes, Korea has a bevy of issues blindsiding its people at the moment, but this may be a lost opportunity. 