BIRDS Korea: “What Does Wilderness Mean to You?”

A month back I was contacted by Mr. Michael McCarthy, one of the UK’s top writers on the environment. For his next book he wanted to see Saemangeum with his own eyes.

Saemangeum, formerly one of the world’s most important estuaries for wildlife, was recently described by Business Korea as a “large land reclamation project that can be seen from space.” As Mr. McCarthy and I saw, Saemangeum is in fact now a vast and empty wasteland. Huge billboards, many rusting and tattered-edged, proclaim the area to be the Dream of the Future, the symbol of Green Growth. Gone now, however, are the billions of small animals that once lived in the mud there; gone are the thousands of shell-fishers that followed the tides in and out each day; silenced are the abundant shorebirds that swarmed there in the hundreds of thousands until only a few years before.

Saemangeum is now a bleak place.

To recharge our spirits and to get a sense of how things used to be, we went north to the still-vibrant Geum Estuary.  There we watched chattering flocks of orange-red godwits and golden-brown curlews spread across silvery mud. We talked joyfully about how these birds, arriving in Korea after non-stop week-long flights all the way from Australia, nonetheless look weighed down by their spectacular bills – natural tools for extracting worms and crabs.

Reminded of the need for food ourselves, we drove on to a convenience store and sat outside with can-coffee in hand. This is when he asked, “What does wilderness mean to you?”

My answer was probably a little hesitant at first. For me at least, wilderness is a place of natural rhythms and forces, where everything fits together. It is a place, or a sense of a place, that is abundant and vital and beyond human control.  Ironically, perhaps, wilderness is where we can best understand what it means to be human and alive.

I offered some examples: we feel peace in wild and natural landscapes but are stressed by ugly architecture and unexpected noise; many of us rejoice at wildlife spectacles; research shows our brain-waves spike each time we are confronted with the unexpected, flooding our bodies with adrenalin to help us flee from danger.

Our species, Mr. McCarthy noted, lived for 20,000 generations in wilderness; a few hundred generations farming; and only a few generations dependent on our new habitat of glass and concrete.  Wilderness was the landscape filled with abundant life in which our own species evolved. Is not wilderness therefore our natural home?

Sitting there, we felt our surroundings intensely. Do others feel the same? Please, let me ask you: what does wilderness mean to you?