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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
Environmental protection in the Korean DMZ is purely accidental. In 1953, no one gave a thought to protecting wildlife when a temporary truce halted the fighting there. Instead, North and South Korea and their respective allies wanted only to end the human savagery that had killed 10 percent of the peninsula's civilian population and resulted in military casualties numbering, on one side, 900,000 Chinese and 520,000 North Korean troops, and, on the other, 400,000 United Nations troops. The war began on 25 June 1950 when North Korea backed by the Soviet Union and the Chinese invaded South Korea in an attempt to reunify the nation, a nation divided in the last days of World War II. The 1953 truce, still in effect today, created a narrow no-man's land roughly along the 38th parallel where no army is supposed to go. Although called the Demilitarized Zone or DMZ, this thin ribbon of territory is decidedly militarized. As the American GIs there say, “there ain't no D in the DMZ.” Unlike every other inch of dry land on the planet besides Antarctica, the Korean DMZ falls outside the control of any single military or any single nation. It is truly a no-man's land. Reckless human violence has necessitated the evacuation of all human beings, and the unintended result is a zone left free for other species. Although the consequences of the continued low-grade war have been tragic for humans, other creatures have flourished because of our relative absence.
1 Don Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1997), 9-10.
2 Don Oberdorfer, ibid., 2.
3 This phrase is used in Kwi-Gon Kim and Dong-Gil Cho, ‘Status and Ecological Resource Value of the Republic of Korea's Demilitarized Zone,‘online publication 19 March 2005 © International Consortium of Landscape and Ecological Engineering and Springer-Verlag Tokyo 2005.
4 Gavan MacCormack, “The Road to Copenhagen,” 13 September 2009 (accessed October 15, 2009)
5 Park Grimm, “Distribution and Protection of the Long-tailed Goral in the DMZ and Civilian Control Zone,” DMZ: Biodiversity and Conservation in the DMZ (Seoul: Korean Environment Institute, conference proceedings, 1006), 49.
6 Park Grimm, ibid., 50.
7 David S. Wilcove, No Way Home: The Decline of the World Great Animal Migrations (Washington: Island Press, 2008) traces bird migration in South and North America, a migration which has the same parallels and perils as the great bird migrations from Australia to Russia.
8 Lee Woo-Shine, Wee-Haeng Hur and Shin-Jae Rhim, “Distribution Characteristics of Black-faced Spoonbill Platalea minor in Western Coast of South Korea,” Korean Journal of Ecology 24/4 (2001), 219.
9 Lee Kisup, “Importance of DMZ for Breeding Side of Black-Faced Spoonbills,” DMZ: Biodiversity and Conservation in the DMZ (Seoul: Korean Environment Institute, conference proceedings, 2006), 28.
10 Joon Hwan Shin, Jong-Hwan Lim, and Jung Hwa Chun, ‘Unique Biodiversity and Landscapes of Korea's Demilitarized Zone (DMZ): Overviews, ‘International Conference on Korea's DMZ Conservation: Science and Impact Assessment (Seoul: conference proceedings, 4 June 2007), VI-10-14.
11 The ROK Ministry of Defense has proposed reducing the CCZ by five kilometers. Hall Healy, ‘Korean Demilitarized Zone: Peace and Nature Park, ‘International Journal on World Peace 24/4 (December 2007), 72.
12 In 1896, discussions between Japan and Russia almost resulted in dividing the peninsula, although apparently not at the thirty-eighth or thirty-ninth parallel as many historians have claimed, according to Bruce Cumings, Korea Place in the Sun (updated edition) (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 123.
13 Don Oberdorfer, ibid., 58.
14 Joon Hwan Shin, Jong-Hwan Lim, and Jung Hwa Chun, “Unique Biodiversity and Landscapes of Korea's Demilitarized Zone (DMZ): Overviews,” International Conference on Korea DMZ Conservation: Science and Impact Assessment (Seoul: conference proceedings, 4 June 2007), VI-4.
15 The 2005 Environmental Sustainability Index was produced by the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network, Columbia University. It integrates seventy-six data sets to measure the ability of nations to protect their environments in the coming years. These findings emphasize the importance of government policy in creating sustainability, and find that there is no direct corollary between economic development and environmental protection, although civil and political liberties correlate highly with sustainability. Link. (accessed 19 January 2009).
16 Cho Myung-Rae, ‘The Emergence and Evolution of Environmental Discourses in South Korea, ‘Korea Journal 44/3 (Autumn 2004), 139.
17 Lee Hongkyun, ‘Environmental Awareness and Environmental Practice in Korea, ‘Korea Journal 44/3 (Autumn 2004), 178.
18 Lisa M. Brady, ‘Life in the DMZ: Turning a Diplomatic Failure into an Environmental Success, ‘Diplomatic History 32/4 (September 2008), 597.
19 Peter Hayes, “Unbearable Legacies: The Politics of Environmental Degradation in North Korea,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 41-2-09, October 12th, 2009.
20 Kwi-Gon Kim and Dong-Gil Cho, ‘Status and Ecological Resource Value of the Republic of Korea's Demilitarized Zone, ‘online publication 19 March 2005 © International Consortium of Landscape and Ecological Engineering and Springer-Verlag Tokyo 2005.
21 Lisa M. Brady, ‘Life in the DMZ: Turning a Diplomatic Failure into an Environmental Success, ‘Diplomatic History 32/4 (September 2008), 609.
22 Tours to the Diamond Mountain were suspended in July 2008 by the South Korea's Unification Ministry when Park Wang-ja was killed by a North Korean soldier when she walked into a fenced-off military zone near the resort in the early morning of July 11, 2008. Choe Sang-Hun, “South Korea to heed North on quick exit from resort” International Herald Tribune 11 August 2008.
23 Kwi-Gon Kim and Dong-Gil Cho, ‘Status and Ecological Resource Value of the Republic of Korea's Demilitarized Zone, ‘online publication 19 March 2005 © International Consortium of Landscape and Ecological Engineering and Springer-Verlag Tokyo 2005.
24 Choe Sang-Hun, ‘N. Korea Scraps Accords with South, ‘New York Times 30 January 2009 here.
25 Ted Steinberg, ‘Down to Earth: Nature, Agency, and Power in History, ‘American Historical Review, 107/ 3 (June 2002), 798-820.
26 J. R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World, (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2000), 20.
27 Other scholars have also noted environmental history's relative lack of self-reflection and engagement with theoretical issues, most especially in the social sciences. Sörlin Sverker and Paul Warde, ‘The Problem with The Problem of Environmental History: A Rereading of the Field, ‘Environmental History 12/1 (January 2007), paragraph 28. Link. (accessed 30 January 2009)
28 The first chair of history was founded at the University of Berlin in 1810. France followed suit in 1812, and England, belatedly, joined the movement with Oxford's Regis Professorship of History in 1866. It was not until 1875 that English undergraduates could read for a degree in historical studies. See Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1973) 136. In Japan, Tokyo Imperial University invited a German historian, Ludwig Riess, to hold the first chair of history, meaning non-Japanese history, in 1887. Two years later, in 1889, a department of Japanese history was established. See Jiro Numata, ‘Shigeno Yasutsugu and the Modern Tokyo Tradition of Historical Writing, ‘in W.G. Beasley and E.G. Pulleyblank, eds., Historians of China and Japan (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 278.
29 One of the earliest articulations of history in this sense can be found in a charming essay by Jean Bodin, Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (1566): “Of History, that is, the true narration of things, there are three kinds: human, natural, and divine.… In accordance with these divisions arise history's three accepted manifestations - - it is probable, inevitable, and holy - - and the same number of virtues are associated with it, that is to say, prudence, knowledge, and faith.” After many recondite elaborations, Bodin places his bets on human history and probability. The agents historians should focus on are human. Historical narratives in tracing the wisdom or folly of human choices will accord neither with the inevitable script of natural necessity nor the providential randomness of miraculous intervention. Instead of knowledge or faith, says Bodin, historians end up with a prudent grasp of probabilities. History, importantly, is the territory of limited free will. Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History translated by Beatrice Reynolds, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1945), 15.
30 William Cronon, ‘A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative, ‘The Journal of American History 78/4 (March 1992), 1368.
31 Cronon, ibid., 1375.
32 Cronon, ibid., 1367.
33 Cronon, ibid., 1375.
34 Quoted in Nancy Langston, ‘AHR Conversation: Environmental Historians and Environmental Crisis, ‘American Historical Review 113/5 (December 2008), 1441.
35 Richard C. Hoffman, ‘AHR Conversation: Environmental Historians and Environmental Crisis, ‘American Historical Review 113/5 (December 2008), 1442 and 1446.
36 The transformation in agency and the redefinition of human and animal is happening not only in historical research but in law and society more generally. Spain passed a limited bill of rights for primates in July 2008. Link.
37 Brett L. Walker, “Animals and the Intimacy of History,” unpublished paper. [emphasis mine] I am grateful to Professor Walker for permission to quote from his paper.
38 Stephen J. Pyne, ‘Firestick History, ‘The Journal of American History 76/4 (March 1990), 1139.
39 Steve Pyne, ‘Environmental History without Historians, ‘Environmental History 10 (January 2005), 72.
40 E. LeRoy Ladurie, The Territory of the Historian, translated by Ben and Sian Reynolds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 15.
41 E. H. Carr examines and excoriates this view in Carr, What is History? (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 13-20.
42 See, for instance, Geoff Eley's magnificent examination of historical practice in the late twentieth century. Not only does Eley not mention environmental history (despite a photograph of a Great Blue Heron on the dedication page) as he traces the major debates in the field, those responding to his book in a special forum of the American Historical Review did not consider this a problematic omission. Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007).
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