Saemangeum, South Korea: 35°41'48"N, 126°33'24"E
Mud is mysterious. It’s nature’s magic gel: capricious, dynamic, malleable.
Physicists label mud a thixotropic substance: Churned enough, it morphs from a semi-solid that you can walk on to a fluid that’ll suck you under. (Just ask clammers.) Mud softens the force of the oceans’ surf, blunting erosion. Deposited onto coastlines, it hosts a dazzling gumbo of microbes, mollusks, arthropods and worms—the organic glue that binds teeming wetlands. Some of the world’s richest mudflats ring the shallow Yellow Sea between China and South Korea. Millions of birds and billions of fishes and shellfish thrive on mucky shores there. Or did once. Sixty-five percent of these frail ecosystems have vanished in recent decades under the bulldozers of land reclamation projects. They’re easy to destroy. They’re mud.
“In the past, no matter where I sunk my spade, I’d find living things,” said environmental activist Oh Dong-pil, chunking holes into a vast mudflat in South Korea named Saemangeum. “I try to be hopeful. I don’t want to think of this place as dead yet. If the water returns, it’ll come back.”
It looked plenty dead to me.
After the 33-kilometer-long Saemangeum Seawall was built, tens of thousands of shorebirds disappeared from an area that was one of the most important habitats along the Yellow Sea.
Youngrae Kim
Oh sampled the steamy surface of the tidal flat—stepping, digging, stepping again—like a madman on a treasure hunt. His reward: a few empty clamshells and crab skeletons. Behind him towered the Saemangeum Seawall. Thirty-three kilometers long and taller than a four-story building, it comprised the largest earthen dyke on the planet. The wall stoppered the mouths of two nearby rivers, the Mangyeung and the Dongjin. Seawater no longer flushed a gigantic estuary two-thirds the size of metropolitan Chicago. The wetlands had begun to smell. It was rotting. Oh paused to squint up at a passing white bird.
“Black-faced spoonbill,” he sighed. “Endangered.”
We watched it flap out of sight, trailing wiry black legs. It shrank over a skeletonized shore, formerly a lush marshland, where giant excavators were busy carving channels to drain bogs and dry out the mud. Not another soul was about. The machines looked like stranded dinosaurs.
Black-faced spoonbills fly over Sura tidal flat in Gunsan. Sura is one of the last remaining tidal flats found within the Saemangeum reclamation site.
Youngrae Kim
Mudflats are generally unloved. They don’t draw many acolytes.
Consider a kingdom of drab pickleweeds dotting slabs of wet, brown sediment. A world of white sun, sauna humidity, and few shade trees. Venture on foot into the gooey barrens at low tide, and you’ll get mired. Motor out in a skiff at high tide, and you’ll likely also get stuck. Mudflats are nature’s wallflowers: superficially charmless but with ecologically rich inner lives. They are also quite rare.
A recent survey estimates that, altogether, such intertidal zones comprise barely 128,000 square kilometers of the Earth’s surface. This area could fit, with room to spare, inside Greece. Yet scientists now recognize that tidal flats punch far above their weight not only in biological value but in “ecosystem services.” They serve humankind as vital nurseries for the fishing industry, function as carbon sinks in an age of climate emergency, and help buffer vulnerable coastlines against rising seas. Ironic, then, that they’re being dismantled apace: The same study calculates that at least 16 percent of the world’s mudflats, and likely much more, were paved over between 1984 and 2016.
Saemangeum is the poster child of such destruction in Asia, where coastal development, stoked by economic booms, is most accelerated.
Conceived during South Korea’s military dictatorship in the 1980s, the massive Saemangeum reclamation project originally planned to hold back seawater from 400 square kilometers of muddy “wasteland” for rice plantations. By the time major construction wound down in 2010, it had become awkwardly clear that the exposed marsh soils would never support commercial rice farms. (Today, in some places, salt-tolerant grasses are sown for cattle feed.) With Saemangeum’s official price-tag scraping $3 billion, the government is proposing a new plan to rezone the reclaimed wetlands for “eco-friendly” industrial parks. There is talk of a cruise ship terminal. The hope is to attract 700,000 new residents to the site. Old residents seemed doubtful.
“We actually held a village party when the seawall was finished,” recalled Lee Chang-gil, a leathery former mayor of Yamido-Ri, a tiny island fishing community that scored a bridge to the mainland as a project perk. “About three years later, the fish started to disappear.”
Lee Changgil, a former fishing association chairman, and his seven-year-old granddaughter, Moon Jehee, stand at the dock in Yamido, a small island now connected to the mainland by the Saemangeum Seawall. Many local people have depended on the seafood industry, but the destruction of area tidal flats has significantly decreased their catch.
Youngrae Kim
Rich stocks of fish, octopus, and crabs that once brimmed in the estuary waters and nearby sea, Lee said, have long since cratered. There was a massive shellfish die-off. And at least 300,000 migrant birds plying the East Asian-Australasian flyway—plovers, gulls, cranes—lost a major staging and feeding ground on the Yellow Sea at Saemangeum. Scientists bleakly warn that plummeting local bird counts may be due to starvation as much as displacement.
“From the beginning, I thought this whole project was a con job—nonsense,” said environmentalist Oh. “I think it was just an excuse for big construction contracts.”
Oh’s organization, the Saemangeum Citizens Ecological Group, has been fighting for years to salvage what biodiversity remains on the coastline. He took me to a relict wetland called the Sura tidal flat.
“This is it,” Oh said, standing sunburned atop a dirt berm and sweeping a hand over the scene. “The last 2 percent of original habitat.”
Lee Changgil, a former fishing association chairman, and his seven-year-old granddaughter, Moon Jehee, stand at the dock in Yamido, a small island now connected to the mainland by the Saemangeum Seawall. Many local people have depended on the seafood industry, but the destruction of area tidal flats has significantly decreased their catch.
Youngrae Kim
Rich stocks of fish, octopus, and crabs that once brimmed in the estuary waters and nearby sea, Lee said, have long since cratered. There was a massive shellfish die-off. And at least 300,000 migrant birds plying the East Asian-Australasian flyway—plovers, gulls, cranes—lost a major staging and feeding ground on the Yellow Sea at Saemangeum. Scientists bleakly warn that plummeting local bird counts may be due to starvation as much as displacement.
“From the beginning, I thought this whole project was a con job—nonsense,” said environmentalist Oh. “I think it was just an excuse for big construction contracts.”
Oh’s organization, the Saemangeum Citizens Ecological Group, has been fighting for years to salvage what biodiversity remains on the coastline. He took me to a relict wetland called the Sura tidal flat.
“This is it,” Oh said, standing sunburned atop a dirt berm and sweeping a hand over the scene. “The last 2 percent of original habitat.”
Oh Dong-pil, center, speaks with Paul Salopek, left, and walking partner Lee Junseok on the Sura tidal flat in Gunsan—one of the last remaining within the Saemangeum reclamation site. Oh is the leader of the Saemangeum Citizen Ecology Investigation Team, a grassroots organization that advocates for conservation and documents threats to tidal flats affected by the reclamation project.
Youngrae Kim
The life-giving mud appeared intact. Waist-high grasses screened wild pigs, water deer, water snakes, racoon dogs, and Eurasian beavers. We heard the caw-caw-caw of shorebirds. The only jarring note was what drowned out the birdsong: the afterburner roars of American fighter jets. They streaked deafeningly overhead with the sound of ripping bedsheets, practicing touch-and-go landings. The nearby U.S. airbase boasted a California zip code, Oh noted, sourly. The Korean government intends to massively expand a civilian airport next to it. This will bury the Sura flats. Oh and other green activists are challenging this death-blow project with lawsuits and in the media.
The Saemangeum Seawall teaches by taking away. But this it has given: South Korea’s budding environmental movement.
Environmental activist Oh Dong-pil shovels layers of mud from the Sura tidal flat in Gunsan. “In the past, no matter where I sunk my spade, I’d find living things,” he said. “I try to be hopeful. I don’t want to think of this place as dead yet. If the water returns, it’ll come back.”
Youngrae Kim
It was easy to get lost in Saemangeum.
A big wall amputating land from sea could be deeply disorienting.
Were you standing on natural coastline or on manufactured land? Where was the shoreline? Where was seaward? Where was landward? Much of the drained mudflats resembled abandoned housing developments: plots of scrubby wasteland, carved by canals, that rang emptily under a hammering sun. Bulldozed roads pushed nowhere. The Saemangeum Seawall itself, several football fields wide at its base and topped by a gleaming highway, became the only reliable landmark. And then there was a marooned fishing boat. It sat decaying in the high grass atop dead mud.
“I liked sunsets, waiting for the fish to come up,” said Kim Hyun-cheol, the boat’s owner. “That’s all in the past. It makes me angry. It’s painful to talk about.”
Environmental activist Oh Dong-pil shovels layers of mud from the Sura tidal flat in Gunsan. “In the past, no matter where I sunk my spade, I’d find living things,” he said. “I try to be hopeful. I don’t want to think of this place as dead yet. If the water returns, it’ll come back.”
Youngrae Kim
It was easy to get lost in Saemangeum.
A big wall amputating land from sea could be deeply disorienting.
Were you standing on natural coastline or on manufactured land? Where was the shoreline? Where was seaward? Where was landward? Much of the drained mudflats resembled abandoned housing developments: plots of scrubby wasteland, carved by canals, that rang emptily under a hammering sun. Bulldozed roads pushed nowhere. The Saemangeum Seawall itself, several football fields wide at its base and topped by a gleaming highway, became the only reliable landmark. And then there was a marooned fishing boat. It sat decaying in the high grass atop dead mud.
“I liked sunsets, waiting for the fish to come up,” said Kim Hyun-cheol, the boat’s owner. “That’s all in the past. It makes me angry. It’s painful to talk about.”
Families gather razor clams for dinner at low tide on a tidal flat near the prehistoric Daehangri shell mound alongside the Saemangeum Seawall. Shell middens show that humans have harvested seafood in the region since the Stone Age—a traditional lifeway largely destroyed by the seawall reclamation project.
Youngrae Kim
At 66, Kim was retired from the sea. He lived in a garage piled with unused nets and clam rakes. The Saemangeum Development and Investment Agency that manages the reclamation project had demolished his village to erect a pocket park for tourists. Partly in compensation, Kim was pad $50 a day, three days a week, to man a roadside checkpoint that guarded nothing from nothing. With blunt fingers he ticked off vanished fishing seasons:
March through May: baby octopus.
May through June: cuttlefish and conches.
July through October: crabs and clams.
November through February: “It’s too windy! Rest at home and drink. Or plant some vegetables.”
I tried to imagine what it was like for Kim, and if he ever visited a promotional museum built at the Saemangeum Seawall that celebrated his ruined lifeways behind glass, in anthropological fashion. Not far from the museum rose a shell mound left by prehistoric people. It faced the sea. Modern commuters parked and sifted the mud there for clams. They laughed as they ran their fingers through the mud, almost gratefully it seemed, sifting through a concoction of earth and water and movement, the thixotropic stuff we’re made of.
Tourists visit the National Saemangeum Reclamation Museum near the Saemangeum Seawall in Gunsan. The reclamation project promised to create new land out of tidal flats, but years later, it instead has led to the loss of livelihoods in local communities and the destruction of crucial wildlife habitat.
Youngrae Kim
