Inside North Korea's Environmental Collapse
Scientists who recently visited the hermit nation report the situation is dire.
BYPHIL MCKENNA
THURSDAY, MARCH 7, 2013
Farmers preparing a field for the planting season outside Wonsan, North Korea, in the shadow of a denuded hillside.---
North Korea has been hiding something. Something beyond its prison camps, its nuclear facilities, its pervasive poverty, its aching famine, its lack of energy—electrical, fossil, or otherwise. What the hermit kingdom has been covering up is perhaps more fundamental than all of those: an environmental collapse so severe it could destabilize the entire country. Or at least, it was hiding it.
Before ecologist Margaret Palmer visited North Korea, she didn’t know what to expect, but what she saw was beyond belief. From river’s edge to the tops of hills, the entire landscape was lifeless and barren. Villages were little more than hastily constructed shantytowns where residents wore camouflage netting, presumably in preparation for a foreign invasion they feared to be imminent. Emaciated looking farmers tilled the earth with plows pulled by oxen and trudged through half-frozen streams to collect nutrient-rich sediments for their fields. “We went to a national park where we saw maybe one or two birds, but other than that you don’t see any wildlife,” Palmer says.
Other Fish in the Sea
“The landscape is just basically dead,” adds Dutch soil scientist Joris van der Kamp. “It’s a difficult condition to live in, to survive.”
Palmer and Van der Kamp were part of an international delegation of scientists invited by the government of North Korea and funded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science to attend a recent conference on ecological restoration in the long-isolated country. Through site visits and presentations by North Korean scientists they witnessed a barren landscape that is teetering on collapse, ravaged by decades of environmental degradation.
“There are no branches of trees on the ground,” Van der Kamp says. “Everything is collected for food or fuel or animal food, almost nothing is left for the soil. We saw people mining clay material from the rivers in areas that had been polished by ice and warming their hands along the roadside by small fires from the small amounts of organic bits they could find.”
Farmers carrying supplies on foot in North Korea.The country’s ecological ruin is partially responsible for the disastrous famine in the 1990s, when massive flooding washed away crops and destroyed stored grain. Today, it continues to undermine the country’s economy and threaten national stability. Yet as dire as the current situation is, it’s neither unprecedented nor irreversible. And the sooner environmental conditions can be improved, the better things will be for either the current regime or whoever is left to pick up the pieces.
A Broken Landscape
For Palle Madsen, visiting North Korea was a bit like going back in time 150 years. “At that time the forest was nearly completely gone here in Denmark,” says Madsen, a forester at the Danish Center for Forest Landscape and Planning at the University of Copenhagen. “There wasn’t a totalitarian regime, but we had a similarly overexploited and degraded landscape. It influences the entire microclimate when you remove all of the trees,” Madsen says.
During a three-day conference in Pyongyang, the nation’s capital, North Korean scientists spoke frankly to delegation members about problems related to deforestation and overexploitation of the soil. Mountains make up much of the country’s landscape leaving only 15 percent of land available for agriculture. Erosion, lack of nutrients, and acidification of the soil have had a devastating effect on crop yields, according to presentations by members of North Korea’s Academy of Sciences.
North Korea’s isolation means detailed data on environmental conditions are hard to come by. However, a 2004 study by the Korea Environment Institute based in Seoul, South Korea, reports that forest cover in North Korea dropped by 17 percent from the 1970s to the late 1990s. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, which provided oil to its communist ally at a discounted “friendship price,” oil imports dropped by 60 percent. Unsurprisingly, the use of firewood for heating more than doubled.
North Korean soldiers hauling firewood back to base. Fuel for heating is scarce, so many rely on what wood they can find, including, apparently, the normally well-supplied Korean People's Army.---------
What resulted was an increasingly barren landscape. Even saplings are felled for fuel, stripping forests of their ability to regenerate. “They don’t have trees to hold the soil,” says Jinsuk Byun of Sookmyung Women’s University in Seoul. Byun was not a part of the recent delegation but has closely followed environmental conditions in the country. “When it rains the soil washes into the river, landslides occur and rivers flood. It triggers a really serious disaster.”
Damage from a July 2012 flash flood near South Hamgyong, North Korea.Conditions in North Korea appear to be little better now than during the famine of the 1990s. In Pyongyang, generally considered to be the most well-off city in the country, delegation members saw bonfires burning on apartment balconies at night, presumably lit by residents to keep warm. Other basic utilities were lacking, too. “I saw a woman lifting a bucket of water with a rope up ten stories to her apartment,” Palmer says.
Looming Famine?
Such glimpses of reality in North Korea are seldom seen but often rumored. “Guided tours are designed not to show you poverty,” says Barbara Demick, author of Nothing To Envy , a book about the lives of ordinary North Koreans who later defected. She says living conditions for the vast majority of those living in the country are likely much worse than what the researchers saw on their tour. “Up to 10 percent of the country perished from starvation in the 1990s. It’s a cold mountainous country, and there is very little arable land. North Korea is highly dependent on artificial fertilization and irrigation and when they ran out of electricity, everything spiraled downhill.”
The lack of birds and other small animals noted by the scientists on their recent visit are a direct result of the famine in the 1990s, Demick says. “The frogs disappeared because everyone caught the frogs,” Demick says. “You see many fewer birds and small animals in North Korea than other countries. People living near the sea ate seaweed but that also ran out.” Ongoing food scarcity continues to take its toll.. A United Nations reportreleased in May 2012 estimated that two-thirds of North Korea’s 24 million people continue to suffer from chronic food shortages and malnutrition.
Similar famines occurred throughout Europe in the 1800s due to over-exploitation of the land, says Madsen, the Danish forestry expert. What turned things around in Europe was the development of artificial fertilizers, the capacity to breed better crops, emigration to North America, and above all, land reform. “The feudal system of old Europe was still in existence,” he says. “It’s a different system in North Korea, much worse than the feudal system of Europe, but allowing farmers to own their own land is what changed things here.”
The reddish hue of exposed soil in North Korea indicates a lack of organic matter, which is vital for farming.----
Small-scale land reform has begun in North Korea, but such policy changes may be making matters worse instead of better. In recent years, the government has allowed individual households to cultivate their own private vegetable gardens. But that has lead to the cutting down and cultivation of forested hillsides.
“They are farming every inch of the land,” says delegation member Keith Bowers, president of Biohabitats, an ecological restoration consultancy based in Baltimore, Maryland. “From the rivers to the hillsides, there is no vegetation on this landscape that provides any of the types of ecosystem services in terms of stabilizing soils, filtering air, attenuating flood flows, or controlling against erosion.” Flooding in North Korea left more than 212,000 people homeless last year according to recent news reports. “You have whole towns being buried in mud because they’ve terraced around the town,” Demick says.
Costs of Reunification
North Korean scientists told the delegates that they would like to reforest hillsides with trees, including the Japanese chestnut, black chokeberry, and Korean pine, that could both stabilize the soil and provide edible fruits and seeds. But funding for such reforestation appears tight. During their week-long visit the foreign scientists were taken to a tree nursery that is part of the country’s current reforestation effort. The automated potting machinery was inoperable either due to a lack of fuel or spare parts, delegates report, and its greenhouse stood empty. Even if the nurseries were running at full capacity, North Korea would still have a long road ahead of it. Bowers estimates that reforesting even half the country would cost around $46 billion, an amount that exceeds the nation’s annual gross domestic product by $6 billion.
Despite the bleak outlook, many in South Korea view reunification with the north and absorbing the costs of retooling the country as inevitable. Estimates for the cost of reunification run from the hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars. Byun, of Sookmyung Women’s University in Seoul, has studied the German reunification as a possible model for Korea. In the 1990s, Germany spent the equivalent of approximately $450 billion in today’s dollars to reduce air and water pollution from factories, waste treatment systems, and inefficient power plants, Byun says.
A woman operates a machine inside a fertilizer plant in North Korea.But reunifying Korea would be a more daunting challenge, in part because of the heavily depleted soils. North Korean farmers are heavily reliant on nitrogen-based fertilizers, which in certain formulations can paradoxically drain the soil of nutrients. “It’s a very unbalanced fertilizer, lacking in magnesium, calcium, potassium, and phosphorus,” says Dutch soil scientist Van der Kamp of the fertilizer predominantly used in North Korea. “When you don’t replace those minerals you basically mine the soil for these other nutrients, so the soils in general are very acidic, with very low organic matter content and low microbial activity.”
In 2012 the United Nations planned to distribute 2,000 metric tons of fertilizer containing each of the above-mentioned minerals to 260 collective farms as part of a $14 million agricultural aid package. But that aid is likely a drop in the bucket in terms of what is needed.
Hope For Collaboration
Rather, delegation members would like to see ongoing collaborations with the scientists they met during their trip. The idea is that a more informed scientific community in North Korea could help the country recover from its environmental collapse in a more sustainable fashion, one not reliant on infusions of aid.
Bowers, of U.S. company Biohabitat, is working with the Society of Ecological Restoration to set up a chapter in China to exchange technological information with North Korean scientists. “If we are looking at any kind of regime change in next 25 to 40 years in North Korea, I think that doing whatever we can from an ecology restoration perspective will only enhance people’s ability to effect a positive regime change,” he says. Madsen, the Danish soil scientist, is currently looking for funding to host North Korean scientists to study in Europe.
“It was pretty hard to have good interactions with our colleagues there, but you could feel some of the people were both smart, and you felt they really wanted increased cooperation and interaction with us,” Madsen says. “It’s encouraging to proceed to try to raise some funding to do something for them. We can only hope changes will happen in that country, good changes in the near future, so we can have something to build on with these colleagues when it does.”
Photo of flood damage courtesy EU Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection (CC-BY-SA).
All other photos courtesy Joseph A Ferris III (CC-BY-NC-ND).
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Margaret A. Palmer
Margaret A. Palmer (/ˈpɑːlmər/; born 1955) is a Distinguished University Professor[1] in the Department of Entomology at the University of Maryland and director of the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC). With a background in hydrology and ecology, Palmer has contributed to testing and extending fundamental theory in marine and stream ecosystems on the interactions between organisms, boundary layer flows, and geomorphic processes. She is an international expert on the restoration of streams and rivers and co-author of the book Foundations of Restoration Ecology. She has worked extensively on the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem processes, the biogeochemistry of streams and wetlands, and organism dispersal in aquatic ecosystems. Palmer is widely published and has been an invited speaker in numerous and diverse settings including regional and international forums, science-diplomacy venues (e.g., in North Korea[2]), and popular outlets such as The Colbert Report. Dr. Palmer has received many honors including election as a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program, the Lilly Fellows Program, and the Award of Research Excellence from the Society for Freshwater Science.
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Education and early career[edit]
Palmer was born in 1955 in Florida, grew up in foothills of the South Carolina mountains and attended Emory University (1972-1977) as a first generation college student. She completed her M.S. and Ph.D. in coastal oceanography at the University of South Carolinawith a focus on hydrodynamics and dispersal of benthic organisms. In 1987 Palmer went to the University of Maryland and began research to test in streams hypotheses derived from fundamental ecological theory that was developed in marine systems related to the role of hydrodynamics and boundary layer flows in the community dynamics of invertebrates. Since then she has been actively engaged in research and teaching at the University of Maryland aside from a 1.5 year stint as a program officer in Ecology at the National Science Foundation.
Current activities[edit]
By the late 1990s she began working closely with natural resource managers to better understand how basic research could contribute to the conservation and restoration of running-water systems. This ultimately led her to propose creation of a National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center which now serves the broad community of social, natural, and computational scholars, policy makers, business leaders, and other stakeholders in co-developing solutions to difficult problems at the interface of humans and nature. Aside from current work with SESYNC, her active research group focuses on watershed and social approaches to restore streams and on the role of intermittent streams in the flux of materials to perennial waters. She also works extensively with nonprofits on freshwater issues and on the impact of coal mining on running-water systems in the Appalachians and in Alaska.
Major professional work experience[edit]
- 2011-present Director, National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center
- 2005-2011 Director, Chesapeake Biological Laboratory, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science
- 1999-2001 Director, Ecology Program, National Science Foundation
- 1997-1999 Director, Biological Sciences Program, University of Maryland
- 1997-present Professor, University of Maryland
- 1986- 1987 Visiting Scientist, Division of Invertebrate Zoology, Smithsonian Institution
- 1983- 1987 Assistant Professor of Biology, Wabash College
Awards[edit]
- 2015 Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland
- 2015 Award of Research Excellence, Society for Freshwater Science
- 2012 Fellow, Ecological Society of America
- 2012 41st Henry J. Oosting Memorial Lecturer, Duke University
- 2011 University System of Maryland, Board of Regents Faculty Award for Excellence
- 2010 University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, President's Award for Excellence in Research Application
- 2006 Distinguished Ecologist citation, Colorado State University
- 2006 Ecological Society of America, Distinguished Service Award
- 2002 AAAS Fellow
- 2001 Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellow
- 1993 Distinguished Scholar Teacher, University of Maryland
- 1990 Lilly Fellow
- 1986 McLain-McTurnan Research Scholar, Wabash College
- 1983 Byron K. Trippet Research Scholar, Wabash College
- 1979 Slocum Lunz Doctoral Fellowship and Belle W. Baruch Predoctoral Fellowship
- 1976 Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Student Fellowship
- 1973 Academic Scholarships from Emory University and the Sirrine Foundation
- 1977 Phi Beta Kappa
Significant publications[edit]
- Palmer, M.A. et al. 2004. Ecology for a crowded planet. Science 304: 1251-1252.
- Bernhardt, E.S., M. A. Palmer et al. 2005. Restoration of U.S. Rivers: a national synthesis. Science 308:636-637.
- Palmer, M.A. et al. 2010. Mountaintop Mining Consequences. Science 327 (5962): 148-149.
- Palmer, M.A., C. Reidy, C. Nilsson et al. 2008. Climate change and the world’s river basins: anticipating response options. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 6: 81-89.
- Palmer, M.A., B. Koch, and K. Hondula. 2014. Ecological restoration of streams and rivers: shifting strategies and shifting goals. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 45: 247-269
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