She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters along the Korean DMZ, and reported the following:
If a reader were to open my book to page 99, they would be hard pressed to identify its main themes or key arguments. Nevertheless, they could likely discern the “quality of the whole” in terms of its methods. It employs historical and ethnographic evidence to examine how ecological knowledge about the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) has been produced. Page 99 is located toward the beginning of Chapter 3 (“Birds”), which focuses ethnographically on the conservation efforts of South Korean ornithologist Dr. Kisup Lee who researches the endangered Black-faced Spoonbill (BFS) off the western coast of the Korean peninsula. The page provides some important details about the transnational network of conservationists Dr. Lee is involved with and information about the political and economic changes that have affected spoonbill and other waterbird habitats. I describe how the destruction of wetlands due to urbanization on the South Korean side and the devastating famine of the late 1990s on the North Korean side of the border led to the disappearance of BFS in their traditional breeding sites. I write that, “Ultimately, dramatic changes in the late–Cold War economies of both Koreas (rapid expansion and rapid decline) contributed to the shift of BFS breeding grounds almost exclusively to the islands of the Yellow Sea.Learn more about Making Peace with Nature at the Duke University Press website.
A main argument of the chapter is that, even as migratory birds that cross over the DMZ have been widely appropriated as cultural symbols of peace because of their ability to physically transcend the national division, in actuality, they are deeply enmeshed in human economies and political ecologies. In other words, although the militarization of the DMZ may provide a sort of refuge for them and other creatures, their migratory lifeways reveal that they survive despite militarization, not due to it.
Avian flyways are one of three “alternative infrastructures” I analyze in the book. The other two are small irrigation ponds and landmines and each provides a meeting point of human, nonhuman, and technical relations. These infrastructures provide the basis for challenging a simplistic discourse that has become common in South Korea and internationally: that the DMZ’s biodiversity represents an example of “nature healing the scars of war.” With respect to Chapter 3, I borrow the notion of “strange kinship” from Merleau-Ponty to analyze how flyways are not simply “natural,” but come into being out of an ethics of care on the part of bird researchers and the lifeways of birds, mediated through technologies such as GPS satellite tracking, motion-detection cameras, and black umbrellas, which, on one fieldtrip, the bird researchers and I used to disguise ourselves as goats. That example is rather involved, and space limitations don’t permit me to summarize it here, but the upshot is that in “becoming goats,” we, to some extent, attempted to shed our human forms in order to convince the BFS that we were harmless. In the broader context of Korean unification politics which often relies upon ethnonationalist fictions of biological familialism, this chapter offers an example of decentering those visions by foregrounding relations of care with nonhuman others. The book as a whole argues that militarized ecologies in the DMZ and elsewhere should be taken less as paradoxical “byproducts” of war, and more as provocations to shift our conceptions of peace to extend beyond only human geopolitics.
--Marshal Zeringue
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