Upon returning home from his time as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I, naturalist Henry Beston famously described wild animals as “other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”
Fast-forward to today, as Arabian humpback whales navigate between sea mines in the Strait of Hormuz, and Beston’s prescient quote takes on new resonance.
The history of warfare is often measured in winners, losers, troop sizes, dollars and human casualties; but collateral damage across the animal kingdom far outlasts the final shot.
In Ukraine, home to more than a third of Europe’s biodiversity, constant shelling and drone attacks have already prompted whole populations of wolves, deer and other large mammals to seek asylum far from the nightly explosions and aerial whistles. Animals who have chosen to stay have been described as visibly traumatized, “as if they’re under the influence of some kind of drug.”
The same story plays out in every theater of war because there is virtually no place where humans live in complete isolation from other species. Ours is a world of overlapping animal societies, of which humans are just one part.
According to a 2022 report by the International Fund for Animal Welfare, usage of Agent Orange to eliminate forest cover during the Vietnam War had the added effect of destroying the habitats of Asian elephants, leopards and gibbons. When the animals tried to resettle elsewhere, another 40,000 were killed by forgotten and undetonated landmines over the next two decades.
In Afghanistan, migratory bird populations have dropped by more than 80%. During the Sudanese civil war, South Sudan’s elephant population plummeted from 100,000 to 5,000 over three decades, as herds of gentle bystanders got caught in the crossfire.
So clear is the connection between warfare and the decimation of wildlife that when researchers analyzed decades of animal population trends in Africa, they concluded that “‘the single most important predictor’ of whether species prosper or perish isn’t poaching, or deforestation, or even climate change. It’s human conflict.”
But nature is resilient, isn’t it? “Life finds a way,” as a wise chaotician once said.
After a wildfire, the optimist waits patiently for the eventual return of squirrels, birds and other forest residents. But what this vision of renewal fails to take into consideration is that once animal societies are shattered into a million pieces, they almost never reconstitute in the same form again. Especially if their temporary absence creates a vacuum we want to fill.
There is perhaps no clearer example of humanity reshuffling the natural world than the demilitarized zone (DMZ) that has bisected Korea for seven decades and counting. Prior to the outbreak of the Korean War, majestic red-crowned and white-naped cranes — regal, 5-foot-tall icons of East Asian folklore — could be found in great abundance in wetlands all over the peninsula.
But once the bombs began to fall, George Archibald, celebrated founder of the International Crane Foundation, told me that many bird populations scattered, seeking temporary refuge on the abandoned farms of soldiers who left for the front lines.
Then, once the last shot was fired, the real displacement began.
In the years following the ceasefire — technically an agreement to pause attacks, as no formal peace treaty was ever signed, meaning the Koreas remain at war — a baby boom caused the human population to soar on both sides of the border, rising from around 30 million people to more than 78 million. With this growth came the construction of new factories, freeways and high-rise condos, while devastated wetlands once inhabited by cranes were systematically drained and repurposed for human use, never to return.
The one place that did regenerate naturally, for reasons that remain wholly unclear to the cranes, was the DMZ. A narrow powder keg, barely two miles wide at some points, littered with more than a million landmines and hemmed in by barbed wire and machine guns.
When I spent more than a week traversing the DMZ alongside Archibald — who has also been migrating to Korea every winter since the 1970s — he explained that this forsaken land was all the cranes had left. More than half of all red-crowned cranes and 90% of white-naped cranes on Earth now spend their winters in this sanctuary of last resort.
Alongside them sit refugees of varying shapes and sizes: Oriental storks, Mandarin ducks and black-faced spoonbills — all thankfully too lightweight to set off unexploded ordnance — as well as cinereous vultures, for whom the occasional detonation by a wild boar only makes their new home all the more appealing. A kind of United Nations of avian societies on the 38th parallel, the only place left where their communities have the latitude to live freely.
This cautionary tale should be fresh in our minds as we await the eventual outcome of negotiations in Iran, Ukraine and other modern-day war zones.
No matter who the victors are, once the bombs stop falling, reconstruction will inevitably follow. But if those efforts are solely focused on rebuilding human societies, to the detriment of all other species, it will only breed increased compression and competition over finite space and resources, and create new opportunities for nations to rise and fall.
Ryan Huling is the author of “The Hidden Nations of Animals.”
