SEOUL -- A merican presidents, soccer stars, paying tourists and the occasional squad of Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders airlifted in to boost U.S. troop morale regularly bus through select checkpoints in the Korean demilitarized zone, but otherwise this 246-km-long, 4 km-wide strip of land is one desolate piece of real estate. Grim-faced South and North Korean soldiers toting machineguns prowl the barbed-wire perimeter, facing off across the foreboding no man's land that has separated the Korean Peninsula for the past 50 years. "Demilitarized zone" seems a misnomer for what is actually the most heavily fortified place on Earth, surrounded by 1.5 million soldiers and countless land mines.
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| Korea's demilitarized zone is a refuge for countless species, including the globally threatened black-faced spoonbill, which now numbers only around 550 (above), and Saunders' gull. PHOTOS COURTESY OF KOREAN FEDERATION FOR ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT |
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But now, momentum is building from within South Korea and abroad to turn this cordon of hell into a patch of heaven -- a world-class, jointly managed nature sanctuary. Ironically, the continuing standoff between North and South Korea has already transformed the DMZ into a wildlife paradise, the last refuge for many species vanished or threatened with oblivion on the rest of the Peninsula.