QUOTE : A metaphor for this, and also a fact, which is lovely and also terrible in this case, is the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, which I got to visit recently. It’s about three miles wide and runs from one end of the peninsula to the other, and it’s the most demilitarized piece of real estate on the earth. There are, as you know, eight species of Asian cranes. All of them are either endangered or nearly endangered, and two of them are making a comeback because they do their winter foraging in the demilitarized zone, which has been made into an unintentional national park. And if North and South Korea ever settle their problems and remove the last nuclear trip wire of the Cold War, that land will probably be developed, and those two species, which are ten million years old, will be gone from the earth.