Out of Eden Walk

02/17/2025

🔈📻 Host Carolyn Beeler of The World: You got a little philosophical . . . writing about mud and the nature of mud. Do you see it any differently now than you did before this walk?

🎙️ Paul Salopek: Yeah, I know. It’s just walking through acres and acres of mud with a biologist, driving past this kind of dead wetlands, getting mud on my hands, getting out to visit with tourists trying to find the last clams that might still exist on the beach. I started to think about what is mud after all, right? It’s earth, and it’s water and it’s motion. It requires motion. Mud can’t just settle, or it turns into kind of stone after a while. It requires tides, requires movement. And I thought that’s who we are. That is what life is. That’s what human beings are, that we kind of have these qualities of mud within us. And so, it was very sad to kind of put your hand into this mud and realize that there just wasn’t much living in it anymore. There was no kind of living connection to it.

🎧📖🔗 To listen to or read along with this episode of The World, “South Korea’s Mud Mausoleum” along with previous episodes of the program, click here: https://theworld.org/stories/2025/02/06/out-of-eden-walk-south-koreas-mud-mausoleum

✍️ From The World: National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek tells host Carolyn Beeler about his walk across South Korea’s Saemangeum, a tidal flat on the coast of the Yellow Sea. It was once home to all kinds of birds, mammals, and snakes. Now isolated behind a 22-mile sea wall, the mud flat has lost most of its wildlife.

This story is part of an ongoing series about Out of Eden Walk produced by The World in collaboration with the Walk and National Geographic Society. 🥾

Image description in comments.

02/15/2025

Table excavation: Archeologists Jong Yoon Woo and Hyeong Woo Lee treat Out of Eden Walk to a garlic-infused feast in Suyanggae, South Korea. The region is replete with prehistoric campsites . . . and garlic. 🧄

02/14/2025

“A journey of 38,000-kilometers begins with a single step.”

🎙 Paul recently joined RNZ (Radio New Zealand) to talk about the Out of Eden Walk journey.

Listen to the conversation, “Retracing the first human migration,” at the link below! 🎧

A journey of 38,000-kilometers begins with a single step. 12 years ago this month, journalist Paul Salopek set off on a journey that follows the first human migration out of Africa, starting in the great Rift Valley in Ethiopia where the first human fossils were found with plans to end at Tierra del...

02/14/2025

✍️ “Mud is mysterious. It’s nature’s magic gel: capricious, dynamic, malleable. Physicists label mud a thixotropic substance: Churned enough, it morphs from a semi-solid that you can walk on to a fluid that’ll suck you under. (Just ask clammers.) Mud softens the force of the oceans’ surf, blunting erosion. Deposited onto coastlines, it hosts a dazzling gumbo of microbes, mollusks, arthropods and worms—the organic glue that binds teeming wetlands. Some of the world’s richest mudflatsring the shallow Yellow Sea between China and South Korea. Millions of birds and billions of fishes and shellfish thrive on mucky shores there. Or did once. Sixty-five percent of these frail ecosystems have vanished in recent decadesunder the bulldozers of land reclamation projects. They’re easy to destroy. They’re mud.

‘In the past, no matter where I sunk my spade, I’d find living things,’ said environmental activist Oh D**g-pil, chunking holes into a vast mudflat in South Korea named Saemangeum. ‘I try to be hopeful. I don’t want to think of this place as dead yet. If the water returns, it’ll come back.’

It looked plenty dead to me.

Oh sampled the steamy surface of the tidal flat—stepping, digging, stepping again—like a madman on a treasure hunt. His reward: a few empty clamshells and crab skeletons. Behind him towered the Saemangeum Seawall.” —Paul Salopek

🔗 Tap the link to read “Mud Mausoleum,” Paul’s dispatch, about the longest seawall in the world: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/articles/2025-02-mud-mausoleum

Pictured:

Photo 1: “The government says this land is useless,” says environmental activist Oh D**g Pil, of the Saemangeum wetlands in South Korea. “But it’s an important biodiversity site.” Since the construction of the world’s longest seawall, which has created a dead zone for wildlife, migrant bird populations have plummeted.

Photo 2: Environmental activist Oh D**g Pil shows the size of the wetlands impacted by the Saemangeum project: more than 400 square kilometers.

Photo 3: The vast Saemangeum seawall in South Korea. The 33 kilometer d**e, the longest in the world, chokes off tidal water flows to a once thriving wetland ecosystem.

📷 Photos by South Korean freelance photographer and National Geographic Explorer Youngrae Kim.

National Geographic Society

Image descriptions in comments.

02/13/2025

In South Korea, the longest seawall in the world entombs a globally important wetland.

✍️ Read “Mud Mausoleum” by Paul Salopek, the latest dispatch from Out of Eden Walk here: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/articles/2025-02-mud-mausoleum

Pictured:

Photos 1 & 2: Tourists comb the beaches near Saemangeum, South Korea, the site of the world’s longest seawall. Ancient shell middens show that humans harvested seafood in the region since the Stone Age—a traditional lifeway largely destroyed by the seawall project.

Photo 3: Last remnants: Environmentalist Oh D**g Pil displays a meager shellfish haul sifted from the Saemangeum mud flats in South Korea, once the site of a rich clamming industry.

Photo 4: The vast Saemangeum seawall in South Korea. The 33 kilometer d**e, the longest in the world, chokes off tidal water flows to a once thriving wetland ecosystem.

Photo 5: “It took about three years for the fish to disappear,” recalls Chang-Gil Lee, a former fishing association president at Saemangeum, South Korea, where a gigantic seawall project strangled an estuary vital to sea life reproduction.

Photo 6: The US military is among the tenants of the Saemangeum project’s newly reclaimed seaside. An airbase sprawls beside the dried-out wetlands.

Photo 7: A spadeful of marshland mud reveals dark bands of dense bacterial growth, the bedrock of a once-rich intertidal ecosystem.

Photo 8: Adapting to diminished reality: Vietnamese migrant workers at Saemangeum, South Korea, learn to weave seaweed-growing nets, an experimental marine crop on a coast where fishing has all but vanished due to a massive seawall project.

Photo 9: The US military is among the tenants of the Saemangeum project’s newly reclaimed seaside. An airbase sprawls beside the dried-out wetlands.

📷 Photos by Youngrae Kim.

Youngrae Kim is a South Korean freelance photographer and National Geographic Explorer who documents the environment, culture and news. He has specialized recently on recording the threatened intertidal ecosystems in his region.

National Geographic Society

02/12/2025

EXCLUSIVE: South Korean activists float homemade balloons carrying religious tracts & dollars across the DMZ into North Korea. These covert launches are rarely filmed by journalists. An Out of Eden Walk story on Korea’s “balloon” wars will appear soon in National Geographic Magazine.

02/10/2025

A “balloon war” erupted last summer between North & South Korea. Out of Eden Walk recorded a nighttime launch. South Korean activists floated Bibles, political literature, rice, & US dollars across the Demilitarized Zone. North Korea retaliated with balloons carrying garbage.

02/08/2025

✍️ “It was easy to get lost in Saemangeum. A big wall amputating land from sea could be deeply disorienting.

Were you standing on natural coastline or on manufactured land? Where was the shoreline? Where was seaward? Where was landward? Much of the drained mudflats resembled abandoned housing developments: plots of scrubby wasteland, carved by canals, that rang emptily under a hammering sun. Bulldozed roads pushed nowhere. The Saemangeum Seawall itself, several football fields wide at its base and topped by a gleaming highway, became the only reliable landmark. And then there was a marooned fishing boat. It sat decaying in the high grass atop dead mud.

‘I liked sunsets, waiting for the fish to come up,’ said Kim Hyun-cheol, the boat’s owner. ‘That’s all in the past. It makes me angry. It’s painful to talk about.’

At 66, Kim was retired from the sea. He lived in a garage piled with unused nets and clam rakes. The Saemangeum Development and Investment Agency that manages the reclamation project had demolished his village to erect a pocket park for tourists. Partly in compensation, Kim was paid $50 a day, three days a week, to man a roadside checkpoint that guarded nothing from nothing. With blunt fingers he ticked off vanished fishing seasons:

March through May: baby octopus.

May through June: cuttlefish and conches.

July through October: crabs and clams.

November through February: ‘It’s too windy! Rest at home and drink. Or plant some vegetables.’”—Paul Salopek

🔗 Read “Mud Mausoleum,” Paul’s dispatch about the longest seawall in the world: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/articles/2025-02-mud-mausoleum

Pictured: “This used to be sea. Now, it’s land. Just thinking about it makes me angry,” says former fisherman Kim, visiting his beached and decaying boat in a tidal marsh drained for agriculture at Saemangeum, South Korea.

📷 Photo by Youngrae Kim. Youngrae Kim is a South Korean freelance photographer and National Geographic Explorer who documents the environment, culture and news. He has specialized recently on recording the threatened intertidal ecosystems in his region.

📍 Saemangeum, South Korea: 35° 41’ 48” N,126° 33’ 24”

National Geographic Society

Image description in comments.

02/07/2025

Families gather razor clams for dinner alongside the Daehang-ri shell mound, a prehistoric camping site near the Saemangeum Seawall. Humans have harvested seafood in the region since the Stone Age—a traditional lifeway largely erased by a gigantic wetlands conversion project.

🔗 Read “Mud Mausoleum,” Paul’s dispatch about the longest seawall in the world: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/articles/2025-02-mud-mausoleum

📷 Photo by Youngrae Kim.

Youngrae Kim is a South Korean freelance photographer and National Geographic Explorer who documents the environment, culture and news. He has specialized recently on recording the threatened intertidal ecosystems in his region.

📍 Saemangeum, South Korea: 35° 41’ 48” N,126° 33’ 24”

National Geographic Society

Image description in comments.

02/06/2025

✍️ “Mudflats are generally unloved. They don’t draw many acolytes. Consider a kingdom of drab pickleweeds dotting slabs of wet, brown sediment. A world of white sun, sauna humidity, and few shade trees. Venture on foot into the gooey barrens at low tide, and you’ll get mired. Motor out in a skiff at high tide, and you’ll likely also get stuck. Mudflats are nature’s wallflowers: superficially charmless but with ecologically rich inner lives. They are also quite rare.

A recent survey estimates that, altogether, such intertidal zones comprise barely 128,000 square kilometers of the Earth’s surface. This area could fit, with room to spare, inside Greece. Yet scientists now recognize that tidal flats punch far above their weight not only in biological value but in ‘ecosystem services.’ They serve humankind as vital nurseries for the fishing industry, function as carbon sinks in an age of climate emergency, and help buffer vulnerable coastlines against rising seas. Ironic, then, that they’re being dismantled apace: The same study calculates that at least 16 percent of the world’s mudflats, and likely much more, were paved over between 1984 and 2016.

Saemangeum is the poster child of such destruction in Asia, where coastal development, stoked by economic booms, is most accelerated.” —Paul Salopek

🔗 Read “Mud Mausoleum,” Paul’s latest story from the trail: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/articles/2025-02-mud-mausoleum

In South Korea, the longest seawall in the world entombs a globally important wetland.

The Saemangeum Seawall—the planet’s largest earthen d**e—has choked off seawater to a vast wetlands on the Yellow Sea in South Korea. Such development has consumed more than two-thirds of South Korea’s tidal flats, which provide vital habitat for wildlife and help fight climate change.

Pictured: an overgrown, prehistoric shell mound near the new seawall.

📷 Photo by Youngrae Kim.

Youngrae Kim is a South Korean freelance photographer and National Geographic Explorer who documents the environment, culture and news. He has specialized recently on recording the threatened intertidal ecosystems in his region.

📍 Saemangeum, South Korea: 35° 41’ 48” N,126° 33’ 24”

Image description in comments.

02/04/2025

🔈🎙️ Host Marco Werman of The World: You’ve traveled with many locals in the 21 countries you’ve visited so far. What have those walking partners meant to you?

Paul Salopek: Very early on, I knew that I was going to be walking with people. This is a people project. I can tell you what my impressions are, walking across Ethiopia, or China, or South Korea, but they would soon become repetitive. So, I walk with local people who add their own voices, their own insights, and therefore, it’s constantly being refreshed; the journey is constantly being made new.

🎧📖🔗 Visit this link to listen to or read along with this episode of The World, “A 12 year walk between oceans” along with previous episodes of the program: https://theworld.org/stories/2025/01/23/out-of-eden-walk-a-12-year-walk-between-oceans

This story is part of an ongoing series about Out of Eden Walk produced by The World in collaboration with the Walk and National Geographic Society. 📻

Image description in comments.

02/04/2025

Antique and new: A modern bike trails slides past the remnants of the Yeongnamdaero, the 600-year-old ‘Scholar’s Road’ linking Seoul with Busan, South Korea.

01/31/2025

Walking Partner Lee Junseok & I put new Fjallraven packs through the ol’ upside-down test. They passed. I didn’t. Near Busan, South Korea.

01/30/2025

✍️ “On a steamy January morning in 2013, I shouldered my pack at an early human fossil site in the Rift Valley of Ethiopia and set out on foot for the bottom of South America.

Forty-three days later, I reeled, sunstruck and dehydrated, onto a gray cobbled beach polished by Indian Ocean surf. My walking partner at the time, a Djiboutian desert survival expert named Houssain Mohamed Houssain, hobbled the cargo camels. I feebly boiled tea. And we sat side by side for several hours, Houssain, the camels and I, blinking at an ultramarine horizon that had been wooing and swallowing human beings—migrants out of Mother Africa—for 60,000 years and more.” —Paul Salopek

🔗 Read Paul’s most recent story from the trail, “Bookend Oceans,” a 12-year walk between big waters: https://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/articles/2025-01-bookend-oceans

🥾 Pictured:

Photo one – Walking Partners Lee Junseok and Jun Michael Park stand at the Japan Sea finish line of the Out of Eden Walk through South Korea.

Photo two – Walking Partner Lee Junseok hugs the Japan Sea shoreline of South Korea, one of the Asian margins reached by the Out of Eden Walk, which began in Africa in 2013.

Photo three – Walking Partner Jang Yikweon strolls the Japan Sea shoreline of South Korea.

📷 Photos by Paul Salopek.

01/29/2025

Toxic beauty. Decades of massive dam-building in South Korea have disrupted natural river flows. In places, blocked streams shined chartreuse with algal blooms—a sign of stagnant, low-oxygen waters where little could live.

01/29/2025

The global Out of Eden Walk spans drastic weathers. Tramping through the sodden, 90%-humidity of South Korea made me long for the mummified desert air of Saudi Arabia—where I slept cocooned inside a sleeping bag to recapture breath moisture.

01/26/2025

🔈 Host Marco Werman of The World: Your journey began near the Red Sea, and it took you 12 years to walk to the edge of the Pacific Ocean. You’re not done yet. But it took the people who did this back in the day, millennia ago, many lifetimes, many generations, to cover the same distance. So, what has taking this on in one lifetime — not even one lifetime, in 12 years — taught you?

🎙️ Paul Salopek: Huge difference. And I have to remind my readers that I am not in any way replicating the original human discovery of the planet. That’s the kind of conceptual part of it. But our ancestors took more than 50,000 years, after kind of rambling out of Africa, with no destination in mind, right — this is before destinations had been invented — to reach the tip of South America. I might do it in 15 or 16 years. I’m moving pretty steadily in one direction. They were going in circles. They were going backward. They were going sideways because they were looking for resources. They’re hunters and gatherers.

The big difference is that they were traveling in communities, right? Hunter-gatherer bands ranged in size from a dozen to maybe up to a maximum of 40 [people]. That’s about as many human beings as you can feed off the landscape that you’re moving through. So, the people who discovered the planet were not dudes. They were not guides. They weren’t like me. They were communities that included old women. They included children. They included people of every age. And so, one of the things I’ve taken away, through my small kind of experience with walking partners, is it does take a community to have a life with meaning, including if you’re always plodding across a continent. So, my community are my walking partners.

🎧🔗 Listen to or read along with this episode of The World, “A 12 year walk between oceans” along with previous episodes of the program here: https://theworld.org/categories/environment/out-of-eden-walk

This story is part of an ongoing series about Out of Eden Walk produced by The World in collaboration with the Walk and National Geographic Society. 📻

Image description in comments.

01/25/2025

🕸️ Trails like spiderwebs in the Sobaek Mountains of South Korea.

📷 Photo by Paul Salopek.