International conflicts may last decades, but collateral damage across the animal kingdom far outlasts the final shot.
South Sudan’s elephant population plummeted by 95% during the Sudanese Civil War, as herds of gentle bystanders got caught in the crossfire.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.
”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.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 beenThe 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.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..
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, theythat “‘the single most important predictor’ of whether species prosper or perish isn’t poaching, or deforestation, or even climate change. It’s human conflict.
”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 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.
, 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. 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 breedThe following AI-generated content is powered by Perplexity.
The Los Angeles Times editorial staff does not create or edit the content. The article argues that modern warfare does not just devastate human communities but also displaces and kills vast “hidden nations” of animals, whose complex societies and migrations resemble human nations and merit moral and political consideration in their own right, an idea the piece connects to Henry Beston’s description of animals as “other nations” in the shared “net of life and time.
”It contends that in conflicts such as those in Ukraine, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Sudan, animals become refugees and casualties: large mammals flee bombardment, those that remain show signs of trauma, and countless others are killed directly by weapons, indirectly by chemical defoliants like Agent Orange, or later by forgotten landmines, with these impacts often continuing for decades after cease-fires. The article maintains that across Africa and other regions, longitudinal research on wildlife trends shows human conflict to be a dominant predictor of whether species decline or persist, suggesting that war can outweigh poaching, deforestation and even climate change as an immediate driver of local extinctions and population collapses.
It argues that popular faith in nature’s resilience—captured in the idea that “life finds a way” after disasters—can be misleading in the context of war, because once animal societies are shattered and dispersed, they rarely reassemble in their former configurations, especially when humans rush to occupy the vacated space. The article presents the Korean Demilitarized Zone as a cautionary tale: before the Korean War, cranes and other birds thrived across peninsula wetlands, but postwar reconstruction, population growth and development drained and converted most of those habitats, leaving the DMZ, heavily mined and fenced, as a narrow “sanctuary of last resort” where a large share of the world’s remaining red-crowned and white-naped cranes now winters, alongside other vulnerable bird species.
It contends that the apparent “refuge” of the DMZ highlights not nature’s triumph but humanity’s failure: animals survive only in a thin, dangerous strip because human societies on either side have so thoroughly claimed and transformed surrounding landscapes that there is nowhere else for these “hidden nations” to live freely, an interpretation consistent with the author’s broader work mapping animal societies crowded into human-dominated spaces.
Looking ahead to conflicts such as those in Iran and Ukraine, the article warns that if postwar reconstruction once again focuses almost exclusively on rebuilding human infrastructure and economies, without explicitly safeguarding space for nonhuman communities, it will intensify competition over finite land and resources and set the stage for further displacement and decline of animal populations.
The piece ultimately suggests that treating animals as “hidden nations” should change how peace and recovery are conceived: true postwar rebuilding, it argues, must include deliberate planning for wildlife habitats and migration routes rather than assuming animals will automatically recover once human fighting stops, a vision the author extends in a forthcoming book that urges readers to see animalkind as a mosaic of organized societies intertwined with human history.
In contrast to the article’s largely cautionary framing, some reporting on the Korean DMZ emphasizes its role as an unexpected conservation success story, stressing that decades of restricted human access have allowed a rich assemblage of cranes and other species to flourish in what is often described as a landscape that “teems with life,” and presenting this as evidence of nature’s capacity to rebound robustly when human pressures recede, even in militarized zones.
Related commentary on the broader “hidden nations” concept sometimes highlights the abundance and ingenuity of animal societies uncovered in places like the DMZ, beaver territories in Canada, and bat colonies in the American Southwest, framing these examples less as fragile victims of conflict and more as proof that wildlife can adapt and reorganize in surprising ways despite human upheaval.
Some reviewers of the author’s book stress its optimism and describe it as a “breathtaking blueprint for a more expansive view of animalkind,” focusing on how new tracking technologies are revealing thriving, intricate animal worlds intertwined with human activity; this more hopeful emphasis on resilience and coexistence can sit uneasily beside the article’s portrayal of war as primarily shattering and irreparable for animal societies.
In environmental policy debates, certain conservation analysts place greater emphasis on global drivers such as industrial agriculture, deforestation and climate change as the leading causes of biodiversity loss, treating armed conflict as one important but relatively localized pressure; from this perspective, while war is acknowledged as destructive, it is not always seen as the “single most important” determinant of species’ fates at planetary scale, and some argue that focusing too heavily on warfare could divert attention from peacetime economic forces that erode habitats year after year.
Some ecologists and philosophers of science also caution against leaning too heavily on metaphors that describe animals as “nations,” warning that this language, while evocative and morally powerful, risks blurring distinctions between human political systems and nonhuman social organization; these critics suggest that conservation should be grounded in the specific ecological roles and needs of species rather than in analogies to human statecraft, and worry that nation-based rhetoric might oversimplify complex ecological dynamics.
Additionally, a number of conservation practitioners working in post-conflict regions emphasize opportunities that can arise during reconstruction, arguing that peace agreements and rebuilding phases can be leveraged to create new protected areas, restore wetlands and integrate wildlife corridors into infrastructure planning; from this standpoint, war’s aftermath is not only a moment of risk for animal societies, as the article stresses, but also a window in which legal and spatial frameworks can be redesigned to benefit both human communities and wildlife. Eighteen months after the Eaton and Palisades Fires, survivors are rebuilding — not alone, but together.
On Poppyfields Drive in Altadena, Whitney Haggins and at least 6 of her neighbors are leading the way. Today we discuss one of the pivotal events of the 1960s: the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Though the gunman was caught at the scene, confessed at trial, and even bragged about the shooting, his motives have largely been forgotten. Modern LA earned its first smoggy nickname 450 years ago, as the “bay of smokes.
” At the La Brea tar pits, we take a short walk through a long history with curator Regan Dunn, who explains how and why the first Angelenos would have set fires that filled the broad bowl of LA and foretold the curse of smog.
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