Remaking Nature at North Korea’s West Sea Barrage

In 1981 the North Korean government announced ‘four great nature remaking projects’ to help the country achieve economic and agricultural self-sufficiency. The cornerstone of these efforts was a concrete seawall and assemblage of dams, locks and sluice gates eight kilometres long and called the West Sea Barrage. Located forty kilometres from the North Korean capital, where the Taedong River meets the Yellow Sea, the West Sea Barrage was designed to increase drinking and irrigation water and improve transportation access. The causeway was also ideologically important as a manifestation of the socialist state’s ability to beat back the sea and ‘remake nature’ in a triumph of human will and engineering. This article uses the West Sea Barrage to understand the broader, complicated legacies of ‘nature remaking’ in North Korea. Notwithstanding the triumphalism of official North Korean sources, the West Sea Barrage has had overall ambiguous effects for local human economies and non-human ecologies.