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Paper short abstract

This paper traces 19th century Donghak Peasant Revolution, Saemangeum Seawall Opposition Movement, and the 2025 Bird and People's March as a shared activist heritage in which cosmology and political struggle enact an ontological refusal of extraction through interspecies relations.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines multispecies politics on Korea's west coast through bird-human relations shaped by land reclamation, military occupation, and developmental planning. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Jeolla Province, it traces continuities across three moments rooted in the same landscape: the late nineteenth-century Donghak Peasant Revolution, opposition to the Saemangeum seawall in the 2000s, and the 2025 Bird-and-People's March against a proposed airport on militarised coastal wetlands. Attention to daily protests shows how standing with birds becomes inseparable from histories of resistance to exploitation. Rather than treating these as discrete environmental protests, the paper approaches them as recursive activist heritage through which cosmology and political struggle enact an ontological refusal of extraction, while remaining entangled in competing temporalities of regional survival and interspecies relations.

Donghak's principle of revering all beings as heaven emerged alongside demands against caste hierarchy and agrarian exploitation. Contemporary activists selectively inhabit this ethical inheritance, through which godwits emerge as both symbolic and juridical actors: their documented migratory dependence on the wetlands played a decisive role in the court ruling that halted the airport development. Initial participation—wearing and making bird hats, singing bird songs, marching —did not reflect a uniform standing point. Many were united by opposition to extractive logic, though their entry points ranged from anti-militarisation and environmental commitments to labour rights. Embodied protest often preceded detailed knowledge of avian species. Drawing on audiovisual documentation, the paper shows how inherited activist traditions rooted in distinct cosmological understanding continue to shape contemporary forms of more-than-human solidarities under extraction.