“Whoever has seen these giants moving across the last open spaces of Africa knows that this is something that cannot be lost.”
Romain Gary The Roots of Heaven 1958
We have felt their inimitable strides and trumpeting calls across the vast face of Africa, there where the human race emerged. But in the last few years an insidious trade has resumed , the ivory market has exploded again, and this time the elephant’s continued presence on this earth is at stake. The horrors of the ivory trade menaces the last surviving elephants in less than a generation. It is a loss that will upturn the biology of an entire continent. Many thought the trade had ended once and for all in 1989 when a global outcry and an ivory ban stopped the market that had destroyed over 600,000 elephants during the 1980’s. If the elephant is consigned to the mists of time and oblivion, its passing will plunge not just a stake of remorse into the hearts who honor the real Babars of the world, it will signal not just the end for the marvels that are the last members of the family of the greatest mammalian behemoths ever to walk the earth, but civilization will have passed a benchmark beyond which our own place on the planet will crumble and humanity will mourn an incalculable loss.
If the children of the future can only have access to mere images of elephants, they who mourn for their dead, something in the soul will have left our species forever. We have little time toturn the tide. A world wide alarm call has been sounded. Heads of state like former Senator and now Secretary of State John Kerry convened an Ivory and Insecurity meeting in May of 2012. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton held the first conference of wildlife trafficking and the ivory trade in diplomatic history a few months ago in Washington DC. She has warned the world that the black market, led by the Chinese penchant for ivory trinkets is leading to a renewed wave of slaughter, a killing spree which destroyed 30,000 elephants just last year, 4% of the world’s population. There are no more than 400,000 African elephants and the forest elephant of the Congo basin, the second largest rainforest on earth, is almost gone.
When Romain Gary wrote in his masterpiece The Roots of Heaven 1958 about the concentration camps in WWII, he imagined elephants charging over the SS liberating the men who were held captive behind barbed wire, reinforced concrete and abject materialism . Dozens of tons of ivory are being confiscated around the world but only after the systematic obliteration of entire herds. It is an apocalypse that cannot long continue.
While increased patrols, international security and anti poaching measures are underway to stem the killing, the level of destruction has reached new levels. What we need to enact is a Marshall plan for the biosphere, and the elephants, for without them we lose one of the central pillars of the world. If we cannot save the elephant, what on earth can we save? If we should lose the elephants and the whales, mankind will have become a moral dwarf beyond repair.
Elephants are a world heritage and a patrimony of human species. As such what is happening to them should be considered as a violation against life and even human rights,for the destruction of elephants and their habitat has also upturned many communities in Africa and Asia. Those who kill elephants are terrorists and have also killed innocent civilians. The movement led by scientists to give non- human person status to cetaceans should also be extended to elephants and also to the great apes. These elite beings pass the self- recognition test. They redefine what it means to self consciousness. Killing them is murder.
As to the future of the elephant, it is eloquently stated by a ranger in Tsavo East National Park in Kenya,” A world without elephants is like a world without oxygen.” The targeted desecration of the elephant is a blasphemous act against Creation. Erwin Chargaff, whose work led to the discovery of DNA, who understood the loss of so many species in our time, wrote in Heraclitean Fire ,” ….what goes as art, and literature and science is only an artificial, youthful-looking skin stretched tight over a crumbling skeleton.” That skeleton could be well be the multitudes of elephant carcasses strewn about Africa. It is a skeleton made possible by our abject depravity. Without the elephant, as one Samburu elder told us in Kenya, “ We will lose our minds.” The next generation of humans and elephants are watching us. For now, the last elephants on earth, still walk the last open spaces of the world and in the corridors of our psyches like no other being since we first walked out of Africa. We cannot fail them. Our sanity depend on it. Their future is our fate .
Cyril Christo
