Review: April 2009

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In 1889, Henry Drummond of Scotland’s Free Church College wrote that “the only thing of value the interior of Africa produces at present in any quantity is ivory.” And such quantities! After the turn of the nineteenth century, traditional hand carving of ivory was dwarfed by its machining for industrial use. Throughout the Victorian era, streams of slaves, staggering under unwieldy loads of tusks, carried the white gold to the coasts of Africa, where it was loaded on to ships bound for Europe, America, and the Far East. Britain alone imported about 500 tons annually between 1850 and 1910, mostly for the manufacture of brush and cutlery handles. Even more went to the United States, to feed production lines of piano keys and billiard balls. In 1922, estimating that at least 4,000 elephants died each year to supply the ball factories, a U.S. billiard enthusiast remarked that “some thin-skinned person might question the killing of this large number of elephants to provide . . . recreation, but on second thought . . . . All animals have been created for man’s special use, and for his good, and this includes the elephant and his ivory.”

No longer does public opinion support such brutal exploitation of native labor or such self-serving slaughter of wildlife. Over the past century, plastic has gradually replaced ivory for most industrial uses, and the elephant has come to be valued more for what it is—a remarkable and intelligent beast—than for its precious dentition. A growing world conservation movement has led to campaigns for the elephant’s protection (some species are endangered), and in January 1990, all international trade in ivory was banned.

Still the lust for ivory persists, virtually undiminished. John Frederick Walker, who has written extensively about African wildlife in the past, quotes estimates of between 5,000 and 12,000 elephants illegally killed each year to supply the black market for ivory, and notes that valuable stocks of tusks, harvested legally from natural deaths in national parks, have been piling up in government warehouses because they are too valuable to trash. Despite the wonders of chemistry, ivory still has its charms; and despite the best efforts of conservationists, elephants are still being shot.

Walker provides a sensitive and insightful analysis of all this ivory mischief, past and present. It’s not, in his view, a case of greedy capitalists versus sensitive eco-warriors. Ivory, he acknowledges, is as wondrous as the creatures that produce it, and if there were abuses in the way it was harvested and sold in the 1800s, it makes no more sense to shun it now than to eschew cotton because it was once harvested by slaves. Ivory remains an ideal medium for carving and sculpture, sensuous in texture and subtle in coloration, with traditional uses that go back to the dawn of civilization. And on the other side, elephants cannot be preserved by simply ignoring them. They compete with humans—and other animals—for scarce resources, and while they may delight urban tourists on safari, they can also terrorize rural populations.

Walker sees the future of elephants not in an absolute ban on all ivory, but in a system of sustainable harvesting and wildlife management. It’s a difficult balancing act, to be sure, but ivory, he proposes, can transcend its bloody past “long stained with the slaughter of elephant herds and human misery” to become a self-renewing resource which can fund national parks, stabilize local economies, and preserve the impressive creatures that make it.