Synopsis
Long before gold and gemstones held allure, humans were drawn to the “jewels of the elephant”—its great tusks—for their beauty, rarity, and ability to be finely carved. In Ivory’s Ghosts, John Frederick Walker tells the astonishing story of the human lust for ivory and its cataclysmic implications for elephants. Each age and each culture, from ancient Egypt to nineteenth-century America and modern Japan, found its own artistic, religious, and even industrial uses for the remarkable material that comes from the teeth of elephants and a handful of other mammals. Sensuous figurines, scientific instruments, pistol grips, and piano keys were all the result—as was human enslavement and the wholesale slaughter of elephants. By the 1980s, elephant poaching threatened the last great herds of the African continent and led to a worldwide ban on international trade. But the ban has failed to stop poaching, and debate continues over what to do with the legitimate and growing stockpiles of ivory recovered from elephants that die of natural causes. An insightful history of this precious commodity, Ivory’s Ghosts is also a wrenching—and utterly compelling—argument for a controversial mode of wildlife conservation: a controlled return to the ivory trade.
Reviews
With a mix of appalled testimony and meticulous research, Walker (A Certain Curve of Horn) traces the story of ivory from Paleolithic times to the present and the devastation the ivory trade has wrought on African and Asian elephants—by one estimate, 2.8 million were killed between 1850 and 1914. At the height of the 19th century craze for ivory—which included a savage dependence on slaves to transport tusks to African trading centers—it was used for sacred artifacts, piano keys, pistol grips, toothpicks and billiard balls. By the 1980s, poaching threatened the last herds in Africa, leading to a worldwide ban on international trade, but with unintended consequences from laws so restrictive no ivory could be sold at all. By 1994, nine African nations had stockpiled 100 tons of pickup ivory, harvested from elephants that had died a natural death. This great gift that the elephant leaves at the end of its life, writes Walker, should be sold to help conserve endangered herds, a controversial proposal that spotlights the deep divide between ardent supporters of continuing the ban and conservationists concerned about the future of the elephant, now more important than the treasure it supplies. 16 pages of illus. (Jan.)
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Author of a book about an endangered species (The Curve of the Horn: The Hundred-Year Quest for the Giant Sable Antelope of Angola, 2002), Walker surveys the plight of another, the African elephant, in this work. Nominally protected by an international prohibition of commerce in their tusks, elephants continue to be poached and, occasionally, legally killed. Walker’s review of the arguments by proponents (mainly African countries) and opponents (mainly Western conservationists) of permitting some level of trade in ivory caps his history of the material’s allures and applications throughout human history. Discussing artifacts from Roman times, Walker references evidence of the eradication of elephants from the Mediterranean rim caused by the appetite for ivory, a precursor of the industrial age’s devastating slaughter of elephants to meet the mass market for combs, billiard balls, and piano keys. Walker’s description of ivory hunters, dealers, and manufacturers shows the trade circa 1900; his accounts of anti-ivory activists and herd managers depict the trade today; and his work delivers an informative, all-around perspective on the elephant’s history at the hands of humans. --Gilbert Taylor
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