A World Without
As the sun was setting across the Okavango Delta, I looked out across one of the last great pristine wilderness areas left in Africa. In amongst the tall papyrus islands, herds of elephants gathered to congregate in the lush swamp, where food is abundant and water plentiful. I found myself speechless at the sight of a mother and calf swimming across a river with their trunks raised like snorkels, while overlooking hippos grunted in unison. It was truly a sight to behold, especially as the matriarch turned to help shove her baby up the bank in an act of motherly love.
But it was also a sight tinged with sadness, as I knew that it was unlikely to be this way for much longer. Every year we build more roads and fences and in doing so encroach upon more and more wilderness, depriving elephants of their ancestral migratory routes. As the human population grows, in equal measure so does the likelihood of elephants becoming extinct, even within a generation.
It feels like we have reached a critical junction. We can act now to conserve the remaining elephants, or we can continue to concentrate on our own greedy needs and let elephants meet the same fate as their mammoth cousins.
Why should you care? The more cynical reader might say that it doesn’t really matter either way if elephants survive or not. We humans have done alright without mammoths for the last 5,000 years, so why worry too much? I think it goes without saying that I’d be upset if my future children and grandchildren never got to see an elephant in the wild, but in the same vein, I’m sure a lot of African farmers wouldn’t lament their loss too much. As my guide Kane said in Botswana, if we all took some elephants home and let them roam free in our gardens, how long would we last?
It’s a fair point. Elephants were wiped out in Europe a long time ago, because of hunting, human greed and climate change. What’s different now? Well, given that we are indeed facing that loss imminently, and this time round we actually know what we are doing, it is worth considering what a world without elephants would really be like.
Elephants are not the only species threatened with extinction, of course, and certainly not the only species under threat because of our actions. The rate of change and degradation to natural landscapes, habitats, and wildlife in the past fifty years is unprecedented, and we humans are driving that degradation. Given how close so many species are to extinction, you won’t be surprised to hear that a lot of people have been considering exactly the kind of question we are asking – how any one species or habitat benefits us and what effects their loss might have on people around the world, even if we think we are far removed from nature.
People often now use the term ‘natural capital’ in this vein, because as a species we seem compelled to bring things back to money and economics. It is really a shorthand way of asking what are the costs and benefits of nature? What rewards does nature bring us, overall?
Understanding these costs is important because, as the Namibian Minister of Environment and Tourism, Hon. Pohamba Shifeta, said recently: ‘Just as a private sector investor will not invest in something without knowing its likely returns, the Government must also know the value of nature, who is benefiting from it as well as the type of returns it is generating. This is vital to inform our planning and budgeting processes.’
His words may sound vaguely disturbing – that governments will not invest in nature unless they see the value – but that is the harsh reality. And the thing is, once we start quantifying the value of nature, and policymakers and society really understand what it does and what it provides, I’d like to think there will be a massive upswing in funding for conservation. Because we fundamentally need nature and nature needs elephants.
Nature is not a waste of space that could be better used for housing or farmland or industry. Wild spaces, and the animals they support, provide us with a huge range of fundamental ‘services’ – ecosystem services, to use the fashionable terminology – that confer real benefits and values to all people.
Ecosystem services include such fundamental things as providing, storing, and purifying water; capturing and storing carbon; and cycling vital nutrients; as well as maybe less obvious things like buffering extremes of drought and flood. The increasing trend in the UK to revert to natural flood defences is because we are remembering that nature – when allowed to work properly – is pretty good at this kind of thing. When we damage nature or natural processes, we lose these ecosystem services, which undoubtedly makes us worse off financially and socially.
Perhaps we even lose out from a well-being perspective, because ecosystem services also include less tangible ‘cultural services’. The recreational, historic, and aesthetic benefits that we ascribe to individual species or wild places are important factors in their value, even if we can’t put a price tag on them. So just as man-made structures like the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris or the Great Wall of China may be described as having ‘huge cultural significance’, so too might a natural place like Northern Ireland’s Giant’s Causeway, or an iconic species – such as elephants.
To better understand what the world would be like without elephants – and make a convincing case for conserving them – we can employ this natural capital framework to consider what benefits elephants provide us. Exactly what services do elephants deliver, and how do these measure against the financial and social costs of conserving them?
Elephants contribute unique services that benefit us. Their ecological impacts can be extensive, and directly and indirectly support a range of ecosystem services. They have been characterised as ‘ecosystem engineers’ and ‘mega-gardeners’, based on their role in dispersing seeds and changing the appearance of landscapes, making elephants a key force in maintaining the health and structure of savannah and forest ecosystems. Plus, they offer a range of cultural services.
By eating fruit from trees and then distributing the hard kernels in their dung as they walk, elephants spread seeds far and wide. In the tropical forests of Thailand, Asian elephants are the most effective seed dispersers around, out-performing gibbons, deer and bears in the role. And in central Africa, forest elephants are known to move great quantities of large seeds away from the parent tree, and so maintain forest structure and diversity. Even savannah elephants have an important role in seed dispersal, distributing marula, baobab, mongongo, and various palm fruits over distances of many kilometres.
The loss of elephants in important tropical forests of Africa is going to have dire consequences for the future survival of some tree species, which will have knock-on effects for carbon capture and storage, and therefore climate change. Currently, the African and Asian tropical forests, together with those of South America, absorb nearly a fifth of all the carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels.
Without elephants to spread viable seed pods, fewer seeds will germinate and grow into saplings, and so fewer trees will grow to replace the older ones that die or are felled by people, and the role of these forests as significant carbon stores will be greatly impacted. Using carbon offset prices, it has been calculated that elephants are performing a carbon capture service in encouraging the new growth of trees that could be worth millions – even billions – of dollars.
Elephants also change woodland and forest structure by pushing over, uprooting, and debarking large trees. By reducing the density of old trees, which may sound bad in itself, they create space for new trees to grow, improving the amount and quality of food available for smaller browsers – the herbivorous mammals such as bushbuck, kudu, and black rhinos that mostly eat leaves, bark, and greener branches from trees and woody plants.
Elephants can open up pathways through thick, spikey areas that other animals can then use to access plant foods. They can even convert new woodland areas, which grew up in the past few hundred years as elephant densities declined due to heavy hunting, back to their previous savannah grassland states, reopening historic environments and feeding opportunities for a whole host of animals.
In fact, the herds of impala and gazelles that are synonymous with our views of ‘Africa’ often do better living in environments with elephants, who maintain the grasslands these antelopes need. Elephants can even help cattle access more food, by increasing the quantity and quality of their diet during the wet season. Yet more evidence that the narrative of competition and conflict between elephants and farmers can be misleading.
Elephants don’t only engage in forestry services. They are also excellent at more general landscape design, creating and maintaining pathways and water features that deserve a stand at the Chelsea Flower Show. Elephants create trails and pathways through habitats that many other creatures use for ease of travel. In central African forests they maintain clearings, the water and mineral-rich soils of which become important mineral sources and gathering points for many forest species, including gorillas, buffalo, and forest antelopes.
They remove sediment from standing water when they mud-wallow, keeping waterholes open, and often open up new ponds or sources of water. On top of that, the 50–150 kg of dung they may produce per day (yes, what they can poop out per day can be the equivalent of two fully grown men!) returns nutrients to the soil over a vast area. As if that wasn’t enough, elephants are also excellent fire marshals. Through their bulk foraging approach, they reduce the amount of dry grass and leaf litter that can accumulate around trees, and so reduce the risk of bush fires burning out of control.
Poaching and conflict with livestock herders has driven elephants out of many areas in northern Kenya. As the elephants disappeared, the herders noticed that so too did natural waterholes and paths through the scrub land. Livestock were no longer able to penetrate the vegetation to feed on mountainsides, so herders began to set fires to clear the bush, eventually resulting in deforestation, soil erosion and drying of water sources. As elephants have been encouraged to return to the area, waterways and pathways have reopened, and damaging man-made fires are no longer necessary.
Elephants don’t provide services purely for people and other mammals. They are also pretty useful for many small creatures, too. In some forest environments, the footprints that elephants leave in mud have been shown to be important for frogs, because the footprints can fill with water, providing pools for frogs to lay their spawn. These miniature pools can also act as ‘stepping-stones’ for frogs to move between larger pools, connecting up different frog habitats.
Let’s not forget the geckos, who prefer to live in trees that have been damaged by feeding elephants. The bark stripping and branch breaking of elephants provides a lot of hiding places for the little lizards, making these ‘damaged’ trees much more safe and attractive places to live. Even elephant dung provides an important home and food source for many different kinds of creepy-crawly, from dung beetles to scorpions and millipedes. And larger animals such as meerkats can often be seen rummaging through piles of elephant dung, looking for these bugs to snack on.
It is clear, then, that elephants fully deserve and should take pride in their labels of ‘ecosystem engineers’ and ‘mega-gardeners’. They don’t passively contribute to ecosystem services; they actively promote and upgrade such services. However, these benefits only play out when elephants are not squashed into restricted areas without corridors allowing them to move between key habitats. Elephants confined at high densities can be very bad news for local plant and tree life and, therefore, for other animals that depend on those trees and plants.
When we mess up the balance for elephants, we mess up a whole range of critically important natural services that we rely on. Elephants need space – corridors and mega-parks – and it would seem giving them this space is entirely in our best interests.
Elephants do have other value, beyond these ecosystem services. Even elephant dung has other uses. It can be turned into a source of biogas; used as a mosquito repellent (the smoke from burning it, that is, rather than having to smear it on directly); and even to make paper. You may have seen on popular survival TV shows that if you are really desperate, squeezing water out of fresh elephant dung can be a life-saving thirst quencher, although I’d suggest you leave that as a last resort.
Perhaps more importantly, elephants are icons of Africa, attracting millions of visitors every year to the many African countries that depend on tourism revenue. Eco-tourism generates obvious economic incentives for nature conservation, and it has been shown repeatedly that elephants are one of the most popular species, especially amongst first-time and overseas tourists. The allure and appeal of elephants make them a ‘flagship’ species, attracting revenue and interest. This revenue can then be used to propel communities living alongside the elephants out of poverty, and further conserve nature.
The tourism revenue that has been lost to African countries as a direct result of losing elephants in the poaching crisis has been calculated at $25 million per year (since the poaching resurgence); a price that exceeds the current costs of anti-poaching enforcement! Protecting elephants makes financial sense.
Throughout our shared history, elephants have provided us with these vital ecosystem services, and have provided a substantial source of income – initially through their tusks, and now through tourism as well. They have also provided us with meat, a military force, and a workforce, to varying extents. There is no denying that elephants always have been, and will hopefully continue to be, extremely important in a practical sense to our lives. We may not always be aware of it, given the complex nature of many of these ecosystem services, but without them our world would be degraded considerably.
But that is not all.
This emphasis on economics – on the services and benefits that elephants and nature provide – is a bit distasteful for many people. The ‘commodification’ of nature can feel wrong, however much we realise that knowing the explicit value can incentivise governments and agencies to invest time, thought and resources in conservation. We know realistically that nature does have to pay its way, but we don’t want to think about price tags. I believe part of the reason that many of us struggle with this is because we are aware that nature – and elephants in particular – offers so much more than economic services. We want elephants to be conserved because they are magnificent, and mysterious, and wild. Not simply because they bring in the dollars.
Elephants do seem to be special, to attract a certain awe among people throughout the world. The Mali Elephant Project, a ‘grass-roots’ conservation organisation that works to protect the remnant population of desert-adapted elephants in the Gourma region of Mali, surveyed local communities as they were beginning to set up their operations, to try to get a handle on exactly what local people felt about the elephants.
This was at a time of severe conflict between people and the elephants, with intense competition over access to water and dwindling local resources. Yet despite this competition, nearly a fifth of the people asked stated that elephants were intrinsically valuable, simply for being elephants. They viewed elephants as lucky! And they were viewed as an important part of the Malian national heritage.
In the ‘Know Your Parks’ scheme that is run annually in South Africa, which allows free access to national parks for South African citizens, the park that receives the most visitors by far is Addo Elephant National Park (Kruger is not part of the scheme). Surely the name tells us something about what people are hoping to see.
At the very least, it tells us that people like seeing elephants for free. But what do I mean about elephants being ‘intrinsically valuable’? In essence, it means that species are valuable irrespective of what they provide or take away from us. By virtue of being here, they have a right to exist, and it would be wrong for us to do anything that encourages their extinction. It’s a perspective shared by many people today, from David Attenborough to Pope Francis (despite running against some entrenched religious perspectives, which inherently claim that people take precedence over animals, and the only value of animals is in what they can do for us.) I guess it is a personal call, but it may be one that is worth all of us dedicating some time to thinking about.
Whatever you think of elephants’ intrinsic worth, they undeniably hold significant cultural value for us. Depending on where we are from in the world, elephants are religious icons, symbols of national heritage, of strength, wisdom or family. We tell stories about elephants, and myths and legends abound. And we use their image in a whole host of ways, in art, in books and illustrations, on logos. The list goes on. We like seeing and talking about elephants.
Elephants are known in the conservation world as ‘charismatic megafauna’ – large, attractive animals that get a lot of attention. You know, things like pandas, polar bears, gorillas, tigers; the animals that grace the cover of all the glossy conservation campaigns. And elephants are perhaps one of the most charismatic of all.
Some conservationists can be a bit sniffy about the ‘value’ of these charismatic animals. Understandably so – the plight of elephants does indeed attract a lot more attention from the general public than some critically endangered warty toad or hairy spider. But it may be fundamentally bad to be a charismatic species, because the general public finds it so hard to believe that such iconic animals – whose images are ubiquitous – could really be in danger.
In a recent survey, hundreds of people were asked what they consider to be the most charismatic species (elephants were third in the resulting list, behind tigers and lions). The ten species that were reported as being most charismatic by those asked are all endangered, but these same members of the general public answering the survey did not realise the animals were in trouble. Incredible. So, whilst some people might be bored of seeing elephants and lions and the like paraded around as the poster children for conservation, the message is evidently not getting through to everyone.
It is muddied, perhaps, by the fact that stylised images of these animals appear on so many logos, cartoons and adverts; we assume that if there are so many on our screens and in our shops and homes, there must be as many in the wild, too. ‘Pandas can’t be endangered. I saw hundreds of cuddly ones in Hamleys toy shop last week.’ That sort of thing.
The very appeal of elephants, which we often assume is key to conserving them, could be promoting ignorance of their plight. Indeed, scientists studied some of the most popular documentaries of recent years and noted that while threats to nature are being mentioned more than in the past, there remains very limited footage of these impacts. Ultimately, this may result in failing to communicate fully the severity of the threats facing the natural world, particularly as the visuals focus on presenting a pristine view of nature that is separate from humans.
Yet the appeal of elephants is very definitely promoting their cause in other ways. Consider the ‘Non-Human Rights Project’, for example. It is not some kind of evil, anti-Amnesty International organisation trying to return us to the Dark Ages, but is an organisation trying to change the law in the US to give something equivalent to human rights to non-human species. (The hyphen is very important in their name.)
The legal mechanics are dense – all about autonomy and ‘personhood’ and a whole lot of other terms that don’t seem to mean quite the same thing to lawyers as they do to you and me; but the essence is that this group wants social, large-brained, and intelligent species to be given particular rights so that they no longer have to be confined in captivity. They are fighting this ethical issue without making it about welfare, because typically that has not got animals very far in judicial systems.
So far, they have brought cases on behalf of four captive chimpanzees and three captive elephants, living in America. The cases are in various stages of appeals, with one of the elephant cases literally being laughed out of court at the first hearing. But they keep chipping away at the arguments, and they are making more and more people think that just because we are human, do we have a right to confine and remove the liberty of other social beings?
Before you dismiss it as doomed to fail, you should know that a court in Argentina awarded human rights to a captive orangutan in 2014. The first victory of its kind, this orangutan, who had been kept alone in a zoo for twenty years, will live out the rest of her days at a sanctuary in Florida, as the first official non-human person. Even great-ape people retire to the Sunshine State.
Whether or not you think that elephants should be given rights equivalent to our own, it feels pretty clear to me that we often take elephants for granted, not always giving them the respect they deserve (in the wild or in captivity). But it is also evident that we need elephants, in a host of different ways, for our physical well-being, given their role in maintaining natural ecosystem services; and for some kind of mental or spiritual well-being. It is not crass to say that elephants have value. In fact, we should be shouting from the roof tops about how much we need them and what they do for us, to make policymakers listen.
Investment in conserving elephants will give good returns! Vital returns. Nature – and elephants within nature – are essential for our existence and quality of life. And by ‘our’, I do mean all people, everywhere around the world.
There’s one last thing I want to touch on here: it’s the story of the loneliest elephant in the world.
Knysna is a small town surrounded by the Tsitsikamma forest, on the southern coast of South Africa, some way to the west of Addo Elephant National Park. Large herds of elephants used to roam here, sharing the area with the indigenous Khoesan people. As in nearby Addo, the arrival of European hunters in the eighteenth century quickly resulted in the near total elimination of the elephants. But unlike in Addo, the elephants inhabiting this forest area were not given special protection, with the area only proclaimed as a national park in 1964. By this point, it was thought barely ten elephants remained, but ages and sexes were unknown.
Being isolated from other elephants – Addo is the nearest wild population, 300 kilometres and several major highways away, and behind a very big fence – the future of the Knysna elephants was uncertain. The population, though only a handful of elephants, was very secretive, hardly ever being seen, but they left signs – dung, broken trees, that sort of thing. They took on a kind of mythical, cult status within South Africa and around the world, with people debating how many were left, where they moved, whether or not they had magical powers of invisibility or tele-transportation.
Camera traps were set, genetic analysis of dung samples was conducted, and countless survey transects were walked. Occasionally someone would catch a glimpse, but no one knew for sure how many elephants were left. In an attempt to revive the population, some of the Kruger-cull orphans were introduced to Knysna in the early 1990s, but they never adapted to the forest habitat (which with hindsight seems obvious – having no experienced leader to show them the way, how could they have learnt to live in a totally different habitat), and were removed a few years later.
By the late 1990s, two camps were appearing – those who believed only one individual remained, and those who thought – hoped – that it was a small family of four or five. DNA analysis from dung samples seemed to suggest five or more animals, but in the brief glimpses people did get, they could only ever be sure of seeing one. Recently, the jury came back with the verdict. Eighty camera traps were set at forty locations across the entire forest range, and were left on for fifteen months.
They only ever photographed one elephant. A single adult female of about forty-five years of age, who has been named Oupoot (big foot). Oupoot should be in her prime, leading a family of adoring daughters and granddaughters. Instead, she is entirely alone, a painful, tragic reminder of what we – with our lust for ivory and greed for land – have done to elephants.
If Oupoot doesn’t convince you that a world without elephants would be a sorry thing indeed, nothing will.