Matthew scully
Elephants are what ecologists call a "keystone" species, a giant force in nature whose fortunes affect everything around them -- for good, or ill
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| Elephants are what ecologists call a "keystone" species, a giant force in nature whose fortunes affect everything around them -- for good, or ill.
For the leadership of Western nations, surely the key is this: Because so many wicked causes are today served by killing elephants, exactly that many good causes are served by helping them. The only upside to being a magnet for every devil in Africa is that it gives the rest of the world, if we are all thinking straight, a powerful incentive to come to your defense, even at this late hour. Elephants are a "keystone" species, as the ecologists say, a giant force in nature whose fortunes affect everything around them for good or ill, and it turns out something similar is true of their place in the security environment. When we help them, we help so many others who suffer at the same hands. When we and our allies help troubled states to protect elephants, we're making them more stable nations, better able to protect themselves from other threats as well. And when, in the case of the central states, armies of thugs, rapists, human traffickers, and terrorists including a cell of al-Qaeda, are getting their money from the extermination of the elephants and the sale of ivory, it is in our urgent interest to stop them, and bring an end to the whole filthy business. "We can beat the poachers," a senior ranger in Gabon named Joseph Okouyi told the London Daily Mail, "but we have to end the demand in China and we need better logistics with more camps, more planes, more boats." Some Western policymakers, pressed by other concerns, may still view it all as hopeless, because the corruption runs so deep, the lines of force seem to favor the enemy, and, it is said, market demand will always find a way. But if Okouyi, a man facing fierce battle with the worst of the worst in Africa, believes the cause isn't lost, then who are politicians and diplomats to say otherwise? The relevant diplomats work their various purposes through the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES. This Geneva-based organization consists of 178 nations, the "Parties," that are legally bound to its rules, or, at least, obliged to honor "requests" and "recommendations" to please observe those rules. It regulates wildlife-related commerce among nations, according to the "appendix" status assigned to each listed species. Whenever you read about elephants and ivory, CITES will be somewhere in the story. In practice, CITES operates a lot like the UN itself at its most helpless, so that the principal offenders have equal voice and everybody else, to conduct any business at all, has to pretend that one and all are in sincere pursuit of the same lofty objectives. CITES proceeds, no matter what the crisis, at the pace of international officialdom: Appeals are made to the Parties to develop and implement action plans for the further study of agenda items that are in due course submitted to the Standing Committee for prompt referral to the Plenary and forwarding for review to the Secretariat, and then everyone calls it a day. The group convened not long ago in Bangkok. Shruti Suresh of the Environmental Investigative Agency, a British NGO, gives a nice summary of how things went: "Gripping speeches were delivered about the elephant poaching crisis ... 'organised crime' and the need for 'time-bound measurable action' to stop the killing and the illegal trade in ivory. ... Throughout the proceedings, there was one word that was avoided like the plague by the Parties -- 'China.'" It can all get very involved, but the upshot is this. CITES in 1989 transferred the African elephant from Appendix II to Appendix I. Appendix I, if you're fauna and people are trying to kill you, is where you want to be -- protected. Asian elephants landed there in 1975, and though they've had their share of misfortune, on the commercial-trade front this status did them a lot of good. To see the difference that Appendix I could make, one had only look at their "de-listed" kin in African from 1975 to 1989, doomed on more than one occasion by CITES itself. For a time, in the 1980's, this organization and the man who ran it were prime movers in the mass hunting and culling of elephants. In South Africa and elsewhere, hundreds of thousands of the creatures were wiped out, in scenes you could set beside last year's Cameroon slaughter of hundreds by the Janjaweed without knowing the difference. The secretary general in that era was Eugene Lapointe, a puzzling figure in the realm of wildlife protection who made a quick exit in 1989 after Time revealed his close connections to the Japanese Ivory Association. Lapointe then devoted himself -- again in collaboration with Japanese interests -- to the cause of delisting both elephants and whales back to lowly Appendix II, so that still more could be hunted without onerous obstacles like "endangered" and "near-extinct" status getting in the way. He seems to have it in for the "charismatic mega-fauna" in particular, as if the special regard and empathy that people feel for these animals makes it only more urgent that they be destroyed. I interviewed Lapointe once, in 2000, and still remember the utter disdain with which he brushed off the "sentimentality" of protection efforts: all this "propaganda about elephants -- elephants being shot and the calf nearby making noises and so forth. ... It's for their own good, to be hunted and used" -- a rule " suffering no exceptions." He is the only man I have ever met who spoke with hatred for elephants. And this is the guy who ran CITES for nine years. The Stalinesque stewardship of Lapointe prepared the way for the great reprieve of 1990. The mass slaughter was so god-awful as to rate, in June of 1989, the presidential intervention of George Bush, who unilaterally banned ivory imports into the United States -- because otherwise, he said, "the wild elephant will soon be lost from this earth." Within a week Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher did the same in the United Kingdom, setting in motion an international ban by CITES that took effect in January. It was still legal to sell existing, worked ivory domestically, but you had to be careful, and the ban was such a big deal that every prospective ivory buyer, high-end merchant, and pawn-shop owner in the civilized world understood that new ivory was forbidden, tainted, and its sale or purchase a punishable offense. Demand was almost gone, enough for elephant populations to stabilize. There was carnage but not mayhem, which in the elephant world is progress. Then, in 2008, at the initiative chiefly of delegates from China and Japan, CITES approved a "one-off" sale of ivory from Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. Some 102 tons of tusks, taken from smugglers or from cullings, was just stacked there in guarded warehouses, and why let it all go to waste? President Mugabe, enforcing his credo that elephants must "pay their own way" with ivory and trophies, was a big player in all of this. In 1999, at the tyrant's insistence, there had been a one-off ivory sale of fifty tons to Japan as an "experiment." Since 2008, other nations including Zimbabwe have received the go-ahead for one-off sales. You have to be burrowed deep into the bureaucratic workings of CITES, as each new sale in turn is authorized, not to look up and wonder why everyone still calls them "one-off." The theory in 2008 was that ivory from elephants already killed would satiate demand, drive down prices, and thereby afford a buffer to elephants still alive. It overlooked a few problems, and the most fatal blunder, as Bryan Christy notes in National Geographic, was a failure to see the difference between "experimenting" in Japan, foolish as that was, and inviting a great reawakening of demand in China -- a country with 14 international borders, thousands of miles of coastline, 10 times the population of Japan, and the world's fastest-growing economy. With the CITES secretary general himself overseeing the auction of tusks, it was one of those news-in-brief items out of Africa that nobody even remembers when the full catastrophe unfolds, and the understandable reaction today is to wonder, "Wasn't ivory banned years ago?" Suddenly it was for sale again, and who was to say whether the goods were new or old? On top of that, state enterprises in China promptly rigged the market. In the auctions, they acquired the raw ivory at artificially low prices (aided, as Dr. Meng Xianlin, China's lead delegate to CITES, confessed recently to Bryan Christy, by collusion between Japanese and Chinese bidders). Now they sell it at artificially high prices, parceling out five tons a year while restricting buyers to Chinese carving factories. So the "legal" stuff is twice the value of what the black-market stuff was in 2008. And the black-market stuff is cheaper than the licit stuff. The combined efforts of Chinese "businessmen" in the African hinterlands, village riff-raff, bought border guards, faithless politicians, warlords, wildlife traffickers, terrorists, and criminal gangs can offer buyers a better deal than Beijing's monopoly will offer, thus inviting the poaching frenzy. To add one further absurdity to this dynamic: even as the newly prosperous of China buy ivory products to strut their affluence, everybody involved is still trying to shave a few yuan off the price tag. Chinese authorities do, on occasion, catch smugglers, and one needn't always assume the worst about them. An ad campaign by WildAid and Save the Elephants is underway in China, with the former Houston Rockets basketball star Yao Ming as spokesman. "An ivory carving is thousands of miles removed from the sad carcass of a poached elephant," writes Ming, "but we need to make that connection. . . . Would anyone buy ivory if they had witnessed this?" It's a tough sell to people who still haven't made a lot of other connections: a land of 1.3 billion that still has no anti-cruelty laws, tolerates the pitiless confinement Asiatic bears farmed for their bile, shows little sentiment for victims caught up in the dog-meat trade, regards the consumption of wildlife, caught or farmed, as normal, and besides all that is ruled by a government that's pretty rough with its own people when they step out of line. Yet there are also the stirrings of a humane movement in China, with younger citizens like Yao Ming showing the way, and what an excellent use for this man to make of his own new wealth and stature. A rule of thumb regarding all the world's ivory would be to leave it where it is, above all if it is still in the jaws of an elephant, and in the case of stockpiled tusks to follow the example of Kenya after the first ban and of Gabon just last year: Burn it all. When Chinese authorities confiscate the raw ivory, in any event, even that gets dumped into the market in sales at a profit to domestic traders. It hasn't occurred to whatever People's Committee decided this policy that the arrangement only makes the smugglers, in effect, ivory couriers working for the government of China. Every last carver and collector, moreover, protests that he or she deals only in legal material predating the worldwide ban. New ivory, fresh off the range states, gets laundered with phony documents. Forging "pre-ban" certificates has become an esteemed craft all by itself. "Like the forest canopy that protects poachers from detection," writes Levin in the Times, "the regulated ivory trade has provided unscrupulous Chinese carvers and collectors with the ideal legal camouflage to buy and sell contraband tusks." Leaving aside the question of whether, at this point, there is any such thing as a scrupulous ivory dealer, what matters is that there be no dealers at all. As long as any ivory can be legally bought or sold, resourceful people will keep the new stuff coming and palm it off as legitimate. A master carver named Zhou Bai, interviewed by Levin, states the matter plainly, although of course he thinks it's all just wonderful. "'When the ban was passed ... I was sad this art would die with me,' said Zhou, who was busy turning a three-foot-long tusk into a fanciful temple surrounded by clouds. 'But now we have the opportunity to keep it alive.'" Only vanity at its most self-absorbed could sacrifice an elephant for an ivory temple, trading so perfect a creature for a little idol of one's own making -- in Zhou's case, a piece only more pathetic for its supposedly pious inspiration. But the man's got one thing right: Either the art dies, or the elephants die. And, though the master would have it otherwise, most of us would prefer a farewell to the art. "The alarm bells are ringing," as Kenya's Julius Kipng'etich told the Telegraph. "We will tell CITES: 'Look what you have triggered with your one-off sales. You must ban the ivory trade." Of course he is right, only this time the ban must be unequivocal, all-encompassing, and permanent. There must be no such thing -- anywhere, and starting in America -- as the legal sale of ivory. A rule of thumb regarding all the world's ivory would be to leave it where it is, above all if it is still in the jaws of an elephant, and in the case of stockpiled tusks to follow the example of Kenya after the first ban and of Gabon just last year: Burn it all. "In the middle of this field was this huge pile of ivory tusks all stacked up on a pyre," as one observer described the moment in Libreville, where Gabon President Ali Bongo put the match to it himself. "It's sending up a torch or beacon to the rest of the world." That is how serious people dispose of serious threats, at no more loss to Gabon or to mankind than a ton of cocaine heaped into the incinerator, and what a contrast to CITES with its ivory auctioneering, appeasement, and consistent refusal to make the one "recommendation" that would really matter: restrictions on the trading privileges of every offender. If we can assume anything about Chinese authorities, national and local, it is that when the orders from Beijing are unequivocal, they know how to police a situation. And assured access to each others' markets is the very incentive built into CITES' original design - the instrument of its authority, if it has any at all. The prospect of sanctions came up the last time around, when, as the Bangkok Post recounts, the conference identified three African nations, Along with transit countries Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, and top markets China and Thailand - as making insufficient efforts to curb the trade. But they avoided punishment after six of them submitted draft action plans in response and China and Tanzania committed to do so by a specific date. ... CITES general secretary John Scanlon said such measures were a "last resort" and should only be imposed "where there's a clear failure to comply and no intention to comply." Give them some dashed-off paper or "draft action plan" at CITES and it buys you another year. Why would these chronic offenders themselves even be asked to do the drafting and planning? Isn't that what the whole organization and treaty are for? Aren't "intention" and performance usually related, so that after years of the same results the intention may be surmised from the non-compliance? And with another ninety or more elephants hitting the dust every day, isn't this exactly the time for a "last resort"? 
Kenya Wildlife Service officials carry recovered elephants tusks and illegally held firearms from poachers at their headquarters in Nairobi on June 22, 2012. (Thomas Mukoya/Reuters) What is happening now to entire herds is just the final onslaught, brought on as much by irresolute people of good intent as by corrupt people of evil intent, a story these poor creatures are hardly the first to play out. "A plaint of guiltless hurt doth pierce the sky," and the Standing Committee is still waiting on first drafts of a plan to do anything about it. Directory: wp-content -> uploads -> 2013 2013 -> International post doctoral research fellowship programme final report title of the research 2013 -> Seals Family History 1565 to 2004 2013 -> Rao bulletin 15 July 2013 html edition this bulletin contains the following articles 2013 -> R institute of technology school of foreign languages 2013 -> Provisional Programme – subject to change thursday 10th april 2013 -> June, 2013 National hiv testing Day Month Men’s Health Week Hurricane Safety Month 2013 -> In memory of the residents of the Parish Chesham Bois that served their country during wwii 2013 -> Federal contract awards in georgia april 2013 Download 344.21 Kb. Share with your friends:
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