Will China's Love of Ivory Kill All the World's Elephants?

A herd of elephants, photographed in Amboseli National Park, Kenya. With China’s growing appetite for ivory, poaching is on the rise all over Africa.Photography by Guillaume Bonn for Vanity FairWriting for Vanity Fair, Alex Shoumatoff takes up the plight of the world’s elephants. With a long career as a journalist covering political and environmental situations and world affairs, Alex Shoumatoff edits DispatchesFromtheVanishingWorld.com, devoted to “documenting and raising awareness about the planet’s rapidly disappearing natural and cultural diversity.”

There is plenty of finger-pointing in ‘Agony and Ivory’ and many of the problems aren’t new, especially those focused on unemployment, poverty and feeding families in Africa.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Africa’s elephanticide epidemic cut the population from an estimated 1.3 million to some 600,000, and Kenya’s elephant population went from 120,000 to 15,000. (It is now about twice that.)

All agree that getting an exact count of the elephant population and the extent of the current slaughter is difficult. The consensus of ‘Agony and Ivory’ is that the illegal ivory trade is increasing at an alarming rate. While illegal ivory is transported far and wide, all fingers point to China and the rise of a middle class devoted to conspicuous consumption.

China’s Love of Illegal Ivory

Before the Chinese began building the 70-mile-long highway around Amboseli, there was no poaching for 30 years. Since 2009, four of Amboseli’s “magnificent big-tusked bulls have been killed” and now poachers seek to kill the matriarchs — the oldest, wisest female leaders of the elephant herds.

The Chinese are close to creating an “extinction vortex” among elephants in the Amboseli, choosing to slaughter or pay for the slaughter of the largest elephants as trophies.

Ninety percent of the arrests for possession of ivory at Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta are Chinese nationals. Half the poaching in Kenya occurs within 20 miles of one of the five massive Chinese road-building projects. Over a million Chinese now live in Africa compared to 700,000 a decade ago.

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International Day of Biodiversity Confronts Global Deforestation Trends

Today is International Day of Biodiversity, a UN program committed to better management of the human relationship with nature on Planet Earth. 

Protecting the diversity of species is a commitment of many global organizations.

In a disturbing piece of good news the journal Nature recently published two new studies shows flaws in current methods of calculating extinction rates.

The good news is that species aren’t disappearing at the rate predicted — but they are disappearing at a fast pace. The bad news is that major research studies will have to be redone.

Conservation of Forests

2011 is dedicated as the year in which the protection of forests becomes a priority. Stripping away forests to make room for expanded production of beef, soy and palm oil is a major factor in global warming.

Edward Norton deplores the reality that forests are being cleared to support commercial activities in developed countries at the expense of the majority of people, mostly the poor. Current estimates are that cutting down forests is responsible for about one-third of greehouse gases emitted into the atmosphere.

“Forest ecosystems represent an enormous uncalculated GDP [Gross Domestic Product], especially for poor people around the world, so when we clear a forest to create ‘economic gain’ of a certain kind of industry, you actually wipe out an enormous GDP that poor people are extracting in sustainable way from the forests. In pursuit of short-term economic gains, we can see more and more clearly we are creating a certain kind of impoverishment when we clear forests.”

Edward Norton, Forests 2011

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Gregory Colbert's 'Ashes and Snow' Awakens Souls & Spirituality

One of my Facebook friends Chantal Simon shared this beautiful video, Danza Subacquea, inspired by photographer Gregory Colbert’s traveling photography project Ashes and Snow.

Danza Subacquea applies Colbert’s vision of humans and animals to men an women. Many spiritual people believe that men and women once lived in greater harmony with each other, before monotheism made man woman’s lord and master.

For many people, attending the Ashes and Snow exhibit is a life-changing experience. Seeing the exhibition twice in New York in 2005 impacted me so greatly that I weep at the mere sight of the Gregory Colbert images of elephants, cheetahs and hawks as spirit guides and message-bearers.

Gregory Colbert’s Ashes and SnowThese images were born in Colbert’s travels to Kenya, Burma, Egypt and India where the nomadic photographer captures more than 40 species interacting with humans. This 21st century bestiary was originally attacked as a photoshop con job, with critics saying that it’s impossible to find humans and animals coexisting in this way.

‘In discovering the shared language and poetic sensibilities of all animals,” Colbert notes, “I am working towards restoring the common ground that once existed when people lived in harmony with animals.’

Critics and big game hunters alike accused Colbert of romanticizing man’s relationship with nature and denying Darwinian laws of the jungle. Colbert agreed that these relationships between the animals and humans were cultivated —  over two years in some cases.

Colbert wants to share what is possible between humans and animals if we change our thinking.

Ashes and Snow Part 1

Ashes and Snow Part 2

I just wrote on my Facebook page that I do not go down on my knees with ease, but I do for the entire Gregory Colbert Ashes and Snow experience. My Cultural Creatives values were very much in transition at the time (2005), as I watched the impact of materialism on the world and here in America.

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Uli Westphal | Mutato-Archive Project | Mother Nature Running Wild

Uli Westphal’s Mutato-Archive is a real world collection of non-standard fruits, roots and vegetables in an astounding array of forms, colors and textures. Left on their own, says Westphal, nature produces anything but the highly-designed, uniformly regular produce we see in our supermarkets.

Many of us —Anne for one — has never seen produce like these images from the Mutato Project.

Uli Westphal is a freelancing artist, who works and lives in Berlin, Germany. He grows his mutatos himself in a series of urban and rooftop gardens in Berlin. The story of Uli’s produce growing is here on his farming blog.

This passionate defender of both Mother Nature and small farmers cites several articles critical to understanding issues around our food supply. Based on Uli’s impressive projects, we will cite them also:

Who Will Feed Us? Questions for the Food and Climate Crises (2009)

From green to gene revolution: How farmers lost control of the seeds from agricultural modernisation (2010)

Extreme Genetic Engineering: An Introduction to Synthetic Biology (2007)

Who Owns Nature? (2008)

The New Biomassters _ Synthetic Biology and The Next Assault on Biodiversity and Livelihoods (2010)

The Big Downturn? Nanogeopolitics (2010)

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Tompkins & Tompkins | Latin America's Environmental Groundskeepers | Like It Or Not

Onelli Bay, Los Glaciares National Park. Patagonia, Argentina.

In an unusually candid article The Christian Science Monitor interviews ecophilanthropist Kristine McDivitt Tompkins — a very rich woman married to a very rich man.

The eco-philanthropy team has purchsed a $10 million, 173,000-acre Patagonian spread, one of several large tracts of land purchases that will create parks and wildlife sanctuaries in perpetuity.

“I have always had a real affinity for the nonhuman world,” explains the former CEO of the outdoor clothing company Patagonia. Her extraordinary wealth has allowed her – and her husband, Doug Tompkins, also a former outdoor clothing magnate who founded The North Face – to bankroll that simple sentiment into a complex crusade to save vast tracts of South American wilderness.

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Saving Dolphins and Whales; Sustainable Fishing Articles

Dave thinks Moko needs a bigger playmate than this seal buddy

Front page news tag: bluefin tuna; dolphins;

New Zealand’s Moko Has Major Dolphin Moxie

Female, Dolphin-Loving Principles Can Win in Blood-Thirsty, Male-Dominated Tajii, Japan

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Aquacalypse Now: Discovering Sustainable Sushi

Following up on recent news of “no deal” on a bluefin tuna resolution out of Europe, The New Republic writes Aquacalypse Now, alleging that governments — including America’s —  provide nearly $30 billion in subsidies each year—about one-third of the value of the global catch—that keep fisheries going, even when they have overexploited their resource base. As a result, there are between two and four times as many boats as the annual catch requires, and yet, the funds to “build capacity” keep coming.

Eating a tuna roll at a sushi restaurant should be considered no more environmentally benign than driving a Hummer, argues the New Republic.

Dining at a new sushi restaurant in Greenwich Village last week, I noticed that half the menu was now vegetarian. Two of our three rolls were veggie and divinely delicious.

Try it, you’ll like it: mango/asparagus sushi, for example. I was surprised at how much I loved the tastes.

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