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A mahout and his elephant at a ReWilding trail in Laos - image credit: India Bourke
They say elephants never forget. But what will future humanity remember about how our generation navigated this moment of pause and precipice? Will it look back at his year of Covid-19 as a spark to urgently needed reform and renewal - socially, economically, environmentally? Or simply as a time of spiralling tragedy?
In so many ways, on so many subjects, these questions still feel fragile and unanswered. Not least for elephants themselves, or certainly the 15,000 or so captive in Asia, where tourism’s sudden collapse is pushing their future into flux.
Across the region, hundreds of mahouts - elephant handlers - and their charges have taken to the roads in the last few months, travelling away from emptied tourist centres back to villages and farms in the hope of escaping starvation by finding space to graze.
“When the lockdown started I did a few press pieces saying elephants are going to starve - and then it dawned on me that the elephant-and-mahout tradition is much older than tourism, and they have survived far more than this,” says John Roberts, Director of the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation (GTAEF).
Bursting the Bubble
What will become of those who make the journeys, as well as those who don’t, is still uncertain. Government laws restricting access to forests are leading mahouts to be fined for seeking out their sanctuary. While the lack of tourism means little spare income available for other forms of care (hence the Thai Elephant Alliance’s focus on raising funds to support vets).
Yet if the elephants can be kept alive, then there is hope that a better future for the creatures could also emerge from the crisis: one that sees a return to more welfare-orientated practices, such as grazing in forests overnight.
In recent years, Asian elephants have become “crazily expensive to buy and lucrative to own,” Roberts explains -- making it harder to introduce legal welfare reforms, and pushing mahouts away from their traditional practices and relationships with the creatures. Before Covid-19, for example, when he encouraged some mahouts to release their elephants in a fenced off area to graze, they responded with shock, claiming he would not ask them to treat a Ferrari sports-car so casually.
But Roberts now hopes that tourism’s temporary collapse “will burst the bubble” of their inflated prices, prompting a more “honest discussion about how many elephants we actually need” and how to treat them.
This applies to tourists’ expectations too. “In the last five years certain people have been trying to argue that riding them is automatically bad for elephants,” he told me. “Yet you can’t have an honest discussion about it because people on both sides are making so much money from their various positions and business-models.”
“I think we’ll start to see some owners start to look at taking their elephants begging on the street. But I’m also hoping they will start re-seeing their elephants as family and friends - the way many mahouts do actually see their elephants, rather than primarily for their monetary value.”
“A picnic compared to what’s going to happen”
Nor is Roberts the not only one holding out hope that a better future for Asian elephants could lie ahead.
For Sébastien Duffillot, founder of the Elephant Conservation Centre in Laos, the lockdown is also prompting renewed attention to the project’s conservation-based roots. Last year, alongside their education-based activities for tourists, the centre experimented with rewilding a small herd of captive-elephants into a national park -- something they are now making the focus on their work.
“It is time-consuming to produce elephant groups that can survive in the wild,” he explains, referencing the difficulty of matching compatible, unrelated captive elephants into loyal and supportive herds, “so we’re looking at this crisis as an opportunity to accelerate that project.”
“Instead of seeing the pandemic as a curse, let’s go back to basics and rewild these elephants with all the necessary safeguards and knowledge. This also means keeping our current mahout staff and reconverting them into forest-guards and rangers who can track the elephants, collect dung and attach camera traps.
Ultimately, Duffilot hopes that rather than using elephants to find employment in logging (as was common in Laos until a ban in 2018), mahouts can use their skills to help protect the species and their habitat: “I think it’s the best possible employment for a mahout.”
How such projects will be funded, especially with less potential tourism to support them, is still uncertain. But a wider shift in attitudes towards animal captivity in the West could help, Duffilot believes, pointing to a new ReWild project in France which aims to re-settle zoo animals in their nations of origin.
According to environmental activist Lamya Essemlali, a ReWild director, conservation funding is not currently being directed in the best way - going towards in-situ habitat protection rather than zoo-based captivity. Yet Essemlali believes this is something that Covid-19 could help change -- through its renewed emphasis on the fragility of the animal-human virus divide, and the importance of keeping ecosystems healthy and intact.
“Really this Covid crisis is a picnic compared to what’s going to happen if we keep destroying wildlife,” she said, also over the phone. “There is a French author that sums it up well: in a world where there is place only for the human, there isn't a place for the human -- a world without wildlife is the end of the world.”
Much about these hopes and plans may sound like little more than silver linings. But there is also something to be said for keeping tight holds on visions of a better world -- and seizing each new opportunity to reach them.
For John Roberts, that impulse at present means simply returning to the parts of his job that first inspired him -- spending time with elephants and mahouts, and sharing those experiences in twice daily livestreams. “I’ve gone back to being an elephant boy again,” he told me, “more grounded in the emotion, rather than just the science.”
Must reads from the region
Black Environmentalists Talk About Climate and Anti-Racism, Somini Sengupta in The New York Times
My recommended-reads this week are not specific to Asia-Pacific, but instead reflective of the wider push to recognise the deep connections between racism and environmental harm -- and the struggles to address their linked injustice. Starting with this key collection of interviews with Sam Grant from 350.org, Professor Robert D. Bullard and Heather McGhee from Demos, in Somini Senupta’s Climate Fwd newsletter.
What is environmental racism and why does it matter? Cyril Ip in South China Morning Post, Young Post
“I have personally become more engaged with issues that I had previously been less informed about (such as environmentalism) because of the way they intersect with issues I already care about, such as race,” writes Cyril Ip, pointing out the dumping of electronic waste (much coming from the United States), in the Chinese city of Guiyu, where reports indicate almost 80 per cent of children now suffer from lead poisoning.
Racism derails our efforts to save the planet, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson in The Washington Post
Marine biologist and policy advisor, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, speaks urgently about racism’s debilitating toll, as well as climate change’s disproportionate impact on people of colour and their importance in mobilising action: “black people are significantly more concerned about climate change than white people (57 percent vs. 49 percent), and Latinx people are even more concerned (70 percent),” she writes.
Research on Environmental Justice in China: Limitations and Possibilities, by Alice Mah and Xinhong Wang, Chinese Journal of Environmental Law
“With its Western origins….what is the salience of the concept of environmental justice in China today?” - an interesting overview from two academics.
Climate Activists: Here’s Why Your Work Depends on Ending Police Violence, Dany Sigwalt in Medium
Dany Sigwalt, co-director of umbrella group Power Shift Network, a collection of organisations fighting climate change and social injustice, lays out how securing justice for George Floyd would be a win for enforcing government accountability -- and in turn a win for the environment.
What else I have been thinking about
Wildeverse, from Internet of Elephants
With engagement and education key to tackling injustice of all kinds, there is some hope to be found perhaps in a new augmented reality game from the Kenyan start-up Internet of Elephants. It is launched in partnership with conservation science experts from the Borneo Nature Foundation, Goualougo Triangle Ape Foundation, Zoo Atlanta and Chester Zoo, in a bid to encourage players to create a virtual forest in which they can seek out and identify different animals as well as protect them from threats.
The best kind of getting lost in the woods perhaps.
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Who we are
Lou Del Bello is an energy and climate journalist based in Delhi, India.
Jocelyn Timperley is a freelance climate & science journalist based in San José, Costa Rica.
India Bourke is an environment journalist based in London, UK.
Mat Hope is investigative journalist based in Nairobi, Kenya.