The Tusk at Hand
Pulverizing ill-gotten ivory at public “ivory crushes” constitutes an important step toward saving endangered elephants. But it can’t be the only one we take.
I plan to be out of the office this Friday, trading in the staidness of my usual surroundings in Washington, D.C., for the kinetic bustle of New York City’s Times Square. It doesn’t represent the early start to a fun weekend getaway, though. I won’t be doing any sightseeing that morning — at least not in the conventional sense of the word.
I will, however, be on hand to witness an extraordinary sight that’s very much worth seeing: the deliberate destruction by U.S. government agents of nearly one ton of confiscated elephant ivory, right there along Broadway between 46th and 47th Streets, in full public view. Just around the corner from the venue where actor Bradley Cooper recently wrapped up his critically acclaimed 14-week run in The Elephant Man, I’ll be experiencing a complicated mix of emotions familiar to many theatergoers: concern, relief, melancholy, awe, and hopefulness. If you happen to be in the neighborhood on Friday at 10:30 a.m., I hope you’ll join me.
Organizers of the U.S. Ivory Crush in Times Square, as the event is formally known, include members of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, politicians, and environmental groups (including my own group, NRDC). In the heart of Manhattan — on one of the most famously visible parcels of real estate in the world, with thousands of people passing by every few minutes — we will jointly oversee a spectacle that has a large batch of seized ivory being pulverized, piece by piece, until it has been completely destroyed. And in doing so we’ll be spotlighting the single greatest threat facing the world’s elephants: an illegal ivory trade that’s responsible for the death of more than 30,000 of these majestic, social, intelligent, and endangered animals every year.
In 1989, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) effectively outlawed the global ivory trade. But CITES limitations, combined with gaps in U.S. law that still allowed for the sale of “antique” ivory, left room for a legal trade to flourish domestically and inspired traffickers to find new ways of smuggling ivory from recently slaughtered elephants into the country. More than 25 years after CITES, poachers are still killing nearly 100 African elephants every day — roughly one every 15 minutes. The population of these animals has dropped from 1.3 million in 1979 to somewhere around 400,000 today; if poachers continue to kill them at the present rates, wildlife biologists say, the African forest elephant could very well go extinct within another decade.
Ivory crushes like the one taking place this Friday are becoming more common throughout the world as governments fighting against wildlife trafficking realize that these events perform two functions. On one level, they draw much-needed attention to the plight of a highly endangered species through gripping imagery: vast stockpiles of long, curved tusks and hand-carved objects being fed into a machine that noisily grinds them into coarse white gravel. On another level, however, these events send a powerful message to the poachers and traffickers whose activity bolsters a $10 billion–a–year black market: We’re taking this ivory out of circulation — permanently — and ensuring it will never reemerge to feed the demand that leads to more dead elephants.
Still, as all those who are involved in the U.S. Ivory Crush know, if we’re ever to put an end to poaching, we’ll need to back up events like this one with new laws. Fortunately, governments are showing that they understand the value of pairing all this pulverizing with policies that will go even further toward saving endangered elephants. The last big American ivory crush before this one, for example, was accompanied by a series of important FWS actions, including a ban on all commercial imports of African elephant ivory into the United States. Individual states, too, have taken action: New York and New Jersey both passed significant ivory-ban legislation last year, and a similar bill is currently awaiting passage in California. And two weeks ago, at a crush in Beijing, China destroyed nearly three-quarters of a ton of ivory and publicly committed to phasing out the domestic manufacture and sale of ivory products.
We’ll need to do something else, too, if we want to stop poaching: put an end to the fetishization of ivory that props up this gruesome and inhumane practice. On Friday, as Times Square’s jumbotrons flash overhead and thousands of passersby record the moment on their smartphones, we’ll take another big step in this direction by destroying a full ton of ivory, and with it the very notion of ivory as a valuable commodity. From the world capital of media, the message will go out loud and clear: Elephant tusks are utterly worthless — unless they happen to be attached to living, breathing elephants.
