Ivory's Ghosts: The White Gold of History and the Fate of Elephants [Hardcover]

John Frederick Walker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 6, 2009

Long before gold and gemstones held allure, humans were drawn to the “jewels of the elephant”—its great tusks—for their beauty, rarity, and ability to be finely carved. In Ivory’s Ghosts, John Frederick Walker tells the astonishing story of the human lust for ivory and its cataclysmic implications for elephants. Each age and each culture, from ancient Egypt to nineteenth-century America and modern Japan, found its own artistic, religious, and even industrial uses for the remarkable material that comes from the teeth of elephants and a handful of other mammals. Sensuous figurines, scientific instruments, pistol grips, and piano keys were all the result—as was human enslavement and the wholesale slaughter of elephants. By the 1980s, elephant poaching threatened the last great herds of the African continent and led to a worldwide ban on international trade. But the ban has failed to stop poaching, and debate continues over what to do with the legitimate and growing stockpiles of ivory recovered from elephants that die of natural causes. An insightful history of this precious commodity, Ivory’s Ghosts is also a wrenching—and utterly compelling—argument for a controversial mode of wildlife conservation: a controlled return to the ivory trade.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With a mix of appalled testimony and meticulous research, Walker (A Certain Curve of Horn) traces the story of ivory from Paleolithic times to the present and the devastation the ivory trade has wrought on African and Asian elephants—by one estimate, 2.8 million were killed between 1850 and 1914. At the height of the 19th century craze for ivory—which included a savage dependence on slaves to transport tusks to African trading centers—it was used for sacred artifacts, piano keys, pistol grips, toothpicks and billiard balls. By the 1980s, poaching threatened the last herds in Africa, leading to a worldwide ban on international trade, but with unintended consequences from laws so restrictive no ivory could be sold at all. By 1994, nine African nations had stockpiled 100 tons of pickup ivory, harvested from elephants that had died a natural death. This great gift that the elephant leaves at the end of its life, writes Walker, should be sold to help conserve endangered herds, a controversial proposal that spotlights the deep divide between ardent supporters of continuing the ban and conservationists concerned about the future of the elephant, now more important than the treasure it supplies. 16 pages of illus. (Jan.)
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From Booklist

Author of a book about an endangered species (The Curve of the Horn: The Hundred-Year Quest for the Giant Sable Antelope of Angola, 2002), Walker surveys the plight of another, the African elephant, in this work. Nominally protected by an international prohibition of commerce in their tusks, elephants continue to be poached and, occasionally, legally killed. Walker’s review of the arguments by proponents (mainly African countries) and opponents (mainly Western conservationists) of permitting some level of trade in ivory caps his history of the material’s allures and applications throughout human history. Discussing artifacts from Roman times, Walker references evidence of the eradication of elephants from the Mediterranean rim caused by the appetite for ivory, a precursor of the industrial age’s devastating slaughter of elephants to meet the mass market for combs, billiard balls, and piano keys. Walker’s description of ivory hunters, dealers, and manufacturers shows the trade circa 1900; his accounts of anti-ivory activists and herd managers depict the trade today; and his work delivers an informative, all-around perspective on the elephant’s history at the hands of humans. --Gilbert Taylor

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press; 1ST edition (January 6, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0871139952
• ISBN-13: 978-0871139955
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,267,362 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, June 25, 2010

By 

Miran Ali "I don't like anonymous reviewers" (Dhaka, Bangladesh) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ivory's Ghosts: The White Gold of History and the Fate of Elephants (Paperback)

First of all, I really enjoyed Walker's last book " A Certain Curve of the Horn" about the giant sable antelope of Angola.

This book's not about elephants and nor was it supposed to be. It is about the history of mans fascination and quest for Ivory. Walker gives a decent history of the uses of Ivory from prehistoric periods right up to the ruthless industrial slaughter of the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries.
He also gives a slightly short but decent account of the great Ivory hunters.

Unfortunately this is where he seems to drop the ball. The second half of the book is more about the current issues on conservation, sustainable use and the politics of CITES. It gets boring and Walker's grasp of post-colonial plunder by African leaders is far weaker than that of the Europeans.

He dwells extensively on Kenya, a disaster in conservation, and ruminates about the reintroduction of sport hunting in that country. He also mentions somewhere about the 300 sport hunted trophies that enter the US each year. Well that number ignores the hundreds also being exported legally to European hunters, specially Spanish, German and British ones.

While it is true that Walker does address the concerns of the better managed Southern countries regarding the international trade in ivory, it is strange that he never once mentions the positive or negative effects of sport hunting in South Africa, Botswana, Tanzania, Zambia and more recently Mozambique. Nor does he ever mention the issue that safari concessions have far less poaching that public reserves, outside of South Africa of course. In fact he only speaks with former big game hunters in Kenya where the sport was banned years ago.

He also gives too much of a free ride to certain countries that are becoming voracious consumers of ivory and who have little concern on whether it's poached or legally exported.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars About ivory, not elephants, August 11, 2009

By 

Enjolras (Springfield, MA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Ivory's Ghosts: The White Gold of History and the Fate of Elephants (Hardcover)

I thought this book would focus more on elephants and the politics of the ivory trade. Instead, it focuses largely on the history of ivory and its uses, with limited focus on the elephants themselves. I feel like much of the book consists of quotes describing the "sensuous" texture of ivory why it was so wonderful. In fact, Walker seems almost blase about the impact of the ivory trade, and instead remarks that ivory is almost a "perfect" material for manufacturing piano keys, Japanese traditional seals, etc. Other parts of the history seem incomplete or disjointed. Sometimes Walker's anecdotes seem out of place or irrelevant. For example, do we really need to know the length and grooming of AMNH's Ross McPhee's beard?

At several key points, Walker's analysis of key debates is one-sided. Near the beginning of the book, he dismisses the notion that humans overhunted mammoths, causing their extinction. Granted, this is a topic of debate, but he doesn't even bother to present the significant evidence amounted for the proposition, or the fact that some scientists now believe cavemen may have killed mammoths en masse since mammoth meat couldn't be preserved for a long time. For more on that particular topic, check out Paul Martin's Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America (Organisms and Environments). Walker also dismisses the biologists who argued for a ban on the ivory trade in the late 1980s. He totally dismisses the effect of criminalizing the ivory trade on stigmatizing ivory and reducing demand. In fact, at times he seems to want the stigma reduced (such as saying he liked his ivory piano keys). Again, this is a complicated issue, but rather than presenting both sides he makes it seem as if conservation organizations were cynically following public opinion.

I prefer Martin Meredith's Elephant Destiny, which follows the history of human-elephant relations. In particular, Meredith's book follows a straight chronology with minimal interruption and focuses on elephants, with chapters on their biology and social relations. It also does a good job chronicling the debates between Ian Douglas-Hamilton and Ian Parker over elephant populations in the early 1980s - better that Ivory's Ghosts.

Also, check out the recent the Scientific America article on the ivory trade.