Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.