In October 1988, the United States Congress, under pressure from strong public sentiment as well as effective lobbying by conservation groups, passed the African Elephant Conservation Act, which stipulates that all ivory imported into the U.S. come from countries that adhere to the 102-nation Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) ivory control system; Congress also established the “African Elephant Conservation Fund,” to help finance the elephant’s cause. Within a few months—May 1989—Tanzania, Kenya, and six other African countries called for an end to the ivory trade worldwide. To avoid a last-minute slaughter by the poachers, the U.S. government immediately declared a ban on ivory imports, a move endorsed a few days later by the European Economic Community (EEC).
Only the countries of southern Africa, more distant from organized poaching, have enjoyed an increase in elephant population; Zimbabwe (where the people own the elephants, and villages share in safari fees and tourist income) must actually cull about one thousand animals each year. Similarly, Botswana and South Africa, which also make profit from a sustained yield of ivory, resist the ban, and so do Zambia, Namibia, and Malawi; these countries feel, not without justice, that they are being penalized for mismanagement and corruption farther north. Though sympathetic, Dr. David Western, addressing the world conference of CITES convened in Lausanne, Switzerland, in October 1989, withdrew his support of controlled sales in these southern countries in favor of a total ban. “The demand for ivory internationally is so overwhelming that the option of sustainability is declining,” Western said. The CITES conference duly adopted the position of world conservation groups that a partial ban would almost certainly be ineffective. For the first time, CITES placed the elephant on the endangered list, which automatically put a halt to the legal trade. This worldwide ban—not incumbent on the southern countries though destroying their markets—became effective as of January 18, 1990. Within the year, the ivory market had collapsed, and though sporadic poaching still continues, it is much diminished almost everywhere.
Today (1990) Dr. Douglas-Hamilton estimates the African elephant population at 609,0000—a remnant of the millions of elephants that once wandered the whole continent. By comparison to the black rhino and mountain gorilla, this appears sufficient, but it is a far less healthy population than it seems. For these are not stable family groups with matriarch leaders but makeshift, neurotic bands of scared young animals that will not reproduce in an efficient way for years to come.
Of all African animals, the elephant is the most difficult for man to live with; yet its passing—if this must come—seems the most tragic of all. I can watch elephants (and elephants alone) for hours at a time, for sooner or later the elephant will do something very strange such as mow grass with its toenails or draw the tusks from the rotted carcass of another elephant and carry them off into the bush. There is mystery behind that masked gray visage, an ancient life force, delicate and mighty, awesome and enchanted, commanding the silence ordinarily reserved for mountain peaks, great fires, and the sea.*
I wrote that twenty years ago, and have seen nothing since to change my mind. Indeed, elephant mysteries are still being discovered. It has now been learned that this animal can transmit low-frequency alarms and other elephantine messages across miles of wilderness, and increasingly it is credited with the apprehension of death that we had heretofore reserved to our own species. Except fire and man, these great animals have more impact on habitat than any force in Africa, and the prosperity of many other creatures may depend on them. This is as true in the forest as on the savanna. The very survival of the bongo, okapi, and lowland gorilla, which browse on the new growth in elephant-made gaps in the canopy, may depend upon the survival of the forest elephant.
—January 1991
* “The Pygmy Elephant: A Myth and Mystery,” in Pachyderm (Newsletter of the African Elephant and Rhino Specialist Group) December 1986.
* Peter Matthiessen, The Tree Where Man Was Born, (New York: Viking Press, 1972).
ALSO BY PETER MATTHIESSEN
THE PETER MATTHIESSEN READER
edited by McKay Jenkins
In this single-volume collection of the distinguished author’s nonfiction are essays and excerpts that highlight the spiritual, literary, and political daring so crucial to Matthiessen’s vision. Comprehensive and engrossing, The Peter Matthiessen Reader celebrates an American voice unequaled in its commitment to literature’s noblest aspiration: to challenge us to perceive our world—as well as ourselves—truthfully and clearly.
Nonfiction
LOST MAN’S RIVER
In Lost Man’s River Matthiessen returns to the primeval landscape of the Florida Everglades, the setting of his bestseller Killing Mister Watson. In 1910 a sugarcane planter named E. J. Watson was gunned down by a group of his neighbors, perhaps in cold blood, perhaps in self defense. Years later, E. J.’s son Lucius tries to discover the truth of his father’s life and death. And even as Lucius tries to redeem his half-lost life by gathering the testimony (and braving the threats) of poachers and renegades, he struggles for the future of the remote country in which they live.
Fiction/Literature
AFRICAN SILENCES
A powerful and sobering account of the cataclysmic depredation of the African landscape and its wildlife. Through Peter Matthiessen’s eyes we see elephants, white rhinos, gorillas, and other endangered creatures of the wild. We share the drama of the journeys themselves, including a hazardous crossing of the continent in a light plane. And along the way, we learn of the human lives oppressed by bankrupt political regimes and economies.
Current Events/Travel
AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD
In a malarial outpost in South America two misplaced gringos converge and clash. Martin Quarrier has come to convert the elusive Niaruna Indians to his brand of Christianity. Lewis Moon, a stateless mercenary who is himself part Indian, has come to kill them on behalf of the local comandante. Out of their struggle Peter Matthiessen has created a novel of Conradian richness that explores both the varieties of spiritual existence and the politics of cultural genocide.
Fiction/Literature
ON THE RIVER STYX
And Other Stories
“Mr. Matthiessen proves himself here to be a connoisseur of coiled tensions, between men and women, between people of different social classes, and, repeatedly, between races.… There is something almost mysterious about his achievement … qualities for which one can think of only classical or old-fashioned words: gravitas, grandeur, beauty.”
—The New York Times
Fiction/Literature
KILLING MISTER WATSON
Killing Mister Watson is a fictional masterpiece, the first novel of the Watson trilogy, written at the peak of Peter Matthiessen’s powers as a novelist. Drawn from fragments of historical fact, it brilliantly depicts the fortunes and misfortunes of Edgar J. Watson, a real-life entrepreneur and outlaw who appeared in the lawless Florida Everglades around the turn of the century.
Fiction/Literature
MEN’S LIVES
“Matthiessen’s portrayal of a disappearing way of life has a biting eloquence no outside reporter could command. The fishermen’s voices—humorous, bitter, bewildered, resigned—are as clear as the technical procedures of their work and the threatened beauty of their once quiet shore.”
—Newsweek
Literature
FAR TORTUGA
“Far Tortuga is a singular experience, a series of moments captured whole and rendered with a clarity that quickens the blood.… From its opening moment … the reader senses that the narrative itself is the recapitulation of a cosmic process, as though the author had sought to link his storytelling with the eye of creation.”
—The New York Times Book Review
Literature
VINTAGE BOOKS
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