Ivory is one of the world’s great unsung treasures. Its inviting warmth and tantalizing, organic texture is innately attractive, an obvious predecessor to the finer properties of today’s plastics. Although elephants are the most well known source of the venerable material, ivory also originates from a variety of other animals, including hippos, narwhals, walruses and sperm whale. Even ivory tusks from extinct woolly mammoths are still found and used today by fine craftsmen around the world.
While stunningly beautiful, ivory is also one of the most controversial materials commonly encountered in antiques. Due to the rapidly shrinking populations of wild African and Asian elephants, ivory has become a focal point of international law enforcement. Although possession of elephant ivory is generally not banned outright, trade in ivory or ivory items is heavily regulated by the global community. In spite of the heavy web of laws and regulations surrounding the ivory industry, the poaching of elephants for their tusks has continued unabated. In response to this development, many nations – including those as diverse as Kenya, Gabon, the Philippines, Hong Kong, China, France, Ethiopia, the Congo and the United States – have crushed, burned or otherwise destroyed previously seized stockpiles of illegal ivory.
Over the past 30 years more than 100 tons of illegally poached elephant ivory has been destroyed in this way. Environmentalist and conservationists applaud this policy as a way to send a powerful, “zero-tolerance” message to would be poachers and dealers in illegal ivory. Unfortunately, like many well-intentioned policy initiatives, it may also have more negative, unintended consequences.
First, destroying national elephant ivory stockpiles does not directly impact poachers or illegal dealers. These two illicit groups only care about one thing: is the ivory they poach today salable? Destroying existing ivory stockpiles doesn’t change the economic calculus of the situation one iota. If anything, severely restricting the availability of elephant ivory only serves to elevate the cream-colored material to an almost mythical status. This enhances its desirability to amoral consumers who are driven primarily by the social status that extreme rarity imparts. Simply put, if poachers think they can find a buyer for ivory, they will kill more elephants. Any illegal ivory that might be seized is simply written off as a loss – an acceptable part of doing business – by those operating illicitly. The poacher or illegal dealer doesn’t care or even know if his previously seized ivory has been destroyed.
The second issue is the unspoken future artistic sacrifice that is made when national governments destroy elephant ivory stockpiles. Ivory has been a recurring theme in exquisite sculpture, carvings, jewelry and musical instruments – not to mention countless other tangible arts – throughout human history. Ivory is truly a physical cornerstone of humanity’s artistic expression as a species – an inherently amazing material which has been treasured by our ancestors for thousands of years. Destroying ivory that has already been seized by national governments constitutes a pointless cultural holocaust. Any ivory destroyed today is ivory our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will never get the opportunity to admire in a work of fine art. Crushing our collective cultural patrimony doesn’t, ultimately, make the world a better place. It doesn’t even save any elephants. Instead we become collectively poorer, both culturally and spiritually, when elephant tusks are burned upon the pyre of international pressure to “do something”.
Let’s peer 50 to 100 years into the future. Although I sincerely hope I am wrong, in all probability both Asian and African elephants will be extinct in the wild. National governments will have proven unable to stop the extermination of elephants because poaching is driven primarily by human poverty in elephant habitats. In other words, as long as sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia are economically poor, people there will poach to augment their incomes. As a result, elephant ivory will have become an incredibly rare and highly coveted material. Instead of feeding tons of seized ivory into the grinder, countries could have sequestered these precious ivory stockpiles in secure locations like Swiss underground bank vaults.
In this probable, dystopian future, poaching is no longer an issue – all the wild elephants are already gone. Therefore, these official, state-approved elephant ivory stockpiles could be quite legally and ethically sold. This would grant an economic boon – perhaps for further conservation of other species or elephant repopulation efforts – to the nations that once harbored these magnificent tusked beasts while also providing the art world with a ready source of a gorgeous and rare luxury material. Instead of this more reasonable outcome, I fear all the world will end up with will be crushed ivory dust, extinct elephants and, of course, bitter regrets.
