Praised for the nuance and sensitivity with which it approaches one of
the most fraught conservation issues we face today, John Frederick
Walker's Ivory's Ghosts tells the astonishing story of the power of
ivory through the ages, and its impact on elephants. Long before gold
and gemstones held allure, humans were drawn to the "jewels of the
elephant"--its great tusks. Ivory came to be prized in every culture of
the world--from ancient Egypt to nineteenth-century America to modern
Japan--for its beauty, rarity, and ability to be finely carved.
Elephants tusks were transformed into sensuous figurines, sacred icons,
scientific instruments, pistol grips, and piano keys. But the beauty
came at an unfathomable cost. Walker lays bare the ivory trade's cruel
connection with the slave trade and the increasing slaughter of
elephants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the 1980s,
elephant poaching reached levels that threatened the last great herds of
the African continent, and led to a worldwide ban on the ancient
international trade in tusks. But the ban has failed to stop
poaching--or the emotional debate over what to do with the legitimate
and growing stockpiles of ivory recovered from elephants that die of
natural causes.