One artist’s point of view about ivory carvings, ivory artifacts, and elephants.

http://wildlifeofafrica.blogspot.com/2014/12/one-artists-point-of-view-about-ivory.html

If you love elephants, then you are already aware of the poaching epidemic we face in Africa that is threatening to wipe our largest Earth mammals off the planet into the tragic realm of extinction.

If you happen to be an artist, then you know the reason for this is use of a substrate to carve from.

I’ve never carved into an ivory tusk, and I never will.

We have clay, wood, hydrocal, marble, plaster, and vegetable ivory, tangua, that can be used to carve art forms.

There is no justification to drive a species to oblivion, in order to create a sculpture, a piece of jewelry, or a gun handle. None, other than human greed, and an artificially inflated market.

My personal opinion is that if we can halt poaching by destroying so called “priceless artifacts” carved from ivory, then it is our most basic human decency to do so.

When we reach the tipping point of elephants extinct in the wild, and have the misfortune of living in that altered environment without that keystone species, that ivory artifact sitting on a shelf in a collector’s vault or a museum will not save all the species who exist in the unhealthy environment created by removing an essential element.

Ban ALL ivory sales, and remove the demand for poaching.
#BanIvorySales in the USA ~ Petitions, email contacts for actions to take here. Thank you!
http://wildlifeofafrica.blogspot.com/p/elephants.html

Image courtesy:

www.eliteauction.com

Hand carved ivory elephants tusk. Fully relief carved design depicting a group of 6 elephants graduating in size walking towards a tree

Inside the NRA’s bizarre battle to prevent a ban on the sale of ivory in the US

Poachers are slaughtering elephants by the tens of thousands, but the NRA is more worried about American gun collectors.

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/inside-nras-bizarre-battle-prevent-ban-sale-ivory-us

December 23, 2014  |  

The National Rifle Association is fighting a new ban on the sale of ivory in the United Sates, meant to protect Africa’s threatened wildlife, because they say it would be disastrous for gun owners.

The NRA is backing new legislation in Congress that would roll back the ivory ban and prevent any regulations under the Endangered Species Act from disrupting or restricting the sale of lawful ivory. The Fish and Wildlife Service has already made an exception to the ban for musicians, which allows them to have a travel exception for antique instruments made with ivory. However, the exception does not extend to the sale of antique instruments made with ivory.

Chris Cox, executive director of the NRA’s lobbying arm, told news site The Hill earlier this year [3]

http://thehill.com/regulation/administration/212037-nra-warns-ivory-ban-will-make-gun-owners-criminals-overnight , “While the goal of restricting illegal commerce in endangered species is laudable, the effects of the ivory ban would be disastrous for American firearms owners and sportsmen, as well as anyone else who currently owns ivory.” 

Many antique guns made in the 1800s and early 1900s are prized by collectors for their ivory grips.

Others gun rights groups went as far as to claim that the new ivory ban infringes on the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. 

"For those of us who are concerned that this administration is trying to take away our guns, this regulation could actually do that," said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) after introducing the Lawful Ivory Protection Act in the Senate. The bill is currently under review by the Committee on Environment and Public Works. A similar bill was also introduced in the House of Representatives.

“See, this is why we can’t have nice things. Like elephants,” Daily Show host Jon Stewart said of the Senate bill. “So I guess the only things that should be hurt here are giant land mammals and victims of African terrorism.”

The new ivory ban is meant to protect endangered elephants and rhinos in Africa, where poachers are slaughtering the animals by the thousands for their ivory and selling it on the black market. China is the largest market for illegal ivory, where it is considered a status symbol for wealthy Chinese. The United Sates is the world’s second-largest market for illegal wildlife artifacts.

Poachers have killed 100,000 Central African elephants in the last three years, resulting in a 64 percent drop in the animal’s population, according to a recent academic study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [4]. 

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/36/13117.abstract

Meanwhile, the government of South Africa reported at least 1,000 rhinos were killed by poachers in South Africa last year.

Much of the money earned through black market ivory sales is used to fund armed extremist groups like Boko Haram in Africa.

Imported ivory has been banned in the United States since 1989. But earlier this year, the Fish and Wildlife Service introduced a more restrictive ban on the sale of ivory, which would require merchants selling antiques made with ivory to prove beyond any doubt that the ivory was imported before the 1989 ban. 

The NRA said that the new, more restrictive ban would do nothing to protect endangered elephants and would only make otherwise law-abiding gun collectors into criminals.

Prince William, destroying ivory art won’t stop poaching.

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/prince-william-destroying-ivory-art-wont-stop-poaching

February 17, 2014 // 12:11 PM EST

I’m all for symbolic actions to show resolve in the face of tragic environmental issues, but there’s good symbolism and there’s pointless symbolism. In the case of Prince William’s desire “to see all the ivory owned by Buckingham Palace destroyed"—expressed in private to Jane Goodall, but now reported in The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/feb/17/prince-william-buckingham-palace-ivory-destroyed The Dodo, https://www.thedodo.com/prince-william-pledges-to-dest-432979376.html?xrs=Dodo_FB and elsewhere—we have an example of pointless symbolism. 

Recently, we’ve seen a number of high-profile burnings of whole elephant tusks by governments, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/21/philippines-ivory-burn-tusks-destroyed_n_3478539.html the tusks themselves either having been seized from poachers or from back stockpiles. There have also been huge ivory crushes http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/chinas-historic-ivory-crush-is-a-good-first-step-but-only-that in several countries.

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/frances-ivory-crush-is-more-proof-that-wildlife-trafficking-is-a-global-problem The destruction both takes ivory off the lucrative black market, as well as attempting to send the message that governments are serious about stopping poaching. Such efforts may well elevate the public awareness of the dire state of the African elephant, being driven rapidly to extinction by the desire for its tusks in the black market of Southeast and East Asia. It’s a nice photograph, a nice story, and decent symbolism. 

But in the case of Buckingham Palace’s collection of ivory, we’re not talking about ivory tusks or trinkets, we’re talking about, to use The Guardian’s description, “about 1,200 artifacts dating back hundreds of years.” In other words, over a millennium of art history. 

Elephant poaching http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/despite-huge-busts-elephant-poaching-has-reached-record-levels--2 is an abomination, full stop. Governments around the world, both in the countries where poaching occurs and in the black markets where the ivory is worked http://motherboard.vice.com/en_ca/blog/vietnam-is-the-world-s-worst-for-wildlife-crime into finished products, are not doing enough to stop the slaughter; there can be no doubt about that. It will be a dark stain on the history of human civilization if we cannot collectively rally to stop this trade. 

However, destroying the legacy of human creativity embodied in the Buckingham Palace collection serves no purpose. Doing so would not, as conservationist Paula Kahumbu http://paulakahumbu.com/ says, “be a demonstration of them putting their money where their mouth is,” nor would it, I imagine, “help Britons hand in their ivory, illegal or legal.” 

It’s one thing, as Prince Charles has apparently done, to remove items in the collection of his homes from public view. Doing so may help, in some small way, distance the linking of ivory objects with wealth, power, and prestige in the minds of potential buyers of either new or antique works in ivory. If Buckingham Palace wishes to do that, it would be a far more sophisticated action than that of destroying outright the objectionable objets d’art. 

In a way, the destruction of existing antique ivory works of art—those created in a time when African elephants were not on the brink of extinction—is some weird form of knee-jerk iconoclasm. It’s as if we are now so horrified by the state of affairs we’ve created vis-a-vis elephants that to show our disgust with our ineptitude at preventing poaching we will attempt to erase the fact that we ever thought using ivory was acceptable. 

Should we also destroy objects created in times of slavery? The near entirety of most museums' Roman collections would have to go, as well as the artistic and cultural legacy of a great many societies. Should we destroy artifacts from the period of westward expansion in the United States associated with the de facto attempted genocide of Native Americans? Should we destroy art objects created in colonized nations by at times brutalized people? Will we in the coming decades all destroy old smartphones and gadgets containing conflict minerals to show our disgust with economic exploitation and environmental degradation? 

We’re obviously not going to do any of those things. Nor should we go around in some purge of ivory antiques, turning in family heirlooms and cultural relics. The visual legacy of practices we now find objectionable is something worth preserving, even when we find it disturbing.  

Good on Prince William for carrying on his father’s legacy on issues of conservation by helping with campaigns to end poaching of both elephants and rhinos. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/prince-charles/10626071/Prince-Charles-and-Prince-William-unite-for-anti-poaching-video.html Take the royal family’s ivory out of public view. Box it up for a time if you must. In a few decades, when either the African elephant will have been driven extinction by our inaction today, or when we will have stopped the illegal ivory trade, take the ivory out of its boxes for re-display. It will then either be a grim reminder of our failure or an emblem of our success. 

TOPICS: elephants, ivory, ivory crushes, environment, poaching