FOREIGN AFFAIRS; The Elephant Wars
By Flora Lewis
Published: January 27, 1990
NAIROBI, Kenya— They burned rhino horns here Thursday, as they had burned elephant tusks last year. The huge pyre, also piled with leopard, lion and zebra skins seized by anti-poaching squads, was worth $2.5 million. Thick black smoke rolled up to the idyllic blue sky, splotched with idle cottony clouds.
It was a symbol and a sacrifice. Some Kenyans muttered that President Daniel arap Moi wouldn't win his people's congratulations for incinerating wealth that could have been used for urgent public needs, including wildlife protection. ''They could have sold it in some other country; the animals were already dead,'' said one worker.
But Daphne Sheldrick, whose English ancestors came to colonize Kenya more than a century ago, was firmly supportive. ''How can you tell people not to wear ivory or wild animal skins if you sell them?'' she said.
Mrs. Sheldrick runs an elephant and rhino orphanage, tenderly nursing baby animals whose parents have been killed by poachers until they can join herds in the game reserves. ''The mother of one of my orphans is in those flames,'' she noted grimly.
The spectacle was a satisfaction to conservationists who feel they are beginning to make headway with Kenya's strict new laws. In the last decade, poaching reduced this country's rhino population from some 7,000 to 400, and they would soon be wiped out without draconian, expensive measures.
Somalians are blamed in part for the upsurge in the illicit ivory and rhino horn trade. Somalia's President, Mohammed Siad Barre, could not afford to pay his loyal troops, so he turned a blind eye on their well-armed poaching raids into neighboring Kenya. Now, Kenya's harsh military orders and the intensified Somalian rebellion have moved the fighting farther away, easing the elephant war as civil war rages next door.
The spectacle of ''the burn'' here was also just a glimpse of the enormous competition developing in the attempt to keep nature and man from a disastrous collision course in Africa. It is obvious that the whole world stands to lose if the wilderness and the ecology of Africa are destroyed. It is obvious that Africa, with its population explosion, is intent on development and that most of its people are more concerned with their own future than with protecting their wildlife for the benefit of the pavement-weary from abroad.
The population growth here, at 4 percent a year, is the world's highest. At that rate, the population doubles every 15 years. It is currently estimated at 23 million. Thoughtful conservationists are aware that the pressure for land in a country that is nearly the size of Texas and only 20 percent arable will make it increasingly difficult to maintain huge wilderness reserves. And there is intense demand, and need, for more public services - education, hospitals, roads, housing, jobs - which drain government resources.
Richard Leakey, director of the Kenyan Wildlife Department, is seeking to promote support for conservation by making people aware that tourism, the biggest earner of foreign currency, depends on the existence of big safari parks with exotic animals, and by using park income to finance community improvements in surrounding areas so people can see their stake in maintaining preserves.
Like everyone here, he sees the implications of dizzying population growth, only marginally slowed by efforts so far. ''The greatest contraceptive is wealth,'' he says, urging far more development efforts in some areas so as to protect others.
He is tough, energetic and totally committed, the son of the famous paleontologists Louis and Mary Leakey, who found some of the earliest known fossils of the human species in Kenya.
''In one sense people could live without elephants,'' he says. ''But it would show we're insensitive to our own place on the planet and the environment that sustains us. If we let something so obvious as elephants go, the next species to be extinct would be us.''
But both conservation and development will take vast amounts of money, and the two efforts have conflicting, often mutually destructive effects. The short term, the medium term and the long term pose contradictory requirements.
The developed world, which grew rich contributing to environmental damage, cannot leave it to those left behind to pay for saving everybody's earthly heritage. But neither can it magically assure nature's health and man's legitimate aspirations.
There will have to be trade-offs. Both are absolutely essential. At some point, developers and conservationists have to take both goals into account. The elephant wars are only the beginning of a vast new human dilemma.