Some Superheroes Have Tusks

By Lance Gould

World Elephant Day is, of course, a global celebration of the planet’s largest land mammal. But while humans on the planet are battling two existential emergencies — the pandemic and the climate crisis — it’s worth noting that elephants can play a critical role in preventing both.

With global attention understandably focused on the more immediate dangers of the COVID-19 crisis, the climate crisis has gotten short shrift. But if you think the novel coronavirus has disrupted life as we know it, just wait to see what cataclysmic consequences await us when global temperatures rise just 2 degrees Celsius. That path is virtually assured unless we drastically change course on greenhouse gas emissions and a number of other environment-destroying policies that are threatening life on the planet.

We are going to need all the help we can get to fight the climate crisis, which, to be clear, will be considerably harder to navigate than COVID. To fight rising global temperatures, we’ll need assistance from key allies — like elephants.

Elephants and other megaherbivores (rhinos and hippos) are undercover climate change superheroes, which play a key role in keeping the planet cooler. The three recognized species of elephants (bush and forest elephants in Africa, and the Asian elephant) mitigate temperature rise in two types of essential ecosystems: grasslands and forests:

Elephants “contribute to the dispersal of the seeds for hardwood trees and are therefore essential to the growth of hardwoods that grow slowly and hold their carbon for long periods.”

A keystone species, elephants also play critical roles in keeping soil healthy and nutrient rich. Healthy soil is essential to carbon sequestration (drawing carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it in the ground), considered one of the most important solutions to fighting climate change.

So humans don’t even realize how much we need elephants.

Of course, ever since COVID hit, elephants need us more than ever, too. It’s a symbiotic, existential relationship that is imperiled by the twin crises of the moment.

Elephants were already in deep trouble before the COVID-19 crisis hit. Between poachers slaying at least 20,000 African elephants a year, the ever-dwindling numbers of Asian elephants in the wild, and humans encroaching ever further into elephant ecosystems, elephant numbers globally are at a flashpoint.

Now that the pandemic has hit, elephants will be subject to even greater dangers, and that is primarily because of the shutdown of global tourism.

In Africa, the greatest threat to elephants are poachers, driven by international criminal cartels that receive astronomical sums for elephant tusks. Just as it has their Asian cousins, the tourism shutdown has impacted African elephants, but in Africa it has manifest in reducing the two biggest obstacles for poachers: 1) tourists, highly visible, whose presence deters poachers, and 2) rangers, who actively serve to protect wildlife.

Arguably worse for the planet, the tourism shutdown’s negative impacts on global and local economies has also led to an increase in another, non-commercial kind of poaching: subsistence poaching, for food.

“Every kilogram of bushmeat,” he noted presciently more than a decade ago, “contained hundreds of thousands of novel viruses that have never been charted, the genomic sequences of which we don’t know, their fitness for creating pandemics we are unaware of, but we are ripe for zoonotic-born emerging communicable diseases.”

Navigating the current pandemic has challenged every nation on the planet — some much more than others. The idea that there are hundreds of thousands more novel viruses out there — and that they are a hungry person’s meal away from impacting huge swaths of the world’s population — should give us all pause, and focus a global effort on saving elephants and other wild creatures. Likewise, if we imagine how much worse the challenges of the climate crisis will be than the pandemic — a scenario in which no looming vaccine will alleviate the crisis — it is clear that we need to stand up for and protect elephants and other megaherbivores.

Humans might think the crusade to save the elephant is cavalier. When really, saving the elephant will save us.

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