Ivory's Ghosts: Walker.

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Ivory's Ghosts: the White Gold of History and the Fate of Elephants.

Long before gold & gemstones held allure, humans were drawn to the “jewels of the elephant”—its great tusks—for their beauty, rarity, & ability to be finely carved. In Ivory’s Ghosts, John Frederick Walker tells the astonishing story of the human lust for ivory & its cataclysmic implications for elephants. Each age & each culture, from ancient Egypt to nineteenth-century America & modern Japan, found its own artistic, religious, & even industrial uses for the remarkable material that comes from the teeth of elephants & a handful of other mammals. Sensuous figurines, scientific instruments, pistol grips, & piano keys were all the result—as was human enslavement & the wholesale slaughter of elephants. By the 1980s, elephant poaching threatened the last great herds of the African continent & led to a worldwide ban on international trade. But the ban has failed to stop poaching, & debate continues over what to do with the legitimate & growing stockpiles of ivory recovered from elephants that die of natural causes. An insightful history of this precious commodity, Ivory’s Ghosts is also a wrenching—& utterly compelling—argument for a controversial mode of wildlife conservation: a controlled return to the ivory trade.

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