At the Hand of Man: Peril and Hope for Africa's Wildlife.

• Author: O'Hanlon, Ann

Raymond Bonner moved to east Africa in 1988 to write for The New Yorker, neatly in time to watch the 1989 global ban on ivory take effect. Enchanted by the continent's peoples and wildlife, Bonner explored the interplay of the two as they relate to wildlife conservation. He discovered that American wildlife organizations such as the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the African Wildlife Federation (AWF) pay scant attention to local peoples while establishing wildlife policy and distort facts when it is conducive to fundraising. The case in point is, of course, elephants and the argument for a total ban on ivory. Both WWF and AWF paid exaggerated attention to the case of the elephant (elephants have never been doomed to extinction; in fact, several countries had to stabilize their elephant populations well before the 1989 ban) once they discovered this was a fool-proof recipe for fundraising. Bonner himself was seduced into focusing on pachyderms, and he serves up some juicy reporting on the politics of elephants. However, if his topic is "Peril and Hope for Africa's Wildlife," as the subtitle promises, Bonnet falls short.

The ban on ivory, announced in 1989 at the initiation of WWF and AWF, was an abrupt reversal of both organizations' prior position of allowing the sale of some ivory. The wisdom of allowing ivory sales is at least threefold. First, elephant populations outgrow their habitat's support capacity and therefore must be kept from trampling the forest and farmland around them and dying of starvation. The tusks from these elephants, and from elephants who die natural deaths, should not go to waste. Second, putting a value on the elephants-outside of the western aesthetic value that many Africans don't have the luxury to share--is the best way to ensure that those peoples work for the survival of the species. Finally, the African people who cope with these dangers should be the people setting and implementing policy, both because it is their land and resource, and because their involvement is a fundamental precursor to caring for the survival of the species. No foreign government that pushed for the ban on ivory ever compensated local populations for their loss of income from ivory sales, nor included any Africans in policy making, an attitude Bonner refers to as "eco-colonialist."

Though Bonner is critical of a number of conservation organizations, he serves up a particularly thorough indictment of WWF. The organization...