Your food reserves are running low; you are beginning to doubt you will be able to feed your family in the upcoming week. Resources have been scarce for a while, but it became especially difficult to find anything after the new neighbors moved in. They have been demolishing and rebuilding upon much of the land you use to gather food, and have even started approaching your home. You are starting to feel threatened, with this intruder only exacerbating your previous problems. If they do not leave soon, you might have to do something drastic to drive them away.
As human beings, our innate reaction may be to empathize with the person we infer to be experiencing these feelings and concerns. We are generally inclined to believe that only other humans encounter anxieties around feeding themselves and keeping their families safe. However, the effort for survival is a universal experience — transcending boundaries of species and resonating with all living beings. Recent explosions in human development, and resulting encroachment into previously undisturbed animal habitats, have led to increased conflict between human and animal needs. Elephant communities have been particularly affected with regards to land-use and resource distribution. However, within these instances of conflict, human and elephant groups are both equally negatively impacted, and often for the same reasons. As such, it is possible to reshape destructive human practices by placing the needs of both human and animal communities at the forefront of sustainable development.
Exploring the Roots: What Are the Causes of Conflict?
To understand what sustainable practices should aim for, it is necessary to first characterize the current systemic threats to elephant communities. The most prominent is habitat fragmentation. Rapid human population growth and resulting needs for infrastructure, housing, agriculture, and mining have led to human expansion into historic elephant domains. This has fragmented long-ranging elephant habitats and prevented access to essential migratory pathways. Elephant habitats now increasingly overlap with human settlements, often in areas where human activity dominates and actively separates previously large elephant communities. The following genetic isolation has led to a loss of gene flow between populations and an increase in inbreeding. The cascading effects have resulted in a reduction of genetic diversity and a reduced adaptive potential. Isolated elephant populations, with limited phenotypes to “pick from,” have less adaptive capacity for external threats, both human and non-human, and a greater vulnerability to extinction.
A reduced range also means that elephants can no longer sustain themselves solely on the resources within their habitats. These animals often turn to seasonal migration to ensure consistent resource access. However, habitat fragmentation impedes migratory behaviors, which are especially vital for elephant communities facing resource scarcity. When elephants do attempt to migrate, they encroach on human settlements and cause damage to subsistence crops and livestock. This may result in retaliatory human behavior, which usually ends in endangerment or loss of life for both populations. Excessive human-elephant conflict can become detrimental to both groups, and conservation practices must take this into account.
Historic approaches to conservation have considered this problem, yet they have sometimes taken it to the extreme. Dubbed “elephantocentric” conservation, this approach prioritizes the reconstruction and maintenance of theoretically ideal elephant communities to be released into sanctuaries and protected habitats. On the other side of the spectrum, it accounts solely for the ecological needs of elephants without wider consideration of human land-use needs or local ecosystems. Constructing an ideal elephant community to reside in a “pristine” natural world, completely untouched by human influence, is unattainable. Elephantocentric approaches are also not feasible given the current trajectory of human growth in areas where elephant conservation is most needed. In addition, this outlook does not consider the history of human-elephant coexistence in many parts of the world. Elephants play major social and cultural roles in local communities, including reciprocal relationships developed through centuries of elephant husbandry practices. While human needs shouldn’t be considered over elephant needs, ignoring the local history of human-elephant relationships and supplanting these philosophies with a largely Western perspective is also counterproductive to elephant conservation. Current research conducted by the de Silva Human-Nature Lab at UC San Diego, which considers a more interdisciplinary and intersectional approach to human-elephant dynamics, addresses this very gap in traditional conservation strategies.
Finding the Kernels: What Are Elephant Needs?
There have been increasing global critiques of modern land usage, primarily concerning agricultural expansion on a scale often unsustainable for local ecosystems. The pesticide and nitrogenous fertilizer usage, strenuous land use, and enormous scale of ultra-efficient commercial farming practices may increase crop yields, but they simultaneously wreak havoc on local ecosystems. Modern agriculture must turn towards new methods which can boost crop production without stripping the land of its resources. As a result, implementing sustainable land use practices, which balance the needs of both animal and human inhabitants, is key to preventing further escalation of these issues. Elephants, as adaptable, wide-ranging animals, become bolder the more their habitats are threatened and force human communities to confront their impacts on the wider ecosystem. Utilizing this reasoning, the de Silva Lab focuses their research on Asian elephants as a valuable case study to aid in the development of their intersectional approach.
The de Silva Lab and collaborators developed an ecological niche model to map and predict the distributions of Asian elephants through their habitats within South and Southeast Asia. With this model, researchers hoped to better understand the core ecological needs of elephants, as well as how those needs overlap with human ones. The process of developing this model can be divided into three main stages: formulating inputs, running the inputs through machine learning algorithm MAXENT to develop the outputs, then refining outputs.
The primary inputs of the ecological niche model were elephant occurrence data and ecological covariates. Ecological covariates refer to specific variables that indicate a region’s suitability to elephant needs, such as wood harvest rate, human densities, forest cover, and climate. For this model, the researchers drew the covariates from historical datasets, concerning patterns in land use, and finer resolution datasets, which set a “benchmark” for environmental variables. Once the ecological covariates and elephant occurrence data were fed into MAXENT, two different map model outputs were constructed from the associations between covariates and the elephant occurrence. The outputs were initially continuous models, but they were binarized for analysis by establishing a cutoff which determined locations as either suitable, or unsuitable, habitats. From this binarized state, the two models were combined into a single map and a corresponding mathematical model for the covariate-elephant associations. This model can now project elephant habitat suitability back into years where there are no records, like predicting an “x” and “y” for a linear model given its equation.
Land-use models are beneficial in allowing researchers to reconstruct a past more distant than existing records. By analyzing historic correlations between human and elephant groups, this model demonstrates that suitable elephant habitats and populations have existed in areas with recorded human presence. Previous areas of sustainable coexistence indicate that human presence itself is not an inherent detriment to elephant populations. Rather, it is human practices that are harmful. This can prompt a shift in conservation practices to prioritize sustainable human presence instead of trying to reconstruct a “pristine” ecosystem that never existed.
Growing the Garden: What Are Human Needs?
The growing importance of sustainability has also prompted interest in incorporating Indigenous land-use philosophies into modern agricultural practices. Indigenous communities, in South Asia and elsewhere, generally embed the health of the surrounding ecosystem into their cultural values, which then positively influences their land management. However, Indigenous practices are often tailored to the particular ecosystems they have been developed in. Similar to “elephantocentric” conservation strategies that ignore local elephant histories, applying the practices of Indigenous peoples outside of Asia to Asian land-use practices, without holistic consideration of greater impacts, may cause more harm than good.
One example of difficulty transferring research findings across different contexts is the potential implementation of “bee-fences” to protect crops from elephant damage. Previous research showed that African elephants had adverse reactions to African honey bees, and researchers hypothesized that Asian elephants would react similarly to Asian honey bees. The bee-fence initially caught the attention of researchers as it would provide a more ecologically conscious alternative to protecting human crops. A bee-fence would harness an elephant’s innate reaction to honey bee sounds, instead of using damaging man-made materials and constructing physical barriers. However, studies conducted in Asia observed mixed results, mainly attributed to differences in appearance and aggression between Asian and African honey bees, as well as differences in behavior between Asian and African elephants. Both these differences exemplify the nuances of individual species and their roles within local ecosystems, highlighting how these relationships impact sustainable conservation.
Beyond the inapplicability of certain practices, the de Silva Lab, in collaboration with other researchers, have also identified that many factors can influence decisions surrounding sustainability. Particularly, they have recognized how an individual’s decision to initiate conflict results from the balance between costs and benefits that are intangible, such as sociocultural or emotional, and tangible, usually economic. For example, someone raised in a society that emphasizes the importance of preserving elephants might be faced with the economic costs of elephant-related damage to their land. The individual now must weigh both the intangible, or cultural, and tangible, or economic, factors to decide whether to engage in conflict with elephants. However, it is generally difficult to change deep-seated personal and social values. Successful conservation efforts therefore must target a narrow range of alterable qualities, like income or living conditions, that can mitigate the human choices which harm elephant populations.
Considering these points, the future of sustainable development must chart a new path centering on “compassionate conservation,” as termed by the de Silva Lab and other ecologists, where genuine care and importance is given to the needs of human communities as an extension to the needs of the natural world. In implementing this research, there must be cooperation between both top-down forces, such as sources of funding and executives in charge of development plans, and bottom-up forces, such as human communities “on the ground” who are dealing with these issues. Imposing policies upon communities without an understanding of their needs and wants will likely fail, and build resentment. Therefore, conservation strategies must center their unique local contexts from the very start.
While the particular study of Asian Elephants may seem distant, the core understanding that our choices impact our ecosystem can better inform our lives and actions. Modern critiques of human-nature interactions are often negative, painting human communities as the principal aggressors and pushing for the reconstruction of “pristine” natural environments devoid of human influence. However, this form of conservation overlooks the historical integration of human communities within the greater ecosystem. Instead of distancing ourselves from the natural world, or characterizing our interactions with it as fundamentally detrimental, we can choose to celebrate our privilege to share the Earth with others — an act essential to human communities since their conception.
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