将大象逼入绝境的象牙贸易

On the fringes of Queen Elizabeth National Park in western Uganda, farmers drum loudly throughout the night to scare off their most destructive enemy: the elephant. In the nearby Bwindi rainforest, small surviving herds of savannah elephants, cut off from their diminishing natural habitat, have adapted to a hidden existence beneath the canopy.

在位于乌干达西部的伊丽莎白女王国家公园的边缘，农民们整晚奋力敲着鼓吓走对他们来说最具破坏性的敌人——大象。在附近的布恩迪(Bwindi)雨林，小群幸存的草原象(savannah elephant)远离了它们日益缩小的自然栖息地，适应了躲在树荫下的隐蔽生活。

Throughout Africa, elephants and humans are in intense conflict. Humans are winning. A hundred years ago there were 10m elephants roaming the continent. By the mid-1970s that number had collapsed to 1.3m. So had the elephants’ range, with herds restricted to ever-smaller pockets of land in ever-fewer countries.

纵观整个非洲，大象和人类正处于激烈的冲突之中。人类即将赢得胜利。100年前，这片大陆上生存着1000万头大象。到上世纪70年代中期，大象的数量锐减至130万头。大象的生存范围也是一样，象群的栖息地越来越小，分布的国家也日益减少。

Today, there are 400,000 elephants left, roughly a third of them squeezed into one relatively safe haven, Botswana. “The story of the elephant is one of retreat, retreat, retreat, retreat,” says Patrick Bergin, chief executive of the African Wildlife Foundation, a conservation group.

如今，非洲仅存40万头大象，将近三分之一分布在博茨瓦纳这个相对安全的天堂。“大象的故事就是一个不断后退的故事，”保护组织非洲野生动物基金会(African Wildlife Foundation)的首席执行官帕特里克•贝尔然(Patrick Bergin)表示。

If loss of habitat is the biggest problem, it will only worsen. Africa has the world’s highest human fertility rates. In the next 30 years, the continent’s population will double to 2bn. In another half century it could double again. Then there is the slaughter. In the 20th century, it was white game hunters. In the 21st it is Asian ivory collectors, whose appetite and wealth has encouraged poaching on an industrial scale.

如果说失去栖息地是大象最大的问题，那么情况只会越来越糟糕。非洲是全世界人口生育率最高的地区。未来30年，非洲的人口将增加一倍，达到20亿人。之后再过50年，非洲人口可能再次翻番。此外，这里还存在屠杀。在20世纪，猎杀大象的是热衷狩猎游戏的白人。到了21世纪，是亚洲的象牙收藏者，他们的品味爱好和财富催生了盗猎产业。

It is hardly the first time humans have driven mammals towards extinction. Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, calls us “ecological serial killers”. The sabre-tooth tiger had existed for 30m years. Within 2,000 years of its first contact with humans, it had vanished forever. A similar fate befell a range of animals from mammoths and mastodons, a distant relation of the elephant, to giant sloths. Even before humans had invented the wheel, they had destroyed half of all big terrestrial animals.

这不是人类首次把哺乳动物推向灭绝境地。《人类简史》(Sapiens)的作者尤瓦尔•赫拉利(Yuval Noah Harari)把我们称为“生态系统的连环杀手”。剑齿虎曾经生存了3000万年。它们与人类首次接触后的2000年内，剑齿虎永远地消失了。同样的命运降临在一系列物种身上，从猛犸象和乳齿象(大象的远亲)到大地懒。人类在发明车轮以前，已经毁灭了一半的大型陆栖动物。

If humans are uncontrollable serial killers, then surely the elephants’ fate is sealed. Inevitably they will go the way of the American lion. At best, they will be driven to near-extinction, preserved in a few city zoos and armed-to-the teeth sanctuaries. Or can anything be done to preserve the world’s largest land mammal in anything like its present numbers? There are two strategies to arrest the catastrophe. Unfortunately, they pull in opposite directions.

如果说人类是不可控制的连环杀手，那么大象的命运无疑已经注定。它们将不可避免地走上美洲狮的老路。最乐观的情况是，它们被逼到近乎灭绝的地步，保留在一些城市动物园和全副武装的保护区内。或者人类能做什么来使这种世界上最大的陆地哺乳动物维持在现有数量?有两种策略可以阻止大象灭绝。遗憾的是，这两种策略可以说是背向而驰。

One is to intensify a 1990 ban on the ivory trade imposed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, which is meeting in South Africa this week. In addition to outlawing the sale of poached ivory, an extended ban would prohibit trade in all ivory products, including antiques. The trade in legal ivory is open to abuse, with new ivory easily passed off as old. Environmentalists say that if China and other big Asian ivory buyers, including Vietnam and Malaysia, support a ban, the market dynamic can shift.

一种策略是强化《濒危野生动植物种国际贸易公约》(CITES)下1990年颁布的象牙贸易禁令。最近一次CITES缔约方大会刚刚在南非举行。

There are obvious flaws in this strategy. Ban anything, from cocaine to Kalashnikovs, and the result is gruesomely predictable: its price will rise. That would energise poaching, not stop it. Even if, by some miracle, the policy worked and ivory lost its monetary value, African farmers would be left with marauding herds of worthless mammals. Other than their intrinsic beauty, they would be valuable only insofar as local people could capture some of the resulting tourist dollars.

该策略存在明显的缺点。从可卡因到卡拉什尼科夫(Kalashnikov)冲锋枪，所有禁令的结果都是可以预见的：价格攀升。这无法阻止偷猎行为，反而会刺激偷猎。即使出现奇迹，政策起到作用、象牙失去了经济价值，非洲农民也不得不对付毫无价值、四处猎食的象群。除了天生的优点之外，大象的价值只有在当地人从游客身上获得好处时才能体现。

The opposite approach would be to legalise the trade entirely. Like debasing a currency, the idea would be to force an “elephant devaluation”. Under this scenario, the market would be flooded with existing stockpiles and arrangements put in place to “harvest” tusks. The hope would be to drive the price below that at which it is worth the risk and cost of poaching. Call it fiat ivory.

另一个截然相反的办法是让象牙贸易完全合法化。和货币贬值一样，该策略是迫使“大象贬值”。在这种情况下，市场中将会涌入库存象牙，当局可以实施“收获”象牙的机制。希望在于这将使得象牙价格降到低于偷猎成本的水平。可以称之为合法象牙。

A “sustainable harvesting” approach has merit. But it may be too late to try. Mr Bergin says there are too many humans and too few animals. Legalisation of ivory would be a death knell, he says.

“可持续收获”方法有其优点。但是，现在再尝试可能为时已晚。贝尔然称，现在人类太多，而大象太少，象牙贸易合法化可能会敲响大象灭绝的丧钟。

Two experimental auctions, in 1997 and 2008, breathed life into the illegal trade by creating “fungible” ivory. Yet if partial legalisation failed, so has the 25-year prohibition. Once again, elephant populations are in alarming decline.

1997年和2008年两次试验性的拍卖，通过创造“可交换”象牙而为非法贸易注入了活力。不过，如果部分合法化这条路行不通，那么长达25年的禁令也一样。大象数量再次急剧减少。

The bigger question still is whether humans and wild animals can live side by side. Africa is huge. It could accommodate the US, China, India and western Europe. But from the elephants’ perspective, it is a shrinking universe.

但是更大的问题是人类和野生动物能否并存。非洲地域辽阔，超过美国、中国、印度和西欧的面积总和。但是对大象来说，世界正在缩小。

Unless African governments, working in conjunction, can protect areas of wilderness and connecting corridors indefinitely from development, the debate on ivory trading will be a sideshow. That is the mastodon in the room.

除非非洲各国政府通力合作保护原野和连接走廊永久地免受开发的威胁，否则关于象牙贸易的争论只能成为余兴谈资。这就像房间里的乳齿象，岂能视而不见。