Download Ivory's Ghosts: The White Gold of History and the Fate of Elephants AudioBook Free

Long before gold and gemstones held allure, humans were drawn to the “jewels of the elephant”—its great tusks—for their beauty, rarity, and potential to be finely carved. In Ivory’s Spirits, John Frederick Walker says the astonishing account of the real human lust for ivory and its cataclysmic implications for elephants. Each years and each culture, from old Egypt to nineteenth-century America and modern Japan, found its artistic, religious, and even industrial uses for the amazing material that originates from the teeth of elephants and a handful of other mammals. Sensuous figurines, methodical equipment, pistol grips, and piano secrets were all the end result—as was real human enslavement and the low cost slaughter of elephants. By the 1980s, elephant poaching threatened the last great herds of the African continent and resulted in a worldwide ban on international trade. But the ban has failed to stop poaching, and argument continues over how to proceed with the reputable and growing stockpiles of ivory retrieved from elephants that pass away of natural triggers. An insightful history of this important commodity, Ivory’s Spirits is also a wrenching—and utterly compelling—argument for a controversial setting of animals conservation: a manipulated return to the ivory trade.