%A Chadwick, Douglas H. %T The Fate of the Elephant %I Sierra Club Books %C San Francisco %D 1992 %G ISBN 0-87156-635-4 %P 492 pp. %O hardcover, US $ 25.00 I came to this book because my daughter Kelsey fell in love with Babar, the King of the Elephants. Within a matter of days, Barney was completely passe, my father was advising all his grandparenting peers to sell their Barney stock, and Kelsey was entranced with not just Babar but all elephants. Seeing through her eyes, I learned how pervasive elephants are in our culture. To name only a few examples, Kelsey has pointed out to me in the last six months that elephants appear on wall hangings, on National Geographic specials, on tea services, on "Entertainment Tonight" playing soccer, on piggy banks, on the signs outside Pinball Pete's video arcade in downtown Ann Arbor, and in a half-inch square on the bottom right corner of page 657 of the J.C. Penney catalog. It was in this context that I read THE FATE OF THE ELEPHANTS and realized that elephants are far nearer to extinction than I had complacently believed. I had been taking their existence for granted. Douglas H. Chadwick's fine book made me realize I was wrong, and, moreover, that far reaching changes will be needed in human society worldwide if elephants are ever again to flourish. The fundamental problem, I learned, is that elephants, like humans, are large, social mammals. They need a lot of range to live in, and they learn. Unfortunately, they do not have enough room--Chadwick reports that almost none of the existing wildlife preserves where elephants live are big enough to sustain a viable population of elephants--and there is nothing that they can learn that will teach them how to cope with the land use pressures caused by a human population that has increased fivefold since AD 1800. Chadwick's book does not inspire a great deal of optimism about the elephant's prospects. He visits elephants all over the world--Kenya, India, Malaysia--and everywhere finds shrinking populations, crowded by human population growth, inadequately protected by wildlife preserves, hunted cruelly for their ivory. He finds hope only in the elephants themselves--in their warm family relationships, in their capacity for play and delight--and in the human capacity to appreciate and love those qualities. "I want to believe we will ultimately save elephants," he writes, "and that we will do it because we acknowledge and accept their commonality with us." I hope he is right. ================ Previous reviews, as well as many links to many other Internet resources related to books, are available via the experimental Internet Book Information Center (IBIC), temporary Gopher address 141.211.183.23. E-mail comments encouraged to Fred.Zimmerman@ciesin.org.