In a very real
sense, the increase in human population is the number
one wildlife conservation issue for the elephant, and
for wildlife in general. In just the past 100 years,
the human population of Asia has gone from about 500
million to 2 ½ billion. By contrast, during that same
century the population of Asian Elephants plummeted from
about one half million to only forty thousand. It is a
simple equation: more people has meant fewer
elephants.
Today there are
about 20,000 elephants in India and in nearby countries
on the Indian subcontinent. And there are about 20,000
other elephants that can be found in areas ranging from
Malaysia and Thailand in the southeast to the island of
Sri Lanka in the west.
Idealized geographic range of the Asian Elephant
Although 40,000
individuals is still a substantial number, and a number
that could ideally make up a healthy population, many of
the remaining elephants are unfortunately isolated in
pockets of forest that are effectively cutoff from one
another. This is a real problem for a species whose
nature is to travel extensively and which needs frequent
intermixing across groups for healthy breeding.
Actual distribution of the Asian Elephant (2001)
People who advocate
a no-nonsense approach to wildlife conservation often
argue that the most important thing we should do is to
put our efforts into stabilizing the human population
and steering our societies toward sustainable
lifestyles. Unless we accomplish those two goals, it is
inevitable that elephants and all the other wild species
of the world will be squeezed further and further toward
extinction. We will quote a field-biologist
acquaintance of ours: "If you're not working on human
population control, you're not really working on
wildlife conservation!"