Blaming The Victim

By EUGENE LINDEN

TITLE: AT THE HAND OF MAN

AUTHOR: RAYMOND BONNER

PUBLISHER: KNOPF; 322 PAGES; $24

THE BOTTOM LINE: A myopic, self-righteous take on the politics of ivory sheds little light on Africa's ecological tragedy.

The villains of Raymond Bonner's confused rant about elephants in Africa are misguided animal-rights activists, well-born white conservationists and elephants. Elephants? Bonner's subtitle, Peril and Hope for Africa's Wildlife, constitutes false advertising since the book's sympathies lie with Africans who suffer at the hooves of elephants that trample crops, destroy property and kill natives. According to Bonner, elitist conservationists unleashed these malevolent beasts on hapless villagers when the World Wildlife Fund and the African Wildlife Foundation cynically pushed for an international ban on the sale of ivory in 1989 because it played well with sentimental American donors.

A righteous populist, Bonner offers up a capsule sketch of awf founder Russell Train's distinguished lineage that seems to suggest racism as an explanation for Train's fears that the Africanization of wildlife staffs would spell disaster for the game. Bonner recounts a litany of condescending comments made about the Third World by upper-class Brits, including slighting remarks made by Prince Philip, an early supporter of wwf. In his centrifugal anger, however, Bonner never connects these fusillades into a coherent argument.

The major point of At the Hand of Man is that conservation efforts must take account of human needs. He presents this as a novel idea, although the phrase "sustainable development" has been a mantra for international environmental organizations for two decades. Still, the best part of the book consists of case studies of imaginative projects in Namibia, Zimbabwe and Tanzania that create economic incentives for local people to protect wildlife.

Unfortunately, these three countries plus South Africa and Kenya (which by now has been largely reduced to an unruly theme park) seem to represent all of Africa to Bonner. If he had looked beyond the English-speaking countries to Zaire and the other Francophone countries (where the conservationists, though often white, tend to be field scientists rather than clubby patricians), he would have seen that without the ivory ban, the slaughter of elephants would have virtually eliminated the mammal in huge tracts of Africa.

Bonner might also have examined what happens to a forest when the elephants are gone: how some trees disappear while others close in, pinching off the network of trails used by other large mammals and reducing the amount of herbaceous vegetation growing on the ground that provides sustenance for lowland gorillas and other creatures. For millions of years, elephants have opened African forests, fostering conditions beneficial to other large mammals. Bonner, who tends to view elephants solely as a resource for humans to use, never raises the question of whether Africa's ecosystems can survive without this animal that once so dominated the landscape.

After writing for 285 pages about the evils of the ivory ban, Bonner, in his epilogue, finally acknowledges the ethical considerations that make conservation choices in Africa so agonizing. "I could accept the ivory ban," he writes. "Elephants are sentient animals: they form family relationships, grieve over the death of relatives . . . It is painful, the thought of killing one of these creatures just to make a profit from ivory, but the poverty of Africans is just as painful." These heartfelt sentences redeem the myopia of At the Hand of Man, but the book does little else to help readers understand the ecological tragedy unfolding in Africa.