The World Without Us

“It’s surely better than using a bulldozer and herbicides to get rid of mesquite,” Western agreed. “Elephants would do it a lot more cheaply and simply, and they also spread manure around for grass seedlings.”

“Exactly,” said Martin, “what mammoths and mastodons did.”

“Sure,” Western replied. “Why not use an ecological surrogate species if you don’t have the original one there?” Ever since, Paul Martin has been campaigning to return elephants to North America.

Unlike Maasai, however, American ranchers aren’t nomads who regularly vacate niches for elephants to use. Increasingly, though, Maasai and their cows are also staying put. The barren, overgrazed ground ringing Amboseli National Park testifies to the result. When light-haired, fair-skinned David Western, of medium height, chats in Swahili with 7-foot, ebony Maasai herdsmen, the contrast dissolves in long-standing mutual regard. Land subdivision has long been their common foe. But with developers and immigrants from rival tribes putting up fences and staking claims, the Maasai have no choice but to seek title and cling to their lands as well. The new human-use pattern reshaping Africa may not be easily obliterated when humans are gone, says Western.

“It’s a bipolar situation. When you force elephants inside a park, and you graze cattle outside, you get two very different habitats. Inside, you lose all your trees, and it becomes grasslands. Outside, it becomes thick bushlands.”

During the 1970s and 1980s, elephants learned the hard way to stay where they’re safe. Unwittingly, they lumbered into a global collision between deepening African poverty, which in Kenya was yoked to the planet’s highest birthrate, and the boom that spawned the so-called Asian economic tigers, which unleashed a craving in the Far East for luxuries. These included ivory; the desire for it outstripped even the lust that once financed centuries of slavery.

As the price, $20 per kilo, rose by a factor of 10, ivory poachers turned places like Tsavo into a trash heap of tuskless carcasses. By the 1980s, more than half of Africa’s 1.3 million elephants were dead. Only 19,000 were left in Kenya, packed into sanctuaries such as Amboseli. International ivory bans and shoot-to-kill orders for poachers calmed but never eradicated the carnage, especially the slaughter of elephants outside parks on the pretext of defending crops or people.

The fever tree acacias that once lined Amboseli’s swamps are now gone, downed by overcrowded pachyderms. As parks become treeless plains, desert creatures like gazelles and oryx replace browsers like giraffes, kudus, and bushbuck. It is a man-made replica of extreme drought, such as Africa knew during ice ages, when habitats shriveled and creatures crammed into oases. Africa’s megafauna made it through those bottlenecks, but David Western fears what may happen to them in this one, stranded on island refuges in a sea of settlements, subdivisions, exhausted pastures, and factory farms. For thousands of years, migratory humans were their escorts across Africa: nomads and their herds taking what they needed and moving on, leaving nature even richer in their wake. But now such human migration is coming to a close. Homo sedentarian has flipped that scenario. Food now migrates to us, along with luxury goods and other consumables that never existed through most of human history.

Unlike anywhere else on Earth—save Antarctica, where people never settled—Africa alone has not suffered a major wildlife extinction. “But intensified agriculture and high human population,” Western worries, “mean that we’re looking at one now.” The balance that evolved between humans and wildlife in Africa has tipped out of control: too many people, too many cows, too many elephants stuffed into too few spaces by too many poachers. The hope that sustains David Western lies in knowing that some of Africa is still as it was, before we evolved into a keystone species potent enough to push even elephants around.

If there were no people left, he believes, Africa, which has been occupied by humans longer than any other place would paradoxically revert to the purest primeval state on Earth. With so much wildlife grazing and browsing, Africa is the only continent where exotic plants haven’t escaped suburban gardens to usurp the countryside. But Africa after people would include some key changes.

Once, North African cattle were wild. “But after thousands of years with humans,” says Western, “they’ve been selected for a gut like an oversized fermentation vat to eat huge amounts of forage during the day, because they can’t graze at night. So now they’re not very quick. Left on their own, they’d be rather vulnerable prime beef.”