How to Save an Elephant

After her mother’s funeral, poet Ruth Padel decides to celebrate her life by finding out how elephants are doing in today’s Nature-threatened world. Herself in her eighties now, Ruth sees this as a quest for hope. Loving and investigating Nature runs in the family. Her mother was a botanist and birdwatcher. So was her granny, who was also Charles Darwin’s granddaughter and editor. Ruth herself has written books on tiger and king cobra conservation. A Life Fellow of the Zoological Society of London, she feels elephants are not only great matriarchs but Nature’s supreme representative. Whatever we are doing to them we are doing to all Nature, everywhere.
           Especially Asian elephants. Far fewer in number and even more endangered than African elephants, they illustrate two different ways we affect Nature while valuing and loving it. We destroy it (though also try to conserve it) but also dominate and make it work for us. Asian elephants are two animals in one: purely wild like African elephants but also, for four thousand years, despite being worshipped as gods, beasts of burden. Because of these contradictions and their double role in human society as a divided animal, reflecting our own divided nature, Ruth decides to focus on Asian elephants.     
           She investigates wild ones, in the jungles of Borneo (where her daughter comes too, to pull her out of rainforest mud), then Sri Lanka and India, and realises that the greatest threat to elephant existence everywhere is conflict with people. Then she explores working elephants, in Thailand and again India. Their psychology, the violent training, their mysterious bond with their mahouts or caretakers, and their roles in religion.
           In Paris and New York, she investigates the ivory trade, elephants’ history in the West, and a court case invoking the Rights of Nature. Invited to Yunnan by China’s Academy of Science to observe China’s new policy, of living in harmony with Nature by expanding wild elephant protection, she returns to Asia and watches the drones guarding them, first used during Covid, when fifteen Chinese elephants ‘wandered’ out of a forest and their adventures became a sensation to a locked-down world.            
           Woven into this story is Ruth’s own family drama. Her daughter and Colombian son-in-law work professionally on conflict resolution, sometimes in
Colombia, sometimes from Edinburgh. Ruth longs for grandchildren, but does not want to pressure them by asking their plans: she has to accept that grandchildren may not happen. Then her daughter falls pregnant and Ruth’s quest for hope turns personal. After a dangerous birth her daughter has a little boy. Ruth, overjoyed, a bit of a matriarch herself now, realises that hope for Nature in this conflict-torn world lies in the young. Rumi’s ‘candle’ is embodied in the young conservationists she keep meeting, and the younger generation’s passion for preserving and healing the environment through Nature’s powers of renewal. 
           A good message for the shade of her mum, who would have adored her new great-grandson with his shock of dark curls and curlew-like burbles, but also the hopeful vision of wild elephants which Ruth explored to honour her, and the young people determined to keep them alive.

‘Ruth Padel is an extraordinarily talented poet and writer, and her books about nature reach out to audiences that would perhaps not normally recognise the value and importance of the natural world to humanity. As nature is eroded at an increasingly rapid rate by human "development", Ruth’s books — and this one in particular — have a vital role to play in making people aware of what is being lost. Writing with passion derived from first-hand experience, Ruth is meticulous in checking her scientific facts, empowering her convincing accounts of how we interact with nature — in this case encapsulated in the Asian elephant.’ Professor Tim Birkhead, author of Birds and Us