Word: botswana
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That value is purely theoretical, however. Both the export and import of ivory are illegal because of a 1989 international agreement that declares elephants a "most endangered" species. Namibia's treasure is, practically speaking, worthless, as are the hoards sitting in neighboring Zimbabwe and Botswana--an estimated $8 billion worth at last count. All three nations are, frankly, fed up with having to sit on all that wealth. So when the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) assembles for its biennial meeting this week in Harare, Zimbabwe's capital, delegates from around the world will be asked...
...face, the proposition sounds eminently reasonable. Namibia, Zimbabwe and Botswana have elephants the way New York City apartments have cockroaches. Elephants roam everywhere, tearing down trees by the acre, galumphing through the crops of irate farmers, stomping on hapless citizens. Zimbabwe alone has about 65,000 of the truck-size beasts, though its wild lands can comfortably support only half that many, and the other countries are similarly overendowed. "The elephant," says John Hutton, Zimbabwe project director of the British-based Africa Resources Trust, "was never endangered in this part of Africa...
These arguments are terribly frustrating to officials in Namibia, Zimbabwe and Botswana, who believe they are being punished, not rewarded, for their excellent conservation record. "This opposition," reads a document issued at a recent meeting of conservation ministers in Windhoek, "comes mainly from people far removed from the realities of southern African wildlife conservation." It's those outsiders, however, who hold the key to the secret tusk warehouses. Unless their concerns are answered, Africa's white gold could stay locked up for the foreseeable future...
...effort to record Africa's vanishing trove of rock art, David Coulson, a Nairobi-based photographer, and Alexander ("Alec") Campbell, former director of Botswana's National Museum and Art Gallery, are crisscrossing the continent, visiting known sites, stumbling across new ones and photographing as much of the art as they can. Everywhere they go they have found images dulled by sunlight, wind and water and damaged by chemical seepage from mining operations, tourism and outright vandalism. "There's an incredible amount of rock art out there," Coulson says, "and little has been done to preserve...
...rock art were inventoried, it would total many hundreds of thousands of individual images. Some 80,000 have already been recorded in Lesotho alone, 30,000 more on the eastern slopes of the Natal Drakensberg in South Africa and more than 4,000 in the Tsodilo Hills in northern Botswana. Indeed, the rock art is so plentiful that despite the hundreds of rolls of film donated by the Getty Institute, Coulson can afford to shoot only the best examples. "We skip over images that are either inferior or too recent," he says...