For ten thousand years, civilization has waged war on the living world. It turned the Fertile Crescent into a desert, tore down China’s forests and terraced its mountains, bled the Great Plains until all that remained was the Dust Bowl, and sparked a mass extinction the likes of which this planet has never seen. Now, the living world is beginning to fight back. Global warming, terrible storms, and worse have shown us the damage that the living world can do to our vaunted civilization. The shock troops of this counter-attack, though, could hardly be more ironic or appropriate: elephants.

That kind of statement would be ridiculed as hopelessly romantic anthropomorphism by most scientists, but perhaps not by Gay Bradshaw, a psychologist at the environmental sciences program at Oregon State University who has studied the phenomenon that’s come to be called “the Human-Elephant Conflict,” even abbreviating it H.E.C. Since the mid-1990’s, elephants around the world have begun what seems almost like an all-out war on humans. Hindus have long worshipped elephants as the incarnations of Ganesh, the god of wisdom, but recently, an Indian newspaper ran an article with the headline, “To Avoid Confrontation, Don’t Worship Elephants.” In Jharkhand, an Indian state on the western border with Bangladesh, 300 people were killed by elephants between 2000 and 2004; in Assam, a northeastern Indian state, 605 people have been killed by elephants in the past twelve years. During the same period 265 elephants have died in Assam—most of them from the retaliations of angry villagers, employing everything from poison-tipped arrows to poisoned food. In Sierra Leone, 300 villages have been abandoned in the face of elephant attacks.

“Everybody pretty much agrees that the relationship between elephants and people has dramatically changed,” Bradshaw told me recently. “What we are seeing today is extraordinary. Where for centuries humans and elephants lived in relatively peaceful coexistence, there is now hostility and violence. Now, I use the term ‘violence’ because of the intentionality associated with it, both in the aggression of humans and, at times, the recently observed behavior of elephants.”

For a number of biologists and ethologists who have spent their careers studying elephant behavior, the attacks have become so abnormal in both number and kind that they can no longer be attributed entirely to the customary factors. Typically, elephant researchers have cited, as a cause of aggression, the high levels of testosterone in newly matured male elephants or the competition for land and resources between elephants and humans. But in “Elephant Breakdown,” a 2005 essay in the journal Nature, Bradshaw and several colleagues argued that today’s elephant populations are suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma. Decades of poaching and culling and habitat loss, they claim, have so disrupted the intricate web of familial and societal relations by which young elephants have traditionally been raised in the wild, and by which established elephant herds are governed, that what we are now witnessing is nothing less than a precipitous collapse of elephant culture.

It has long been apparent that every large, land-based animal on this planet is ultimately fighting a losing battle with humankind. And yet entirely befitting of an animal with such a highly developed sensibility, a deep-rooted sense of family and, yes, such a good long-term memory, the elephant is not going out quietly. It is not leaving without making some kind of statement, one to which scientists from a variety of disciplines, including human psychology, are now beginning to pay close attention.¹

It is not so singularly romantic as an elephant war on humans, though; it would be more accurate to simply say that the elephants are going insane. Besides the attacks on humans, elephants are also taking their rage out on other species. Since the mid-1990’s, young elephant males from the Pilanesberg National Park and the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve in South Africa have been raping and killing rhinos. In July 2005, Pilanesberg officials killed three male elephants that had, between them, killed 63 rhinos, and attacked safari vehicles. In stable elephant communities, some 6% of male deaths are due to violence with other males; in Addo Elephant National Park in South Africa, that number is now 90%.

Elephants are some of the most social animals on the planet, along with humans. The keystones of their communities are the elders: the matriarchs, and the elder bulls, who protect and guide the herd, and serve as the primary connection for younger elephants to the grand tradition of elephant society and culture, helping them to learn what it is to be an elephant.

When an elephant dies, its family members engage in intense mourning and burial rituals, conducting weeklong vigils over the body, carefully covering it with earth and brush, revisiting the bones for years afterward, caressing the bones with their trunks, often taking turns rubbing their trunks along the teeth of a skull’s lower jaw, the way living elephants do in greeting. If harm comes to a member of an elephant group, all the other elephants are aware of it. This sense of cohesion is further enforced by the elaborate communication system that elephants use. In close proximity they employ a range of vocalizations, from low-frequency rumbles to higher-pitched screams and trumpets, along with a variety of visual signals, from the waving of their trunks to subtle anglings of the head, body, feet and tail. When communicating over long distances—in order to pass along, for example, news about imminent threats, a sudden change of plans or, of the utmost importance to elephants, the death of a community member—they use patterns of subsonic vibrations that are felt as far as several miles away by exquisitely tuned sensors in the padding of their feet.²

But these elders are precisely the animals targeted by poachers, and by government culling programs. The result is the unraveling of elephant society. Without elders to show them how to live as elephants, the social bonds they rely on so intensely break. The whole species becomes poised on the brink of madness.

The relationship between humans and elephants is a long and checkered one. When human hunter-gatherers moved into Europe, Asia, and eventually North America, an ancient relative of the elephant, the mammoth, provided one of the most prized and valued sources of food. They were enormous, and could provide enough meat to feed a whole tribe for weeks, or even months. Whole villages have been discovered, built from mammoth bones; Mesolithic hunters would use fire and spears to stampede whole herds of mammoth over a cliff. While the evidence for mammoth extinction solely at human hands is lacking, the over-hunting of mammoths is one of the strongest arguments the “overkill” theory has. In some parts of Siberia, there are tribes that have continued to live off of the mammoths even since their extinction—by digging their bodies, preserved by the cold, out of the permafrost. We have recovered such preserved mammoths,³ and there is currently debates on the subject of using elephant surrogates to resurrect the species.^{4, 5}

The more recent “Human-Elephant Conflict” cannot help but be tied in many ways to human social complexity. With 40% of the earth’s land surface dedicated to human agriculture, all the world’s large animals have been under pressure, as the sixth mass extinction in the history of the planet sets new records for such rapid destruction. Much of the conflict is as old as agriculture itself. As the graph shows, elephants prefer to live where humans don’t—and as the places where humans don’t live constantly diminishes in the face of our overpopulation, the space left for elephants continues to shrink.

As Dr. Tony Ferrar points out, it is a truism that at any but the lowest density, elephants and humans are fundamentally incompatible. As densities of both elephant and man increase, the incompatibility between the two also increases rapidly. In areas where the human population density is low, there is usually a greater acceptance of the wild surroundings by the people. But today, given the 5,430:1 ratio of humans to elephants in Sri Lanka, the relationship has deteriorated from acceptance to intolerance in many areas, despite the tolerant influence of Buddhism. Furthermore, given their intemperate appetite and sheer size, elephants cannot co-exist with people in areas where agriculture is the dominant form of land use, unless the damage they cause can be compensated.⁶

Elephants have long defended against the encroachment of civilization. In parts of Uganda, high elephant populations fought off the spread of agriculture clear into the twentieth century.⁷

Elephant and humans have much in common, besides the ways in which we’ve helped shape one another’s evolution. We both live in strong communities; we both need our elders to instruct us in the proper ways of existing in our cultures; we even both bury our dead. In fact, humans are the only species other than their own that elephants will bury.

…he mentioned to me an odd little detail about the killing two months earlier of the man from the village of Katwe, something that, the more I thought about it, seemed to capture this particularly fraught moment we’ve arrived at with the elephants. Okello said that after the man’s killing, the elephant herd buried him as it would one of its own, carefully covering the body with earth and brush and then standing vigil over it. …

When a group of villagers from Katwe went out to reclaim the man’s body for his family’s funeral rites, the elephants refused to budge. Human remains, a number of researchers have observed, are the only other ones that elephants will treat as they do their own. In the end, the villagers resorted to a tactic that has long been etched in the elephant’s collective memory, firing volleys of gunfire into the air at close range, finally scaring the mourning herd away.⁸

Even more relevant to the sudden insanity of elephants, they share our response to trauma.

What Bradshaw and her colleagues describe would seem to be an extreme form of anthropocentric conjecture if the evidence that they’ve compiled from various elephant resesarchers, even on the strictly observational level, weren’t so compelling. The elephants of decimated herds, especially orphans who’ve watched the death of their parents and elders from poaching and culling, exhibit behavior typically associated with post-traumatic stress disorder and other trauma-related disorders in humans: abnormal startle response, unpredictable asocial behavior, inattentive mothering and hyperaggression. Studies of the various assaults on the rhinos in South Africa, meanwhile, have determined that the perpetrators were in all cases adolescent males that had witnessed their families being shot down in cullings. It was common for these elephants to have been tethered to the bodies of their dead and dying relatives until they could be rounded up for translocation to, as Bradshaw and Schore describe them, “locales lacking traditional social hierarchy of older bulls and intact natal family structures.”⁹

These elephants come from the same areas of Africa where the toll of First World complexity has been most acute—where the legacy of European colonialism is exacerbated by champions of complexity like the World Bank and the IMF and the crushing debt they extract, and further fueled by arms sales from enterprising First World entrepreneurs, selling First World technology and complexity. The close ties of human and elephant trauma is nothing short of amazing.

Abe told me that when she first arrived at the park, there were fewer than 150 elephants remaining from an original population of nearly 4,000. The bulk of the decimation occurred during the war with Tanzania that led to Amin’s overthrow: soldiers from both armies grabbed all the ivory they could get their hands on—and did so with such cravenness that the word “poaching” seems woefully inadequate. “Normally when you say ‘poaching,’” Abe said, “you think of people shooting one or two and going off. But this was war. They’d just throw hand grenades at the elephants, bring whole families down and cut out the ivory. I call that mass destruction.”

The last elephant survivors of Queen Elizabeth National Park, Abe said, never left one another’s side. They kept in a tight bunch, moving as one. Only one elderly female remained; Abe estimated her to be at least 62. It was this matriarch who first gathered the survivors together from their various hideouts on the park’s forested fringes and then led them back out as one group into open savanna. Until her death in the early 90’s, the old female held the group together, the population all the while slowly beginning to rebound. …

In 1986, Abe’s family was forced to flee the country again. Violence against Uganda’s people and elephants never completely abated after Amin’s regime collapsed, and it drastically worsened in the course of the full-fledged war that developed between government forces and the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army. For years, that army’s leader, Joseph Kony, routinely “recruited” from Acholi villages, killing the parents of young males before their eyes, or sometimes having them do the killings themselves, before pressing them into service as child soldiers. The Lord’s Resistance Army has by now been largely defeated, but Kony, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for numerous crimes against humanity, has hidden with what remains of his army in the mountains of Murchison Falls National Park, and more recently in Garamba National Park in northern Congo, where poaching by the Lord’s Resistance Army has continued to orphan more elephants.

“I started looking again at what has happened among the Acholi and the elephants,” Abe told me. “I saw that it is an absolute coincidence between the two. You know we used to have villages. We still don’t have villages. There are over 200 displaced-people’s camps in present-day northern Uganda. Everybody lives now within these camps, and there are no more elders. The elders were systematically eliminated. The first batch of elimination was during Amin’s time, and that set the stage for the later destruction of northern Uganda. We are among the lucky few, because my mom and dad managed to escape. But the families there are just broken. I know many of them. Displaced people are living in our home now. My mother said let them have it. All these kids who have grown up with their parents killed—no fathers, no mothers, only children looking after them. They don’t go to schools. They have no schools, no hospitals. No infrastructure. They form these roaming, violent, destructive bands. It’s the same thing that happens with the elephants. Just like the male war orphans, they are wild, completely lost.”¹⁰

At the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, elephants are provided with psychotherapy in much the same way that humans are: and it’s working.

Under this so-called nondominance system, there is no discipline, retaliation or withholding of food, water and treats, which are all common tactics of elephant trainers. Great pains are taken, meanwhile, to afford the elephants both a sense of safety and freedom of choice—two mainstays of human trauma therapy—as well as continual social interaction.¹¹

Dr. Bradshaw suggests the need to move beyond our anthropocentrism, to embrace a “trans-species psyche.” This naturally reminds me of what David Abram said in an interview wtih Scott London, when asked if there were any equivalents to traditional magicians in modern civilization.

I do think that some of the nature writers are doing an exquisitely important work of magic. They are doing what we might think of as word magic — very carefully taking up the language and trying to use it in new ways, trying to work out how to speak without violating our kinship with the rest of the animate earth.¹²

We can see so much of ourselves so clearly in elephants; perhaps that is why we tend so often to stay apart from one another—perhaps a given place has only enough room for one species of large mammal with strong social ties. Our relationship with elephants has long been antagonistic; we never developed the kind of relationship with the mammoths that might have helped us from overhunting them, and since the Neolithic, our expanding farmlands have consumed the elephants’ world. Now, we have shattered the keystones of their social worlds. In so doing, we’ve more often than not shattered our own worlds. The same armies that slaughtered the elephants’ matriarchs also recruited and orphaned human children. The same civilization that is driving elephants mad in Africa has also caught the humans of that continent in between—incapable of supporting its complexity, and yet unable to collapse. We share a common fate, bound by the same suffering we unlocked in the Neolithic.

And yet, we can also find hope in our pachyderm brethren, and not just in the insanity that siezes them now to stand violently against human encroachment, but also in the fact that trauma can be healed. We can still heal ourselves, our world, and yes, even help to heal the damage we’ve done to the elephants. In “Ecological Collapse, Trauma Theory and Permaculture,” Lisa Rayner presents civilization as a trauma to the human species very similar to the trauma suffered by the elephant species—and creating many of the same results. But Rayner also offers a possibility for healing.

A brief comparison of the process of healing from PTSD and the process of healing from ecological/social collapse demonstrates that they are remarkably similar. The principles of trauma therapy and the principles of permaculture design share the same basic outline.

To begin with, psychological research shows that it is nearly impossible to heal from past trauma if one is presently in a traumatic situation. For example, a battered wife cannot heal from the effects of child abuse until she gathers the strength to leave her marriage.

Therapists who specialize in treating survivors of trauma say that we must be gentle with ourselves. We are trying to heal the Earth and heal our own psychological and political traumas at the same time. This is not an easy task. It has never been tried before on such a large scale. We don’t know if it can be done. We must accept that human beings have limits.

Permaculture design begins with a clear understanding of natural limits. Good design works within those limits to create functional ecosystems. …

In the Winter 2004–2005 issue of The Permaculture Activist, Richard Zook speaks to the new opportunities present after a catastrophe in his article, “Catastrophe as Opportunity.” Zook is a survivor of the catastrophic Hondo fire of 1996 that destroyed the Lama Foundation outside Taos, New Mexico. He says that, “In many ways catastrophe is the epitome of the permaculture principle, ‘the problem is the solution.’ This principle is about our relationship to what we perceive.”

The existence of trauma survivors demonstrates that it is in fact possible to survive. People do heal from abuse, rape, torture and grief. There are still Romans in Rome and Mayans in the Yucatán. During the earth’s previous mass extinctions, some species survived to carry on the evolution of life on earth.

Permaculture design also incorporates a sense of “deep time.” While collapse returns a system to a less complex level of functioning, we know that ecological succession and evolution will continue on a geological time scale, if not on a human one. Forests will recover. Accumulations of humus and water and minerals will occur over eons. The web of life will eventually repair itself.

Likewise, surviving trauma also involves making a commitment to healing. Likewise, the prime directive of permaculture is its ethical system of Earth care, people care and sharing the surplus. Only by making this commitment to caring for one another will we ever manage to heal the Earth and its peoples.¹³

When the Spanish left 15 horses behind them in Argentina, they were shocked to return decades later to find the continent filled with wild horses. What they did not know was that horses were actually native to North America; they had crossed the Bering Land Bridge into Asia before it was closed off, and then they went extinct in their American homeland, with the Eurasian populations booming instead. When the Spanish let a few horses go, they were unwittingly returning the horse to its native home. With so many elephants in today’s zoos and the private ranches of the United States’ most wealthy, the collapse of civilization will release a population of elephants into the same ecology that was once home to their mammoth relatives. Whether we clone wooly mammoths or not, there may well be herds of giant, elephantine pachyderms thundering across the plains of North America in centuries to come.

The end of our civilization will come too late for many elephant herds, but some will survive, even if only in zoos—and even in zoos, elephants have proven impossible to truly domesticate. The pressure then will be on us, to rediscover magic as David Abram puts it—to hear the voices of other animals, to appreciate the life that surrounds us constantly, and to open up a dialogue with the elephants. It hasn’t always been the best relationship, but it hasn’t always been hostile, either. We are much too similar to one another, and now we have been bound to a common trauma, and a common healing. We both need one another now; without our help, there may be no hope for elephants. But by the same token, without elephants, there may be no hope for us.