The Tusks of Extinction

Power was the ability to destroy without needing to. To do it not out of necessity, but as an act of pure excess.

Whoever can remember is real. A being that remembers is alive, and authentic. I am here. That is enough.

And I understood: I know what it is like to be from an extraction zone. What it is like to grow up in the place where the taking begins. But an elephant knows what it is like to be an extraction zone. That is their history. The elephant is enormous, but it is not as gigantic as the history of human exploitation.

But there were links [to memories] that were broken as well. That no longer led to other memories. Were those memories still there, disconnected but whole, like planets that had escaped the gravity of their systems to drift forever in the darkness between the stars? Or had those memories dissolved over time, dissipated to relieve the neurons of the task of maintaining that connectivity?

The individual elephants slaughtered were lost in the numbers-the elephants butchered by the thousands, cut down by ivory hunters until there were almost none left in the wild. Seeing the individual acts of butchery was a reminder that every killing of an elephant was, like the elephant itself, enormous. A towering act of human cruelty.

The elephant is enormous, but it is not as gigantic as the history of human exploitation

And she called it a war because just like every war, it existed only for the people it was happening to

People were certain that, no matter what the problem was, it could not touch them. People were certain someone else would fix it, if they even thought of the war at all.

Something in him had come loose. Something had broken. Something in me is broken, too, he thought. And something in Anthony is broken. And maybe something in every single person is broken, and we just keep moving forward as if it were all normal—all of it—

This was the beginning of my political life. It was a strange place for the political life of a Kenyan man to be born - among antiques shops crowded with bric-a-brac, on scholarship in a world I could spend a lifetime in without understanding. But there it was. I saw the system: cities like Hong Kong and New York and London at the center, vortexes into which goods from all over the world were pulled. Places where things became materials. Where things became commodities. And on the other end of all of that, the places people like me were from - the extraction zones where the tug of all this displacement began. I saw the slave ships then, moving like shuttles in a loom across the sea. I saw the sugarcane fields and the cotton plantations. I saw the taxidermized bodies of our African animals in Western museums. I saw the rare earth metals in every terminal in every hand in Hong Kong, London, New York. I saw everything that was torn from its natural environment to become a material, to become anonymous, denatured. I saw all of that. But for some reason - perhaps because I grew up here, among the elephants, what caught my eye, always, was ivory. It stood out, white and gleaming among the other objects in every display - like maggots in a wound. And I understood: I know what it is like to be from an extraction zone. What it is like to grow up in a place where the taking begins. But an elephant knows what it is like to be an extraction zone. That is their history. The elephant is enormous, but it is not as gigantic as the history of human exploitation.

He was afraid to lose this memory. He returned to it often, like a person checking their pockets to make sure their keys were still there. He had lost so many memories of her. The further away he moved from the day of her death, the more she faded. So he had named this memory "Corsica" to give it a place in his mind. And he had given names to other memories of her, often associated with maps or with her talking about maps. He had memories of her named Astrakhan, Colchis, Wakhan, Gondwanaland, Ashgabat, Cyclades, Alkebulan, Thebes...

I said before that you are the only existing human mind that worked and lived with wild elephants. And that is true. But I should have put it another way. You are the only existing mind of any kind that knows the culture of Elephants. the last wild elephant died over a half-century ago. Our surrogates were raised in captivity, as was every Elephant they know. Wild elephant culture is dead on planet Earth except in one place: Your mind.

When you bring back a long-extinct species, there's more to success than the DNA.