When you consider that 90% of African elephants have been killed for their ivory in the last century, is there a more devastating chapter in the collision of human greed and the natural world? Before the commercialization of ivory and European colonization of Africa, estimates placed the population of African elephants at 20-26 million across the continent. Today, those numbers range from 400,000 to 500,000.

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During the Egyptian and Roman Empires, ivory was widely traded for use as luxury items, including jewelry and furniture. But the scale of the decimation accelerated dramatically during the 19th and 20th centuries as the Industrial Revolution and the Colonization of Africa took hold. Ivory was transformed from a rare luxury to a mass-market commodity, used for everything from piano keys and billiard balls to religious carvings.

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Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, systematic poverty and government corruption fueled a poaching frenzy. This resulted in as many as 750,000 elephants being slaughtered, dropping populations from 1.3 million to 600,000 in a single decade. Faced with an ecological catastrophe, government officials enacted the 1989 CITES ban, making the international ivory trade illegal.

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Despite this global ban, poaching continued by sophisticated criminal cartels to become a multi-billion-dollar illegal enterprise. Driven by rising wealth in Asia, where ivory became known as “white gold”, the 2010s experienced a devastating poaching crisis with over 150,000 elephants killed, 40,000 elephants in 2011 alone.

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Modern poachers operate under the cover of darkness with night-vision goggles, GPS, and military-grade weapons. Countries like China and Vietnam have made progress through stricter domestic bans and increased conservation efforts, but the threat remains acute. Elephant herds of today face a dual threat: the lingering shadow of the illegal ivory trade and increased habitat loss are making their survival a pivotal test of global conservation resolve.

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To be clear, no human needs ivory; it is no more than an incisor. But as long as greed and corruption outweigh conservation, the survival of these sentient giants remains in a precarious balance.