On the fringes of deserts, in the heart of forests and in open savannahs elephants are daily making their choices; searching for food, deciding when to drink, finding shade, negotiating terrain, nurturing babies, choosing mates and ever increasingly having to react to human encroachment. Wherever elephants interact with people there are human voices, both for and against them. Ultimately it is the way people think and act that will secure or deny a future for elephants and the environment they inhabit.Recently the world has woken up to climate change and environmental degradation, but elephants are no stranger to the phenomenon. In Mali elephants for thousands of years have retreated from a once fertile and abundant Sahara to the last migration route in the Gourma semi-desert. Our research discovered Africa’s longest elephant migration, a massive counter-clockwise annual circle that covers a distance of 500 km. Even now the Sahara pushes southward, with drying lakes under increasing human pressure denying elephants access to water. Global warming has captured our imaginations and has now hit the political mainstream. However, less talked about is the increasingly heavy human footprint as a cause of extinction. We cannot separate elephants or their environment from the global upward trajectory of the human population. In a single lifetime more people have been added to this planet than all the people that ever came before them in human history. With today’s population of over 6 billion people shouting out to be heard, how can the 500,000 remaining elephants and the rest of the quieter animals and plants in the world even begin to compete?

On top of the explosive human population is the constant threat of the ivory trade. In the 70s and 80s most elephant populations in Africa were devastated. Harassed elephants tended to concentrate in safer areas like National Parks and increased woodland damage and the perceived notion of too many elephants. Now with people taking up more and more land we have increasing human-elephant conflict.

The threats of the ivory trade still could return with devastating effect if ivory markets emerge from newly affluent countries like China. On a whim of fashion, the remaining elephants of Africa and Asia could be destroyed. Huge as these problems are globally they come down in the end to individuals, whether these are people or elephants.

Save the Elephants tracks elephant movements in four regions of Africa: Kenya; Congo; Mali; and South Africa. Our main research station is in a beautiful, undeveloped region of Northern Kenya of unfenced wilderness, where some 5000 elephants still roam as they always did and share the land with the people. It is one part of the African elephant’s range where new ideas can offer new hope for the future.

Over the last three years we have developed state-of-the-art GSM elephant tracking technology, “radio”-collars with built in mobile telephones, kindly supported by the Safaricom Foundation. These data go straight into a database accessible on the Internet via text messages. We have now created software that can track animal movements in real time across a three dimensional landscape on a computer – watching the screen is like low flying across the Kenyan bush spotting elephants from 500 ft in the air, but through Google Earth! We believe that it is by understanding how elephants make their movement choices that we can understand their needs and those of the other animals that share their range.

Samburu and Laikipia are unusual areas where animal routes and corridors have not yet been disrupted. In broad figures Laikipia has about 3000 elephants and Samburu 2000. Maintaining a connection between these two populations can be done by keeping the old migration routes open. STE uses elephant maps showing connectivity as a powerful reminder to NGOs, politicians and landscape planners that elephants too have a right of way.

One spectacular route is made by a male elephant called Mountain Bull who climbs up from Lewa through the Ngare Ndare Forest to streak across wheat fields at night. He crosses a busy main road to the north, then a small patch of settlement, and finally runs the gauntlet to gain the safety of the Upper Imenti Forest before dawn. STE has helped the Bill Woodley Mt Kenya Trust in their fundraising to keep this corridor open by plotting Mt. Bull’s exact route as he repeats his mountain climbing time and time again. It is planned to divert his route to avoid crops, but to retain connectivity.

On the lonely heights of a remote slope in the Mt Kenya massif is the body of an elephant “Icy Mike” who froze to death at 14,000ft. As the snows melt and glaciers disappear his remains are testimony of the exploratory nature of young bull elephants. Why he chose to go there will probably forever remain a mystery. What we know for certain is that after ten years of tracking elephants in Northern Kenya we see them cover a kaleidoscope of different land uses. At least half the ecosystem – made up of national reserves, private ranches, subsistence farmers, and montane forest - is linked by elephant movements and across this varied landscape elephants make their choices about where to go and when. An important current problem is elephant crop raiding in places where human beings have displaced elephants from their natural habitat.

We have a new idea to tackle this – Geo-Fencing. Using tracking technology we see a way to give subsistence farmers advance warning of when elephant attacks might occur, by the raiding elephant itself sending a text message from it’s collar if it crosses an invisible line into a no-go-zone. Forewarned is forearmed, and good information on elephant movements should help farmers to use their home- made low-tech repelling devices to save crops from raiders. The point is self-determination. Empowerment leads to a better relationship with wildlife. Our technological pilot project is collaborating with the extensive community conservation grass roots network of the Darwin Initiative, the Laikipia Wildlife Forum and other stakeholders like Ol Pejeta Conservancy.

Closer to Samburu reserve are nomadic pastoralists who talk about elephants with different voices, for they have shared the land with elephants for centuries. Samburu is one of the few places in Africa where people and elephants really do live side by side. The Samburu people have a long history of living with elephants and a mythological link which makes them much more tolerant. Customary belief has it that finding an elephant placenta brings good luck, and that burning elephant dung at marriage is auspicious. Humans and elephants are said to share an ancient ancestor so that elephants are blessed in death like people. This traditional tolerance of wildlife in the culture is a good foundation on which to build a local conservation ethic derived from local values.

There’s a hunger for education and training, and through Save the Elephants we have developed an extraordinary integration between international scientists and Samburu nomads who also have a real flare for the elephant research we do. Engaging people intellectually and emotionally in conservation through education or employment helps to enhance a sentiment that is already traditionally sympathetic to wildlife.

In Kenya hundreds of thousands of children now go to school, and an explosion of communications and technology brings the outside world to remote areas. Given a chance these children are just as open to the love of wildlife as those of the urban West and can start caring about big issues of Nature, biodiversity and conservation. At Save the Elephants we have a scholarship programme that sends needy but talented children to school and welcomes them to visit our research and conservation centre in their holidays.

Elephants will only be able to survive in the long run where clear land use planning allows them sufficient space, and the means to co-exist with man. The development of community wildlife areas, like the Northern Rangelands Trust in Kenya can bring incentives to local stake holders to benefit, from ecotourism and to get a better education. Our research is integrated with local people and grass roots education projects. With the help of our generous supporters we believe there is a good chance we can create a new tolerance between man and elephants to help minimize conflict and to encourage elephant choices to be accompanied by assenting human voices.