Jacob Shell (Department of Geography and Urban Studies, Temple University)
Along with fuel emissions and ocean pollution, deforestation is one of the primary drivers of climate change. Livelihood practices with a strong track record of maintaining forest cover, rather than erasing forest through urban and agricultural development, merit greater scholarly and public attention. This presentation, based on Shell’s recently released book Giants of the Monsoon Forest (W.W. Norton) focuses on one underexamined and highly instructive example of such a practice: the training of Asian elephants as work partners for humans in the forest. This partnership, which takes place mainly in the border region of Myanmar (Burma) and India (a region where Shell has conducted ethnographic fieldwork between 2013 and 2019), allows people to conduct transport operations across forest terrain without the use of motor vehicles and permanent roads—and thus, without the eventual forest-erasing developments these more conventionally “modern” technologies and infrastructures tend to bring. A kind of local geopolitical power has emerged in the region from the trans-sylvan geographies opened up through human collaboration with elephants, a power which in turn helps keep forces of deforestation at bay. The presentation also highlights aspects of local elephant stewardship which hold promise as models for elephant conservation. By virtue of having constant forest access, forest-based work elephants reproduce at much higher rates than elephants in zoos or in tourist compounds.