In War to Save Elephants, Rangers Appeal for Aid
Protectors seek protection from armed poachers.
"That's a sad reflection on our planet," Lee White, head of Gabon's national park system, said Sunday at a meeting of the World Conservation Congress in Jeju, South Korea, where conservationists are appealing for aid from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as African elephant populations plummet. (See blog posts from the congress.)
With international crime syndicates coveting more and more elephant ivory—a symbol of wealth in booming Asia—numbers of the mammal have fallen to "crisis levels," according to a June report by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).
The highest rate of elephant poaching since a global ivory ban in 1989 occurred in 2011, with tens of
