Conversation by elephants: from Green Park to green thinking

 

Stories and ideas inspired by the lantana elephant herd in Green Park, London which are modelled on Indian elephants and made by indigenous craftspeople in Asia. Words by Nicola Baird (see www.nicolabaird.com for more info about my books and blogs). 

The lantana elephant herd moves through Green Park: amazing activism art (c) NB

The elephant herd in Green Park look as if they are flowing across the park out of the tube and down the hill to Buckingham Palace. Randomly cycling to explore central London with my university colleague Gracia we are both amazed to stumble on to an art safari. 

We’ve covered no air miles, read no hype but are utterly awe-struck by the size of the herd. Each elephant is individually sculpted from lantana, a rattan-like material which a volunteer in a hi-vis vest explains is an invasive weed, despoiling habitats. Lighten our footprint and wildlife bounces back says Coexistence which put up the project for https://elephant-family.org/ 

Trunk detail on the lantana herd. (c) NB

It’s clear these models are made by people who know how to look deeply. Each elephant seems to be moving. There are calves, bigger youngsters and grand old dams. In total “there are 72 elephants and they’ll be in Green Park until 23 July,” says a dreadlocked security guard who has managed to luck out with a job that involves walking around a hard to steal set of exhibits, currently moored outside under the trees of Green Park. Gracia and I wander slowly noticing lifted forefeet, curled trunks, swishing tails… We are all-seeing in this famous park deliberately planted with open vistas by Henrietta so that her famously-philandering husband Charles II had less opportunity for liaisons – though he still managed to have at least 100 illegitimate children. “Deforested for surveillance,” suggests Gracia which seems a remarkably 21st century approach. Restoration was nearly 400 years ago so no surprise that Green Park has a decent spread of avenues now, as befits a national park city like London. And it is down one of these big tree lined avenues that the elephant herd is progressing, attended by curious visitors. 

The project run by Elephant Family is called Coexistence and has an intriguing aim – to get watchers to share their stories and an attempt to reboot our nature understanding. “This isn’t a call for an extreme return to the wild. Look around you, wherever you are. Who do you share your world with? Can we increase our coexistence everywhere, and rewild ourselves. Nature is intelligent and adapting. Other life forms will meet our efforts halfway, if only we give them the chance,” writes Coexistence on the website. 

The elephants are made by craftspeople from the Tamil Nadu jungle who clearly know the way elephants move. These magnificent creatures in Green Park look as if they are walking towards tea with the Queen – trunks swinging confidently. Of course, they’re not: these are artworks on tour and also for sale raising funds for elephant protection – a baby is £6,000; adolescent £12,500 and the 7.5x12x4 foot matriarch £22,000. 

Messages from the elephant in the room - Green Park (c) NB

For years the term “elephant in the room” has bumped around environmentalists conversations as they talked biodiversity loss, population pressure and a warming planet at meetings they’d flown to. An elephant has become such a signifier of these types of reluctance to address the big picture that spotting this herd immediately makes me think they are there to raise awareness about climate change. And in fact they will be, as those not sold are taking a detour to Glasgow to help support the COP26 climate meeting run by the UN in early November. They will certainly cheer up this vital meeting. You can read more about elephants and climate change on the Coexistence blog, see https://elephant-family.org/news-views/news/what-do-elephants-have-to-do-with-climate-change/ 

Elephant stories
For almost all of us, elephants inspire us to share stories: our encounters on TV (thank you David Attenborough) or real life, our efforts to save them, our funny moments. In the 1970s I remember re-reading my little brother the story of the Elephant and the Bad Baby by Elfrida Vipont whose elephant and tiny passenger went “rumpeta, rumpeta, rumpeta down the road”. I always felt sorry for the Bad Baby - who was definitely tricked by the Manners Police – but also for my brother whose only experience with elephants was via these Raymond Briggs’ illustrations. In contrast I’d spent my summer as a three-year-old being used as a toddler honeytrap by our entrepreneur Dad. 

Let's think and move like an elephant. Nicola posing by one
of the lantana herd at Green Park.

Dad had acquired a life-size mechanical elephant (built in Essex and named Jessica) which could take people for rides. He’d get me on to this giant’s back to either pose for the press or encourage other families to climb aboard. I was quite a scowly little girl, but I liked being in the corner seat behind my dad on top of an elephant. He’d dress up as an elephant handler when he operated the controls, no doubt crossing his fingers that the licence plate the DVA insisted was attached to Jessica’s tail wouldn’t fall off and ruin the looks-like-a-real-elephant spell. Fun as she was, his mechanical elephant soon became a liability. She triumphed on Blue Peter then fell through the floor at Whiteleys department stores near Paddington. She was destined for Republican fundraising in the US (from an animal motif point of view Republicans are elephants and Democrats donkeys) but storms delayed the ship, so she never made it. Like my family’s car she’d regularly break down and was super hard to fix. My Dad worked from home and it wasn’t unusual for random telephone callers to begin, “It’s about an elephant…” During peak elephant crises he began to avoid the phone. The last known sighting was rumoured to be on a Birmingham allotment. My Dad died more than two decades ago but my Mum says if you happen to have news about an unusual elephant she’s not interested! 

Slowly memories of my elephant life drifted away. Then in 2000* I visited a friend in Zimbabwe and just near the garden of the Victoria Falls hotel the taxi we were using came to a halt as a herd emerged from scrubby trees and crossed the road. Their big feet didn’t prevent them from moving silently – but they left behind a torn trail of branches. One particular elephant standing apart, with flapping ears, seemed vast: my nearly two-year-old daughter looked at this massive land animal with complete composure. In contrast I felt quite weak: a flesh and blood elephant was a very different beast to poor mechanical Jessica. 

Around the time I was born the world population was 2.7 billion and wilderness accounted for 64% of the world. When you compare this to 2020 the numbers seem to have been put in a shaker and jumbled themselves out of control. World population is now 5.7 billion and inevitably wilderness space has fallen to 46%. It seems amazing in a way that so much is still left. But that’s not how the elephant herds must see it. On the Coexistence website you can find stories of the Indian elephants used as models – Highway Hathis (hathi means elephant in Urdu) who have to constantly cross busy roads and railways and the Crop Raiders on the scavenge for 150kg of food a day. 

Both these herds have at least one human hero who has turned around their chances of survival. For the Highway Hathis this was Sanjay Gubbi who has imposed sanctions (slower vehicle speeds and roads closed at night), whilst for the Crop Raiders it was Dulu who came up with the idea of a buffet barrier rice field between the village and forest.  But it took a community commitment to make the changes happen.

Spending time with the lantana herd in Green Park you can get to know the characters, discuss art, activism and exhibitions. As you stare and snap for social media the volunteers gently engage you in conversation about the elephants. It’s a brilliant way of bringing the elephant in the room – in this case a need to coexist with all wildlife – into our front of brain understanding. Days later I took a train to Ash in Kent to a wedding and at the station, opposite the garage was greeted by a good view of a new Bellway homes construction site, walled by panels and ringed by a busy road. The billboard claimed: ‘Coming soon Wildflower Meadow’ conjuring up images of red poppies and blue cornflowers and not a large, tightly-fitted set of brick houses. 

Message from the lantana elephant herd: “If some people can live with elephants surely we can learn to live with beavers, badgers and bring back our fast vanishing birds and butterflies.”
Could this be possible with these housing complexes built so tightly to main roads? (c) NB

This uncomfortable disconnect between what our ever-expanding population is promised – wildflowers and meadows – and what is coming – crowded brick houses on a road - made me revisit the message the Green Park elephant herd was created to share: “If some people can live with elephants surely we can learn to live with beavers, badgers and bring back our fast vanishing birds and butterflies.” Yes, we surely can follow Coexistence’s message, but to do so, most of us need to look deeply into the way we organise our lives if we want to give those smaller animals and ecosystems a fighting chance for survival. 

When it comes to PR, being a massive elephant has a lot more impact than being a mini-beast. But at least we humans still have the power to make a positive difference. Some suggestions: 

• In the garden leave out food and water for birds and other wildlife; keep all cats indoors at night and never use slug or snail pellets. 

• Getting around aim to use your own steam (walk, scoot or cycle) or public transport. 

• Avoid food waste - farming destroys habitats so it makes sense to at least use and eat what you have bought.

• Measure your carbon footprint and aim to bring it down. There’s a fun measuring site on https://footprint.wwf.org.uk/ 

More about this herd and the thinking behind how it is supporting Asia’s wildlife at elephant-family.org The lantana elephants move out of Green Park on 23 July 2021.

FOOTNOTE

*2000- after this trip my family made a commitment to only fly every 10 years and reduce our carbon footprint. I last made a plane flight in 2011. In theory I'd have probably taken a flight in 2021 but for lots of reasons - including my own carbon budget - probably will not. I can't imagine that we'll be behaving just as we do now in 2031, so maybe that's plane trips over for me.