Did you know it’s World Elephant Day? In this report, NPR’s Terry Gross of Fresh Air takes a fascinating look at how some fighting the ivory trade are using GPS trackers and Google to map smuggling routes in Africa.
The segment features investigative journalist Bryan Christy and follows his journey in creating the fake ivory tusks embedded with GPS trackers.
“These tusks…operate really like additional investigators, like members of our team, and almost like a robocop,” Christy tells Fresh Air. He says more than 36,000 African elephants are killed each year due to poaching.
Christy says that they were able to embed the tusks with a smuggling group and track it with Google Earth, following them from Congo’s Garamba National Park to Sudan. The technology makes it possible for those fighting the ivory trade to safely follow it, track it and gather more information — Christy calls it “Mission Impossible” like technology that even records locations when the GPS loses satellite signals.
Much of the ivory ends up in China. “China is the biggest consumer of illegal ivory…Just a few years ago [China] purchased 60 tons of ivory from Africa, and it was that purchase that unleashed the notion that ivory is on the market again,” Christy told Fresh Air. China has pledged to curb the trade.
It’s an incredibly complicated problem in central Africa, as ivory is used by rebel militia and terrorist groups to trade for arms and medicine, NPR reports. As Christy says, it’s a “human” problem resulting in violence and death.
Christy’s article about tracking the ivory of African elephants is National Geographic‘s September cover story.
Listen to the story of how they’re using GPS and Google maps to fight poaching via NPR below:
