"The problem is that during the 1980s, a decade of heavy poaching, the elephants retreated to safer areas. And now people have moved into the corridors once used by the elephants"
About this Quote
Leakey’s sentence has the calm, forensic tone of someone describing a crime scene where the culprit is partly history itself. The “problem” isn’t framed as bad luck or vague “human-wildlife conflict.” It’s a chain reaction with fingerprints: industrial-scale poaching in the 1980s pushed elephants out of their habitual routes, and that forced retreat quietly rewrote the map. By the time the killing eased and conservation efforts strengthened, the landscape had been reoccupied - not by nature, but by people building lives in the negative space elephants left behind.
The subtext is an indictment of delayed consequences. Leakey is reminding us that wildlife doesn’t simply bounce back when a threat is removed, because human settlement is not a temporary variable. Corridors aren’t scenic extras; they’re infrastructure, as essential to elephant survival as roads are to a city. When elephants “retreated to safer areas,” they didn’t choose exile; they were herded by violence. When “people have moved into the corridors,” it’s not villainy so much as inevitability in countries where land is livelihood, and boundaries follow opportunity.
Context matters: Leakey spent years arguing that conservation is governance, not sentiment - that poaching is tied to markets, corruption, and state capacity. This quote compresses his larger warning: you can’t treat ecological disruption like a momentary crisis. Once you force animals off their routes, you create a vacuum, and vacuums get filled. Then coexistence becomes a negotiation over territory both sides consider non-negotiable.
The subtext is an indictment of delayed consequences. Leakey is reminding us that wildlife doesn’t simply bounce back when a threat is removed, because human settlement is not a temporary variable. Corridors aren’t scenic extras; they’re infrastructure, as essential to elephant survival as roads are to a city. When elephants “retreated to safer areas,” they didn’t choose exile; they were herded by violence. When “people have moved into the corridors,” it’s not villainy so much as inevitability in countries where land is livelihood, and boundaries follow opportunity.
Context matters: Leakey spent years arguing that conservation is governance, not sentiment - that poaching is tied to markets, corruption, and state capacity. This quote compresses his larger warning: you can’t treat ecological disruption like a momentary crisis. Once you force animals off their routes, you create a vacuum, and vacuums get filled. Then coexistence becomes a negotiation over territory both sides consider non-negotiable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nature |
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