Living with(out) elephants. Environmental dynamics, colonial control and the birth of global conservationism (Congo-Uganda, ca. 1880-ca. 1962)

This project is about environmental justice, and assumes that mass destruction of wild animals is correlated with social injustice. It addresses this issue by focusing on the birth and development of colonial conservationist policies of the African elephants which, it will be argued, were both socially disruptive and environmentally destructive. It focuses on two government organisations acting in neighbouring areas: the Elephant Taming Station, established around 1899 in the Congo Free State, and the Elephant Control Department, established in 1925 in British Uganda. Both implemented disruptive policies that became central in the development of global conservationism: the protection and control of elephants via the enforcement of game laws and mass cullings; the associated development of reserves and national parks aiming to separate animals from people; the appropriation and taming of elephants. This project will analyse their dynamics and effects by integrating elephants into the narrative via an innovative methodology which includes ecological and ethological insights, and by investigating their intertwined social impact – for example, the increase in human-elephant conflicts due to changes in elephant migratory patterns, themselves a product of cullings which aimed to confine elephants into reserves. Finally, the project intends to rehabilitate historical attempts to act in favour of a coexistence with elephants inclusive of as many human and non-human needs as possible.