The drug war should already have taught us that it's counterproductive to view offenders as generic nuisances rather than people to be negotiated with.
The ivory trade, like the drug trade, is entrenched. There are a lot of people involved. There’s a large, complex, long-standing, and covert structure to deal with. As law enforcement has so clearly demonstrated, you can’t solve behavioral problems at scale with contempt and violence.
The really thorny problems in the world won’t be beaten into submission. To negotiate our way out of this problem, it’s necessary to see the offenders as real, valuable human beings.
> The drug war should already have taught us that it's counterproductive to view offenders as generic nuisances rather than people to be negotiated with.
The lesson of the drug war is twofold: it is immoral to dictate what a person does with their body to the extent they are not harming society, and it is impractical to try to limit the harm drug use does to society by criminalizing drug use and sale. However that is not equivalent to saying, for example, that we ought to try to reason with and come to an understanding with vicious drug cartels. I was proud that I could vote to legalize marijuana in Washington State, and I hope it's a small step on the road to a total dismantling of the War On Drugs. But the point of all that is to weaken the cartels so that they may be destroyed. I would happily bury every member of Los Zetas at the center of the Earth.
Is the life of an African smuggler or Chinese merchant really more valuable than the life of an elephant? 500,000 elephants, 1 Billion Africans, 1.5 Billion Chinese. It is clear who we should be saving.
You really should stop thinking of people who do a bad thing as abstract, one-dimensional monsters. Poachers and smugglers aren't smirking Captain Planet villains; many of them are thugs, but many of them are men with wives, children, elderly parents, trying to make ends meet in a desperately poor part of the world.
What they're doing is harmful and needs to be stopped; sometimes violence may sadly be necessary to protect elephant and human lives. That doesn't mean that the life of a mere courier is worthless and can be thoughtlessly discarded.
I never meant to say that the life of a courier is worthless. I do apologize if it came across that way. I just meant to say that the life of an elephant is worth more.
The ivory trade, like the drug trade, is entrenched. There are a lot of people involved. There’s a large, complex, long-standing, and covert structure to deal with. As law enforcement has so clearly demonstrated, you can’t solve behavioral problems at scale with contempt and violence.
The really thorny problems in the world won’t be beaten into submission. To negotiate our way out of this problem, it’s necessary to see the offenders as real, valuable human beings.