MIAMI BEACH, Fla. – For the past week, a herd of elephants has taken over the sands of Mid Beach.
A traveling installation that wowed crowds in New Port, Rhode Island and the Meat Packing District in New York City and is now in Miami Beach for Art Week has been drawing in residents and visitors and going viral on social media.
“It’s 100 life-size elephant sculptures that have been created by an Indigenous community in India,” explained Fiona Humphrey, co-founder of the Great Elephant Migration. “Each one represents an elephant that they live alongside.”
Each elephant is crafted by hand, by artisans from Southern India, using wood harvested from the bark of invasive plants that threaten the native elephant population whose habitat has already been dramatically diminished by human civilization. The message here is one of coexistence.
“What can you do as a human to create space for that wildlife to live peacefully with you,” she said.
It’s an urgent call to action at a time when our natural world is literally in crisis.
According to the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) latest Living Planet Report, Earth has experienced a catastrophic loss of 73% of its wildlife population in the past 50 years alone.
“So what we’re seeing is that we see an overall drop,” said Rebecca Shaw, Chief Scientist for WWF. “The freshwater systems are doing much worse, that’s an 87% drop…whereas the marine species aren’t doing as bad, but it’s still pretty bad.”
Mammals, fish, reptiles, amphibians, and insects have all been pushed to the brink due to massive habitat loss, environmental degradation, and overharvesting driven mainly by our global food system, but also due to a proliferation of invasive species and disease, stressed by climate change.
“This isn’t just climate change, this is the undermining of nature with climate change, and you can see what the output of that is after every single disaster,” Shaw explained.
Natural disasters around the world continue to intensify, and it’s not just because of an overheated atmosphere exacerbated by our relentless burning of fossil fuels but because humans around the world have and persist in wiping out wild spaces for development and food production, in doing so, weakening the planet’s natural defenses at our own peril.
“The combination of Nature loss and climate change is really just, it’s just opens up a whole Pandora’s Box,” said Shaw. “This is just an early warning indicator of nature unraveling.”
Zoo Miami’s Communications Director and lifelong conservationist Ron Magill has witnessed the changes first hand. From Africa to Antarctica, he says our planet is screaming for help.
“These are all things that are indicators to us that, listen, if we don’t do something now, the problem could become so catastrophic, it’s the point of no return, and that’s again, a reflection on our own quality of life,” Magill emphasized. “I’ve seen a difference, not just in the number of animals, but the changes in habitat.”
The problem is that we humans have lost our connection to the natural world. We are mindlessly overconsuming everything, overexploiting our resources, and ignoring the warning signs.
“The amount of habitat destruction and deforestation to provide agricultural grounds to the methane produced by things like cattle. People don’t understand how truly damaging this is to our environment,” Magill reflected.
The alarms are loudly ringing in our own backyard. From the Florida Panther to our manatees and sea turtles, our native animals are dwindling in numbers and facing increasing threats from habitat loss and pollution. Several species of sea turtles have been afflicted by Fibropapillomatosis, cancer-like tumors that have spread like wildfire among the turtles, caused by pollution and warming oceans.
“These animals (turtles) are keystone species in the ocean, we depend on the oceans,” Magill said. “Whether we never see a sea turtle or not, if we’re protecting the sea turtles, we’re protecting our own quality of life.”
Everything is connected. The web of life is so delicate and precise because every species serves a purpose. So when a species disappears it weakens the entire balance of our natural world, including us.
“That needs to be a huge wake-up call. These animals are telling us, like the canary in the coal mine, wake up,” Magill emphasized. “Changes that are heading your way. They’re not getting better, they’re getting worse, and we need to pay attention.”
Magill stresses there are things that we can do every single day to help our planet: reducing our consumption of animal protein, being mindful of our food waste, greatly reducing or even eliminating our use of plastics, and being efficient in our energy use.
“There’s always hope. We’re at a tipping point, but we can determine which way it tips,” reflected Magill.
Every choice we make matters.
“Nature is so resilient, at the same time it’s so fragile,” said Magill. “If we can just understand maintaining that balance, we can coexist…we just need to do so sustainably.”
It’s important to underscore that the loss of wildlife data refers to the total wildlife population size, not the percentage of species lost.
However, another report from the United Nations warns that if we continue down this current path, as many as one million species could go extinct by 2100.
Beyond the simple swaps in your everyday life, you can also make a difference by supporting the World Wildlife Fund or Zoo Miami’s Wildlife Conservation efforts.
For more information on the Great Elephant Migration exhibit, visit their website.