Art: Epitaph on Film

Images of ruin in Africa

"The great elephant," Leonardo da Vinci wrote, "has by nature qualities which rarely occur among men: namely probity, prudence, and the sense of justice and of religious observance." Later zoologists in Africa have noticed more human traits in Loxodonta africana —long childhoods and close nuclear families, high intelligence and a habit of wrecking their environment and destroying their own food supply. The suicide ground of the retreating herds of African elephants has been, for the past quarter-century, the Tsavo National Park in Kenya, a place ringed by political...

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