Man about Boulder: dailycamera.com, biggreenboulder.com, fridayallweek.com
Why Harvest Elephant Poop for Paper in Sri Lanka? To save elephants, of course. It turns out that a tenth of the mere 40,000 Asian elephants worldwide live in Sri Lanka, where they're killed due to their interference with agriculture. There's no major ivory trade, and Sri Lankans don't eat elephant meat, so the sole factor that elephants are being exterminated is because they're a nuisance. Many Sri Lankans have long regarded elephants as dangerous pests that ruin their crops via trampling them, and kill them to protect their livelihood as some Americans kill wolves to protect livestock.
Mr. Ellie Pooh hopes to change that conception by proving that elephants can be valuable to the economy, and thus worth sparing. They feel that the only way to protect the elephants is to change the public's idea of their indisputable value--if Sri Lankans are making an honest living creating paper, and an entirely new market is opened up, there'll be more incentive to find alternative solutions to protecting their crops.
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