Tree removal for space shuttle arrival tempers excitement

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posted by Osnat

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-shuttle-trees-20120904%2c0%2c5463653.story

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September 3, 2012, 5:12 p.m.

For some South L.A. residents, the excitement of Endeavour rumbling through their neighborhoods en route to the California Science Center faded when they learned that 400 trees had to be cut down.

By 

Space shuttle Endeavour's final 12-mile journey through the streets of South Los Angeles already promises to be a meticulously planned spectacle: a two-day parade, an overnight slumber party in Inglewood and enough hoopla to create a giant traffic mess.

But for some residents in South L.A., the excitement of the shuttle rumbling through their neighborhoods quickly faded when they learned that 400 trees will be chopped down to make room for the behemoth.

The California Science Center — Endeavour's final home — has agreed to replant twice as many trees along the route from the shuttle's docking place at Los Angeles International Airport to Exposition Park.

"They are cutting down these really big, majestic trees," said Lark Galloway-Gilliam, a longtime Leimert Park resident and neighborhood council director. "It will be beyond my lifetime before they will be tall like this again."But that's not enough to satisfy some tree lovers.

Many worry that the replacements — young, wiry trees that will provide little shade — will pale in comparison to the mature magnolias that line the Crenshaw corridor. Others are concerned that the bare streets will further depreciate property values.

City officials and the science center are hoping the historical significance of housing the shuttle will offset the tree loss.

In its 25 missions spanning nearly two decades, Endeavour circled the Earth more than 4,600 times, spending 299 days in space. One of those missions was to repair NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, basically giving it contact lenses so that it could peer farther into the universe.

"It is a historical artifact and national treasure," said California Science Center president Jeffrey Rudolph. "The community understands that and recognizes that it will help inspire the next generation of explorers."

Several alternatives for the Oct. 12 move were considered but ultimately discarded.

Taking the massive shuttle apart would have damaged the delicate tiles that acted as heat sensors. Airlifting the 170,000-pound craft was also ruled out. Not even heavy-duty helicopters could sustain that kind of weight, Rudolph said.

A freeway route was considered until engineers realized that the five-story-tall, 78-foot-wide shuttle could not travel under overpasses.

"We had to identify a route that had no permanent infrastructures like buildings and bridges," Rudolph said.

They settled on a final route that will follow Manchester Boulevard to Crenshaw Drive, then onto Crenshaw Boulevard and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard — wide thoroughfares with few permanent obstacles.

To make way for the shuttle, some trees will be pruned, power lines will be raised and traffic signals will be removed.

Inglewood will lose 128 trees, and communities in South Los Angeles about 265 trees, though the exact number has not yet been determined.

Meanwhile, officials have been working to allay fears by sharing replantation plans, seeking community input at neighborhood council meetings and finding compromises where they can.

Residents disapproved of a route that would have taken the shuttle through Leimert Boulevard and forced the removal of dozens of pine and fir trees planted years ago to honor the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Engineers found an alternative — albeit longer — route.

Construction crews in Inglewood are already chopping pine, ficus and other trees down to their stumps.

Inglewood officials see the tree removal as a win-win. The city rids itself of some problematic trees and even gets sidewalks repaired. In total, the California Science Center is expected to spend $500,000 to improve the city's landscape.

PHOTOS: Space shuttle Endeavour 1991-2012

"The move of the shuttle allows the city to be a part of this national endeavor," said Sabrina Barnes, Inglewood's director of parks, recreations and library services. "And gives the chance to address problematic trees that have eroded the landscape."

Workers are expected to start replanting trees a few weeks after Endeavour reaches the science center.

Still, Cristina Melendrez said she will miss the sight and smell of the pine trees. But she's also excited about the learning possibilities. She said she's planned a month-long curriculum around Endeavour's arrival as part of her job at AbilityFirst, a nonprofit that serves people with disabilities.

"It's a shame they are cutting down these beautiful trees," she said. "But it's going to be fun having our participants witness history."

Columbia University to Cut Down Trees to Make Way for Waterfront Park

 Updated July 2, 2012 5:18pm

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posted by Osnat

http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20120702/inwood/columbia-university-cut-down-trees-make-way-for-waterfront-park

Supporting link: trees_crime_portland_donovan.pdf

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July 2, 2012 5:18pm | By Carla Zanoni, DNAinfo Social Media Editor

INWOOD — As Columbia University prepares to begin construction on the public waterfront park at the edge of its Baker Field Athletic complex, some residents are concerned that the school’s plan includes removing several old trees. 

Park Terrace resident Osi Kramer protested the removal of mature trees, linking their removal to a potential increase in crime, based on a study conducted in Portland, Ore., and published in Environement and Behavior journal, in which theauthors find that “trees in the public right of way are associated with lower crime rates.”

“In light of the Columbia University plans to chop down "several" trees to make way for its Inwood public waterfront park. your attention is required, because as it is right now, your so-called 'plan' to cut down trees is part of the problem, not the solution,” Kramer wrote, calling for a public meeting prior to the removal of such trees.

But Columbia officials said it is necessary for them to remove "several" trees in order to move forward with the project.

"To create or restore a salt marsh, there needs to be full sun light," wrote Columbia spokeswoman Victoria Benitez in an email. "The design team worked closely with a natural resource consultant and the [Department of Parks and Recreation] to come up with a viable way to restore the salt marsh in the inlet area, which involves the need to remove several trees along the southern edge of the restored marsh." 

Benitez added that although “several” trees will be removed to make way for the park, "the project plan includes the planting of 32 new trees indigenous to the area around the Boathouse Marsh site."  

The Parks Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The university received “preliminary approval” on the project during a public hearing in May.

Columbia agreed to build the public waterfront park as a concession for building on its land without turning over the normally required 15 percent of the space for public use. Instead, Columbia set aside just 1.5 percent of its property for public use.

Residents were dismayed in May 2011 when the university removed approximately 10 mature trees during the first phase of its Baker Field Athletic complex construction at the corner of West 218^th Street and Broadway.

School officials said they needed to remove those trees in order to make way for its 47,700-square-foot, five-storyCampbell Sports Center, but pledged to plant the additional 30-plus trees in exchange for their removal.

Construction on the waterfront property is slated to go through the summer.

Columbia and community officials have said the school will not be able to receive a certificate of occupancy for its new building until it opens the waterfront space, but community members have questioned whether the agreement is enforceable. 

“We anticipate the park being substantially complete in the fall of 2012," Columbia spokeswoman Victoria Benitez told DNAinfo in May.

Read more: http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20120702/inwood/columbia-university-cut-down-trees-make-way-for-waterfront-park#ixzz2Czdb5ouO

Transplanting Mature Trees

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posted by Ron

http://www.savatree.com/mature-tree-transplants.html

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After walking through a forest, have you ever wished that you could capture and feature the majestic beauty of these large trees in you home environment? Amazingly, through the use of carefully executed transplanting techniques, fully grown trees of almost any specie or size can be successfully integrated into the residential or commercial landscape.

While choosing a suitable location for your new transplant is very key to its survival, the future health, beauty and utility of the tree is also greatly influenced by how it is dug, transported, planted and maintained.

Ron Byleckie, a veteran of mature tree transplanting with over 20 years experience explained, "A tree typically loses up to 90% of its root system in the transplantation process. As a result, trees are diminished in their capacity to uptake the water and nutrients they need to survive. In order to minimize transplant shock, the mature tree must be placed in intensive care, before, during and after transplanting." When moving a mature tree, Mr. Byleckie recommends the following guidelines for success:

1. Assess the tree's transplantability. Some trees can be moved more successfully than others depending on their species, size, health as well as its former and future habitat. A professional arboristshould be consulted to verify that these conditions are favorable for transplanting.

2. Make sure the rootball is the right size. Trees should be "10" of root ball per inch of caliper (i.e. a 7" caliper tree requires a 70" rootball) to survive and thrive.

3. Find a reliable, experienced tree mover. Mature tree transplanting is a skill which requires the proper equipment, expertise and care. If you do not know a tree mover, contact your local cooperative extension agent, nursery or professional tree care company for a referral.

4. Carefully prepare mature trees for transplanting. Trees which have never been moved from their natural growing environment tend to have asymmetric root systems because they grow with the irregularities of the surrounding topography. If the tree is not nursery grown, root pruning should be performed up to one year prior to transplanting to encourage the development of a more dense and fibrous root system.

After the tree has been carefully dug from its original location, it is critical that extreme care is taken to prevent root death. Make sure that roots are kept moist as they are easily damaged under conditions of high temperature and low humidity. Put simply, "a dry root is a dead root".

When transporting large trees long distances, it is important that the mover be aware of size and weight limits which roads and bridges will withstand. Also, precautions must be taken to avoid drying of foliage by misting the tree and securely covering it with tarps to minimize air movement during transport.

Also, consider the logistics of moving the tree to the new planting site: will power lines, septic tanks or your property be a risk?

5. Thoroughly prepare the new site for mature tree transplanting. There are three key factors to consider in preparing the site: soil quality, depth and drainage. It is very important that the soil is of adequate quality or the tree will not receive the nutrients, soil microbia and other elements it require to live. The depth of planting must be close to the original so that the soil level at the base of the trunk is level or slightly above (3-6 inches) with the surrounding soil surface. If the tree is set too deeply it will not thrive because feeder roots must be able to receive oxygen. It is also important to improve aeration in unamended backfill by breaking up clods and gradually adding this soil into the hole.

6. Provide intensive post-planting care. Newly planted trees need to be maintained to ensure the success of their relocation. Depending on the strength and health of the tree, it may need to be artificially supported and pruned. However, all new transplants should be watered and mulched immediately; then fertilized at the end of the first growing season (depending on soil conditions). It is also important to implement a plant health care program to monitor the tree and treat tree insects and diseases.

Since mature tree transplanting can be an expensive venture, it is wise to consult with a professional arborist and obtain a recommendation before proceeding.

Click or call today to arrange a complimentary consultation from our fully trained and certified arborists for mature tree care, tree fertilizer and lawn care services from SavATree. Contact the office nearest you.

SavATree provides mature tree care in the following areas:

Connecticut - Fairfield, Hartford, Litchfield, Middlesex, New Haven, New London, Tolland, Windham;Illinois - Cook, DuPage, Kane, Kendall, Lake, McHenry County, Will; Massachusetts - Barnstable, Bristol, Essex, Franklin, Hampden, Hampshire, Middlesex, Norfolk, Plymouth, Rockingham, Suffolk, Worcester;Maryland - Montgomery, Prince George's; New Hampshire - Rockingham; New Jersey - Bergen, Burlington, Essex, Hunterdon, Mercer, Middlesex, Monmouth, Morris, Ocean, Passaic, Somerset, Sussex, Union; New York - Bronx, Brooklyn, Columbia, Dutchess, Manhattan, Nassau, New York, Orange, Putnam, Queens, Rockland, Suffolk, Ulster, Westchester; Pennsylvania - Berks, Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Hampshire, Monroe, Montgomery, Northampton, Philadelphia, York; Virginia - Alexandria, Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun, Prince William; Washington, D.C.

Organic food no more nutritious than non-organic, study finds

--posted by Nathttp://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48888214/ns/health-diet_and_nutrition/#.UK6kwYd9J8F--
By Genevra Pittman

updated 9/4/2012 1:29:25 PM ETt:

Organic produce and meat typically isn't any better for you than conventional varieties when it comes to vitamin and nutrient content, according to a new review of the evidence.

"People choose to buy organic foods for many different reasons. One of them is perceived health benefits," said Dr. Crystal Smith-Spangler, who led the new study.But organic options may live up to their billing of lowering exposure to pesticide residue and antibiotic-resistant bacteria, researchers from Stanford University and the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System found.

"Our patients, our families ask about, ‘Well, are there health reasons to choose organic food in terms of nutritional content or human health outcomes?'"

To try to answer that question, she and her colleagues reviewed over 200 studies that compared either the health of people who ate organic or conventional foods or, more commonly, nutrient and contaminant levels in the foods themselves.

Those included organic and non-organic fruits, vegetables, grains, meat, poultry, eggs and milk.

Many of the studies didn't specify their standards for what constituted "organic" food - which can cost as much as twice what conventional food costs - the researchers wrote Monday in the Annals of InternalMedicine.

Many conventional farms in the U.S., in contrast, use pesticides to ward off bugs and raise animals in crowded indoor conditions with antibiotics in their feed to promote growth and ward off disease. The Food and Drug Administration has been examining that type of antibiotic use and its contribution to drug-resistant disease in humans.According to United States Department of Agriculture standards, organic farms have to avoid the use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, hormones and antibiotics. Organic livestock must also have access to pastures during grazing season.

Smith-Spangler and her colleagues found there was no difference in the amount of vitamins in plant or animal products produced organically and conventionally - and the only nutrient difference was slightly more phosphorus in the organic products.

Organic milk and chicken may also contain more omega-3 fatty acids, they found - but that was based on only a few studies.

There were more significant differences by growing practice in the amount of pesticides and antibiotic-resistant bacteria in food.

More than one-third of conventional produce had detectable pesticide residues, compared to seven percent of organic produce samples. And organic chicken and pork was 33 percent less likely to carry bacteria resistant to three or more antibiotics than conventionally-produced meat.

Smith-Spangler told Reuters Health it was uncommon for either organic or conventional foods to exceed the allowable limits for pesticides, so it's unclear whether a difference in residues would have an effect on health.

But Chensheng Lu, who studies environmental health and exposure at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, said that while the jury is still out on those effects, people should consider pesticide exposure in their grocery-shopping decisions.

"If I was a smart consumer, I would choose food that has no pesticides," Lu, who wasn't involved in the new study, told Reuters Health. "I think that's the best way to protect your health."

He said more research is necessary to fully explore the potential health and safety differences between organic and conventional foods, and that it's "premature" to conclude organic meat and produce isn't any healthier than non-organic versions.

"Right now I think it's all based on anecdotal evidence," Lu said
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The Slaughter of Elephants in Vietnam Is Nearly Complete

By MARK MCDONALD

Tyler Hicks/The New York TimesRangers discovered a poached elephant, stripped of its ivory tusks, in a national park in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Poachers also have hunted elephants in Vietnam, where only a few dozen of the animals remain in the wild.

The killing has now reached a kind of frenzy, and even military units in central Africa are involved, gunning down elephants from their helicopters. Ivory tusks, most of them bound for China, have become the new blood diamonds.HONG KONG — The plight of elephants in Africa is being explained, in graphic and saddening detail, in a new series of stories by my colleague Jeffrey Gettleman of The New York Times. “An epic elephant slaughter,”he calls it, with poachers wiping out tens of thousands of elephants a year for their ivory.

The poachers have already done their worst in Vietnam. Along with developers, loggers, villagers and negligent bureaucrats, they have conspired to reduce the wild elephant population to just a few dozen.

Elephants are under critical threat all across Asia, especially in India and Thailand, but the situation is so exceedingly bleak in Vietnam that wildlife conservation groups have essentially thrown in the towel there.

A minuscule and poorly funded Elephant Conservation Center is located in a national park in Dak Lak Province, in south-central Vietnam, and it has been sheltering a herd of 29 elephants. But two weeks ago, a pair of elephants from that group were found slaughtered in a forest, including the herd’s only remaining male, whose head, trunk and tusks were severed.

Without an adult male, Vietnamese forestry officials said, the herd is no longer “sustainable.” The park’s interim director said elephant poaching has now become “rampant,” with six males from the herd having been killed this year.

Experts also expect that a herd of 15 elephants in southern Vietnam will soon be wiped out. In February, venturing out of a “protected” forest in Dong Nai Province, the hungry elephants tore through cornfields, sweet potato patches and sugar cane fields. Farmers ran in terror.

Marauding elephants not only tear up farms, they also trample people and attack rural homes, mostly in their search for salt and the bamboo ash from cooking fires. In turn, villagers dig deep trenches to trap and kill the elephants, and they use homemade shotguns and flame-throwers to scare the animals off.

Protection efforts in Vietnam have been nothing short of disastrous. In 1993, a herd of 13 elephants in southern Vietnam was being relocated away from its natural habitat, an area that was slated to be turned into industrial farms. Twelve of the 13 elephants died, and the lone survivor was packed off to the Saigon Zoo.

Frank Momberg, the Vietnam program manager with the British conservation group Fauna and Flora International, told me in 1999 that “local authorities are making decisions about development without any environmental concern.”

“The elephants are facing extinction in Vietnam,” he said, although at the time he was still hoping for some government intervention. “It’s a matter of national pride. The Vietnamese don’t want to be exposed internationally for letting the elephants go extinct.’’

A so-called “urgent action plan” for elephant protection was adopted by the government in 2006, but it has yet to be funded and no protected land has been set aside.

Just a generation ago there were thousands of elephants roaming the upland forests and jungles. I spoke to a former Viet Cong guerrilla who once, on a pitch-black night, while evading an American patrol, unknowingly belly-crawled between the legs of a massive elephant that was straddling a jungle path.

As postwar Vietnam slowly began to open its economy, land was increasingly cleared for rice farms and coffee and rubber plantations. Factories sprang up. New dams and roads were built, and cities sprawled. Illegal loggers, too, were busy at their work, clear-cutting ancient stands of mahogany, teak and ironwood for overseas markets. The population skyrocketed, and with a population of 92 million, Vietnam today is larger than Germany. It’s nearly twice the size of Spain.

In the process, the elephants have died.

Even domesticated elephants aren’t safe. In April 2011, local authorities charged the owner of an elephant named Beckham with conspiring to kill the animal for its tusks, reportedly worth $24,000. The owner used Beckham to give rides to tourists at an “eco-park” in Binh Duong Province.

“The elephant was found dead in a forest in Da Lat on April 24 with its tusks and tail intact,” said the Tuoi Tre newspaper. “It was tied to a tree and the ligaments in its hind legs had been cut off.”

The authorities said the owner, her brother and another man had sawn off the 57-pound tusks before cremating Beckham.

Jeffrey’s harrowing reporting says most of the ivory poached in Africa — as much as 70 percent — ends up in China, where the country’s economic boom has created a whole new class of consumers now able to afford ivory knicknacks, chospticks and combs. A pound of ivory on the streets of Beijing, he says, now goes for $1,000.

“China is the epicenter of demand,” said Robert Hormats, a senior U.S. State Department official. “Without the demand from China, this would all but dry up.”

Elephants Dying in Epic Frenzy as Ivory Fuels Wars and Profits

By Ben Solomon

The Ivory Wars: Heavily armed platoons of rangers at Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo wage war against elephant poachers.

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

Published: September 3, 2012 566 Comments

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posted by Milton

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/world/africa/africas-elephants-are-being-slaughtered-in-poaching-frenzy.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0

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The Price of IvoryGARAMBA NATIONAL PARK, Democratic Republic of Congo — In 30 years of fighting poachers, Paul Onyango had never seen anything like this. Twenty-two dead elephants, including several very young ones, clumped together on the open savanna, many killed by a single bullet to the top of the head.

This is the first installment in a series of articles that will explore how the surge in poaching of African elephants both feeds off and fuels instability on the continent.

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There were no tracks leading away, no sign that the poachers had stalked their prey from the ground. The tusks had been hacked away, but none of the meat — and subsistence poachers almost always carve themselves a little meat for the long walk home.

Several days later, in early April, theGaramba National Park guards spotted a Ugandan military helicopter flying very low over the park, on an unauthorized flight, but they said it abruptly turned around after being detected. Park officials, scientists and the Congolese authorities now believe that the Ugandan military — one of the Pentagon’s closest partners in Africa — killed the 22 elephants from a helicopter and spirited away more than a million dollars’ worth of ivory.

“They were good shots, very good shots,” said Mr. Onyango, Garamba’s chief ranger. “They even shot the babies. Why? It was like they came here to destroy everything.”

Africa is in the midst of an epic elephant slaughter. Conservation groups say poachers are wiping out tens of thousands of elephants a year, more than at any time in the previous two decades, with the underground ivory trade becoming increasingly militarized.

Like blood diamonds from Sierra Leone or plundered minerals from Congo, ivory, it seems, is the latest conflict resource in Africa, dragged out of remote battle zones, easily converted into cash and now fueling conflicts across the continent.

Some of Africa’s most notorious armed groups, including the Lord’s Resistance Army, the Shabab and Darfur’s janjaweed, are hunting down elephants and using the tusks to buy weapons and sustain their mayhem. Organized crime syndicates are linking up with them to move the ivory around the world, exploiting turbulent states, porous borders and corrupt officials from sub-Saharan Africa to China, law enforcement officials say.

But it is not just outlaws cashing in. Members of some of the African armies that the American government trains and supports with millions of taxpayer dollars — like the Ugandan military, the Congolese Army and newly independent South Sudan’s military — have been implicated in poaching elephants and dealing in ivory.

Congolese soldiers are often arrested for it. South Sudanese forces frequently battle wildlife rangers. Interpol, the international police network, is now helping to investigate the mass elephant killings in the Garamba park, trying to match DNA samples from the animals’ skulls to a large shipment of tusks, marked “household goods,” recently seized at a Ugandan airport.

The vast majority of the illegal ivory — experts say as much as 70 percent — is flowing to China, and though the Chinese have coveted ivory for centuries, never before have so many of them been able to afford it. China’s economic boom has created a vast middle class, pushing the price of ivory to a stratospheric $1,000 per pound on the streets of Beijing.

High-ranking officers in the People’s Liberation Army have a fondness for ivory trinkets as gifts. Chinese online forums offer a thriving, and essentially unregulated, market for ivory chopsticks, bookmarks, rings, cups and combs, along with helpful tips on how to smuggle them (wrap the ivory in tinfoil, says one Web site, to throw off X-ray machines).

Last year, more than 150 Chinese citizens were arrested across Africa, from Kenya to Nigeria, for smuggling ivory. And there is growing evidence that poaching increases in elephant-rich areas where Chinese construction workers are building roads.

“China is the epicenter of demand,” said Robert Hormats, a senior State Department official. “Without the demand from China, this would all but dry up.”

He said that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who condemned conflict minerals from Congo a few years ago, was pushing the ivory issue with the Chinese “at the highest levels” and that she was “going to spend a considerable amount of time and effort to address this, in a very bold way.”

Foreigners have been decimating African elephants for generations. “White gold” was one of the primary reasons King Leopold II of Belgium turned Congo into his own personal fief in the late 19th century, leading to the brutal excesses of the upriver ivory stations thinly fictionalized in Joseph Conrad’s novel “Heart of Darkness” and planting the seeds for Congo’s free fall today.

Ivory Coast got its name from the teeming elephant herds that used to frolic in its forests. Today, after decades of carnage, there is almost no ivory left.

The demand for ivory has surged to the point that the tusks of a single adult elephant can be worth more than 10 times the average annual income in many African countries. In Tanzania, impoverished villagers are poisoning pumpkins and rolling them into the road for elephants to eat. In Gabon, subsistence hunters deep in the rain forest are being enlisted to kill elephants and hand over the tusks, sometimes for as little as a sack of salt.

Last year, poaching levels in Africa were at their highest since international monitors began keeping detailed records in 2002. And 2011 broke the record for the amount of illegal ivory seized worldwide, at 38.8 tons (equaling the tusks from more than 4,000 dead elephants). Law enforcement officials say the sharp increase in large seizures is a clear sign that organized crime has slipped into the ivory underworld, because only a well-oiled criminal machine — with the help of corrupt officials — could move hundreds of pounds of tusks thousands of miles across the globe, often using specially made shipping containers with secret compartments.

The smugglers are “Africa-based, Asian-run crime syndicates,” said Tom Milliken, director of the Elephant Trade Information System, an international ivory monitoring project, and “highly adaptive to law enforcement interventions, constantly changing trade routes and modus operandi.”

Conservationists say the mass kill-offs taking place across Africa may be as bad as, or worse than, those in the 1980s, when poachers killed more than half of Africa’s elephants before an international ban on the commercial ivory trade was put in place.

“We’re experiencing what is likely to be the greatest percentage loss of elephants in history,” said Richard G. Ruggiero, an official with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.

Some experts say the survival of the species is at stake, especially when many members of the African security services entrusted with protecting the animals are currently killing them.

“The huge populations in West Africa have disappeared, and those in the center and east are going rapidly,” said Andrew Dobson, an ecologist at Princeton. “The question is: Do you want your children to grow up in a world without elephants?”

‘We Shoot First’

Garamba National Park is a big, beautiful sheet of green, 1,900 square miles, tucked in the northeastern corner of Congo. Picture a sea of chest-high elephant grass, swirling brown rivers, ribbons of papyrus and the occasional black-and-white secretary bird swooping elegantly through rose-colored skies. Founded in 1938, Garamba is widely considered one of Africa’s most stunning parks, a naturalist’s dream.

But today, it is a battlefield, with an arms race playing out across the savanna. Every morning, platoons of Garamba’s 140 wildlife rangers suit up with assault rifles, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. Luis Arranz, the park manager, wants to get surveillance drones, and the nonprofit organization that runs the park is considering buying night-vision goggles, flak jackets and pickup trucks with mounted machine guns.

“We don’t negotiate, we don’t give any warning, we shoot first,” said Mr. Onyango, the chief ranger, who worked as a game warden in Kenya for more than 20 years. He rose to a high rank but lost his job after a poaching suspect died in his custody after being whipped.

“Out here, it’s not michezo,” Mr. Onyango said, using the Swahili word for games.

In June, he heard a burst of gunfire. His rangers did a “leopard crawl” on their bellies for hours through the scratchy elephant grass until they spied poachers hacking several elephants. The instant his squad shot at the poachers, the whole bush came alive with crackling gunfire.

“They opened up on us with PKMs, AKs, G-3s, and FNs,” he said. “Most poachers are conservative with their ammo, but these guys were shooting like they were in Iraq. All of a sudden, we were outgunned and outnumbered.”

Both of the rangers’ old belt-fed machine guns jammed that day, and they narrowly escaped (11 have been killed since 2008 and some of the rangers’ children have even been kidnapped). Later investigation showed that the poachers were members of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a brutal rebel outfit that circulates in central Africa, killing villagers and enslaving children. American Special Operations troops are helping several African armies hunt down the group’s phantom of a leader, Joseph Kony, who is believed to be hiding in a remote corner of the Central African Republic.

Ivory may be Mr. Kony’s new lifeline.

Several recent escapees from the L.R.A. said that Mr. Kony had ordered his fighters to kill as many elephants as possible and send him the tusks.

“Kony wants ivory,” said a young woman who was kidnapped earlier this year near Garamba and did not want to be identified because she was still terrified. “I heard the other rebels say it many times: ‘We need to get ivory and send it to Kony.’ ”

She said that in her four months in captivity, before she ran away one night when the rebels got drunk, she saw them kill 10 elephants, wrap the tusks in cloth sacks and send them to Mr. Kony at his hiding place.

Other recent escapees said that the group had killed at least 29 elephants since May, buying guns, ammunition and radios with the proceeds. Mr. Kony may be working with Sudanese ivory traders. One ivory retailer in Omdurman, Sudan, who openly sells ivory bracelets, prayer beads and carved tusks, said the Lord’s Resistance Army was one source of the ivory he saw.

“The L.R.A. works in this, too; that’s how they buy their weapons,” the shopkeeper said matter-of-factly. That made sense, American officials said, given Mr. Kony’s few sources of income.

Several Sudanese ivory traders said the ivory from Congo and the Central African Republic moved overland across Sudan’s vast western desert region of Darfur and then up to Omdurman, all with the help of corrupt Sudanese officials. There is a well-worn practice in Sudan called “buying time,” in which smugglers pay police officers and border guards for a specified amount of time to let a convoy of illegal goods slip through checkpoints.

But there are many routes. On Africa’s east coast, Kenya’s port city of Mombasa is a major transshipment center. A relatively small percentage of containers in Mombasa is inspected, and ivory has been concealed in shipments of everything from avocados to anchovies. Sometimes it is wrapped in chili peppers, to throw off the sniffer dogs.

On the west coast, in the Gulf of Guinea, “there is a relatively recent phenomenon of well-armed, sophisticated poachers who load their ivory onto Chinese fishing ships,” one senior American official said.

Chinese officials declined to discuss any aspect of the ivory trade, with one representative of the Forestry Ministry, which handles ivory issues, saying, “This is a very sensitive topic right now.”

Several Sudanese ivory traders and Western officials said that the infamous janjaweed militias of Darfur were also major poachers. Large groups of janjaweed — the word means horseback raider — were blamed for killing thousands of civilians in the early 2000s, when Darfur erupted in ethnic conflict. International law enforcement officials say that horseback raiders from Darfur wiped out thousands of elephants in central Africa in the 1980s. Now they suspect that hundreds of janjaweed militiamen rode more than 600 miles from Sudan and were the ones who slaughtered at least 300 elephants in Bouba Ndjida National Park in Cameroon this past January, one of the worst episodes of elephant slaughter recently discovered.

In 2010, Ugandan soldiers, searching for Mr. Kony in the forests of the Central African Republic, ran into a janjaweed ivory caravan. “These guys had 400 men, pack mules, a major camp, lots of weapons,” a Western official said. A battle erupted and more than 10 Ugandans were killed.

“It just shows you the power of poaching, how much money you can make stacking up the game,” the official said.

Businessmen are clearly bankrolling these enormous ivory expeditions, both feeding off and fueling conflict, Western officials and researchers say.

“This is not just freelance stuff,” said Mr. Hormats, the State Department official. “This is organized crime.”

Paul Elkan, a director at the Wildlife Conservation Society, said that the janjaweed sweeping across central Africa on ambitious elephant hunts “goes much deeper than a bunch of guys coming in on horses. It has to do with insecurity and lawlessness.”

Perhaps no country in Africa is as lawless as Somalia, which has languished for more than 20 years without a functioning central government, spawning Islamist militants, gunrunners, human traffickers and modern-day pirates. Ivory has entered this illicit mix.

Several Somali elders said that the Shabab, the militant Islamist group that has pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda, recently began training fighters to infiltrate neighboring Kenya and kill elephants for ivory to raise money.

One former Shabab associate said that the Shabab were promising to “facilitate the marketing” of ivory and have encouraged villagers along the Kenya-Somalia border to bring them tusks, which are then shipped out through the port of Kismayo, a notorious smuggling hub and the last major town the Shabab still control.

“The business is a risk,” said Hassan Majengo, a Kismayo resident with knowledge of the ivory trade, “but it has an exceptional profit.”

‘Easy Money’

That profit is not lost on government soldiers in central Africa, who often get paid as little as $100 a month, if they get paid at all.

In Garamba, the park rangers have arrested many Congolese government soldiers, including some caught with tusks, slabs of elephant meat and the red berets often worn by the elite presidential guard.

“An element of our army is involved,” acknowledged Maj. Jean-Pierrot Mulaku, a Congolese military prosecutor. “It’s easy money.”

Congolese soldiers have a long history of raping and killing civilians and pilfering resources. According to a report written in 2010 by John Hart, an American scientist and one of the top elephant researchers in Congo, the “Congolese military are implicated in almost all elephant poaching,” making the military “the main perpetrator of illegal elephant killing in D.R.C.”

The Garamba rangers and a Congolese government intelligence officer said that they also routinely battled soldiers from the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, the military of South Sudan. A South Sudanese military spokesman denied that, saying that the soldiers “didn’t have time” for poaching.

The American government has provided $250 million in nonlethal military assistance to South Sudan during the past several years. In May, the Garamba rangers said they had opened fire on four South Sudanese soldiers who had poached six elephant tusks. The rangers said they killed one soldier, though they did not seem to think too much about it.

“I’ve killed too many people to count,” said Alexi Tamoasi, a veteran ranger.

But the suspected helicopter poaching is something new.

Mr. Onyango said the strange way the elephant carcasses were found, clumped in circles, with the calves in the middle for protection, was yet another sign that a helicopter had corralled them together because elephants usually scatter at the first shot.

African Parks, the South Africa-based conservation organization that manages Garamba, has photographs of an Mi-17 military transport helicopter flying low over the park in April and said it had traced the chopper’s registration number to the Ugandan military.

Col. Felix Kulayigye, a spokesman for the Ugandan military, acknowledged that the helicopter was one of its aircraft. But he said that the poaching allegation was a “baseless rumor” and that he knew “for sure” that Lord’s Resistance Army members were “well known” poachers in that area.

John Sidle, an American from Nebraska who works as a pilot at Garamba, said, “What bothers me is that it’s probably American taxpayer money paying for the jet fuel for the helicopter.”

The United States has paid tens of millions of dollars in recent years for fuel and transport services for the Ugandan Army to hunt down Mr. Kony in central Africa, while training Congolese and South Sudanese to help. But the State Department said it had no evidence that the Ugandan military was responsible for the Garamba killings, nor knowledge that any of the African soldiers involved in the Kony hunt had engaged in poaching. It did not address the broader history of poaching by American-supported militaries.

In June, 36 tusks were seized at the Entebbe airport in Uganda. Eighteen of the 22 elephants killed in Garamba in March were adults that had their ivory hacked out, which would usually mean 36 tusks. The little stubs of ivory on the dead calves had been left untouched.

In 1989, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species passed a moratorium on the international commercial trade of African elephant ivory, except under a few rare circumstances. No one knows how many elephants are being poached each year, but many leading conservationists agree that “tens of thousands” is a safe number and that 2012 is likely to be worse than 2011.

The total elephant population in Africa is a bit of a mystery, too. The International Union for Conservation of Nature, a global conservation network, estimates from 472,269 to 689,671. But that is based on information from 2006. Poaching has dramatically increased since then, all across the continent.

Some of the recently poached elephants had been sexually mutilated, with their genitals or nipples cut off, possibly for sale — something researchers said they had not encountered before.

“It’s very disturbing,” said Iain Douglas-Hamilton, the founder of Save the Elephants, who recently testified at a Senate hearing on ivory and insecurity.

‘Like the Drug War’

Mr. Arranz, Garamba’s director, has an exhausted look in his eyes. History is against him. Garamba was founded more than 70 years ago, in part to protect the rare northern white rhinoceros, which used to number more than 1,000 here. But many people in Asia believe that ground rhino horn is a cure for cancer and other ills, and it fetches nearly $30,000 a pound, more than gold. In the past few decades, as Congo has descended into chaos, rhino poachers have moved into Garamba. The park’s northern white rhinos were among the last ones in the wild anywhere, but rangers have not seen any for the past five years.

Garamba faces a seemingly endless number of challenges, many connected to the utter state failure of Congo itself. Some of the rangers are poachers themselves, killing the animals they are entrusted to protect, saying their salaries are too low to live on.

“I was hungry,” explained Anabuda Bakuli, a ranger jailed for killing a waterbuck.

It does not help that many Garamba rangers are, by their own admission, alcoholics and run up debts at the bar not far from park headquarters. Mr. Onyango, the chief, is known to drink several liters of beer in a single sitting. He talks about “the stress.”

Poaching rates are now the highest here in central Africa, a belt of some of the most troubled countries in the world. In Chad, heavily armed horsemen, who many conservationists say were janjaweed, recently killed 3,000 elephants in just a few years.

Garamba once had more than 20,000 elephants. Last year, there were around 2,800. This year, maybe 2,400.

Every morning, if the skies are clear, Mr. Arranz flies above Garamba in a small two-seat plane, the equivalent of a Mazda Miata with wings. The emerald green savanna stretches out below him, a breathtaking sight at dawn.

But the other day, he saw something that furrowed his brow: vultures.

The next day, after a hike through the tall grass, the stench grew unbearable and the air reverberated with the sizzle of thousands of flies. “Poached,” Mr. Arranz said, as he discovered a dead elephant, its face cut off.

Nearby were the ashes of a small campfire.

“These guys were out here for a while,” he said. “If they were willing to do this for one elephant. ...” His voice trailed off.

“It’s like the drug war,” he said later. “If people keep buying and paying for ivory, it’s impossible to stop it.”