Although world leaders and the media rally to protect the endangered elephant from poachers and ivory traders, speakers at an Institute of Politics forum said last night, the destruction is in part a natural outgrowth of urban expansion and farmers' efforts to defend their land.

A panel of four conservationists mediated by Richard D. Estes, associate in mammalogy in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, discussed the plight of the African elephant and debated how best to combat its decline.

The African elephant population had declined from 1.3 million to 625,000 over the last decade. The most publicized cause of the depletion has been poaching, Estes said, and African governments have taken steps to improve enforcement of anti-poaching laws.

"The majority of people want to see elephant shooting stopped," Estes said.

Two of the panelists--paleontologist Richard Leakey, the director of Kenya's Wildlife Services, and Richard Garstang of the Endangered Wildlife Trust of Southern Africa--disagreed over the role of ivory trading. While the Kenyan elephant population is dangerously low, Garstang said, elephant overpopulation in South Africa makes that government's policy of state-run population control and ivory trading an appropriate solution.

"I'm convinced that if the ivory trade were not controlled, it would result in the extinction of the animals," said Leakey.

He added that he recently confiscated and burned several tons of ivory to symbolize Kenya's oposition to the trade.

The members of the panel--sponsored jointly by the Kennedy School, the International Tusk Fund and the Energy and Environmental Policy Center--said the most effective method of protecting elephants is to involve communities at a grass-roots level.

"The belief that the resource [elephants] is valuable to the people is worth three or four times the military patrol, but it has to be visible and tangible," said Garstang.

But it is difficult to elicit farmers' cooperation because elephants often destroy farm and forest lands. And because of agricultural expansion and an increase in the number of individual farms, elephant habitats are diminishing, and farmers are generally not committed to wildlife or land conservation.

"The days are gone in Kenya when the agriculture is limited to large farms headed by white colonists," said Leakey. "We are seeing a radical transformation in land use. Conservation has to be seen against that backdrop."

A second, more natural threat to the elephants is the damage they do to their own ecosystems by tearing down trees and depleting the food supply, the panelists said.

"Elephants will eat themselves out of their own houses, and those of others," Estes said.

"The elephants are a short-term problem in the long-term problem of the whole ecosystem," said Iain Douglas-Hamilton, a researcher on elephant behavior. "They are an indicator."