Kristin Bauer Instagram – Are Africa’s last free-roaming elephants destined to be ghosts? Spectral beings roaming an Earth scarred by our desires, surviving on the fringes of our world as a regret. The ghost elephants challenge us, they beckon across an existential divide with a silent trumpeting in the language of trees. They ask us to look beyond what is seen, to feel the pulse of wildness that still beats beneath the concrete and steel of our creations. Vanishing; the ghost elephants are fading whispers in the wilds of our imagination, their ivory spectres a pale reflection against the canvas of modernity. Walking silently, their colossal forms shrouded in the dust of memory charge loudly into a global consciousness struggling to remember their majesty. The ghost elephants tread an eternal path through this twilight of existence. Ethereal; when they return, there will be thunder. Lost in an era of progress, they seek solace in deep, forgotten forests. Along with the last people seeking freedom, they dwindle in our indifference and disconnection. Their footprints are everywhere, but they remain unseen. Their footfalls, as soft as whispers, are echoes of Earth’s ancient heartbeat. The ghost elephants are memories of the world as it once was; pure and untroubled, wild and unbridled. As we ponder their fate, we must ask ourselves if the future of all wildlife is to follow these ghosts into obscurity; hidden from sight, there but unseen, phantoms in darkness. They have the power to create and to destroy; the architects of landscapes; the shapers of ecosystems. Wielding the power to topple trees and excavate rivers, their all-powerful trunks have the tenderness of a mother’s touch caressing the fragility of life. There is a war raging, a battle for their survival, perhaps for the very soul of the Earth. This isn’t just a fight against extinction. It’s a struggle for human nature, for existence as we know it. We face the choice between a world where wild spirits roam free or one where they are but ghosts, haunting the edges of human consciousness, forever a reminder of what was and what could be again. A haunting in the collective memory of humanity. Photo: @dugmore_or_less_wildphoto