Myanmar: Burma’s Logging Ban Is Great for Forests, but a Disaster for Its Working Elephants

Mar 31, 2014 | Charlie Campbell, Time
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Modern Burmese history was built on teak, which is to say it was built on the backs of elephants. The British quickly saw teak’s potential after colonizing Burma in 1824, and realized that hitching an elephant to a two-ton log was the only way of getting timber from where it was felled to the nearest waterway, and floating it to mill and market.

It was arduous work, with malaria and anthrax decimating man and behemoth. But fortunes were made and the timber helped shape the world map by being the stuff from which the British imperial fleet was fashioned. Teak remained vital after Burma’s independence in 1948. It was the second highest source of legal foreign exchange and exports for the military dictatorship, earning the junta hundreds of millions of dollars a year.