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How To Live With Elephants In The Backyard-BY ELIZABETH ORIEL Source:Noemamag Image Source:Noemamag Conflict between humans and elephants in Sri Lanka is complex and ancient, but listening to the people closest to it reveals much about building a collaborative multispecies future. Author’s Note In 2018 and 2019, I lived in Sri Lanka while conducting fieldwork for my PhD at the University of London. I was studying human-elephant conflict. Though this conflict is an ancient one, in recent decades, it has gotten tenser. Elephants are eating and damaging crops at higher rates. Though it is illegal to harm an elephant and doing so can also upset a tacit code of interspecies conduct, farmers sometimes retaliate. Over the course of my research, I interviewed farmers, government officials, economists, guides and others near Uda Walawe National Park in the south and Knuckles Conservation Forest in the central region. Here I present their stories ...