Watch Common Ground Online

We're happy to announce the feature documentary Common Ground is now available online! Options to rent or purchase are available here. 50% of all proceeds are donated to the Sri Lanka Wildlife Conservation Society, for our research and conservation efforts for the protection of Sri Lanka's endangered wildlife, communities, and natural habitats.

Common Ground is an epic cinematographic production. The documentary was filmed over two years in Sri Lanka and captures insightfully how the similar needs of people and elephants have brought them into intense conflict. The people of Sri Lanka and the elephant have an association that is 5,000 years old and even today the elephant is a venerated living religious symbol and cultural icon. At the same time the film also presents the enigmatic nature of this association mainly from the peoples’ perspective since the elephant is so tightly woven into the cultural fabric of Sri Lanka.

Today this historic association has reduced into one of intense conflict resulting in the death of nearly 225 elephants and 80 people annually. In addition the economic cost of human-elephant conflict has been estimated to be a staggering $10 million per annum. This is not taking into account the economic, ecological and sociocultural loss the country suffers as it loses 5% of its total elephant population every year.

The film opens with some of the most amazing aerial footage that aptly portrays the incredible diversity and beauty of Sri Lanka, an island the size of the State of West Virginia or half the size of England. Exciting scenes of herds of elephants some taken from the air show them trying to live as they did for millennia, while human development encroaches to narrow the interface between human and elephant habitats into a thin and blurry boundary. It is a wonderful film that has very poignantly captured the ethos and the pathos of the human-elephant story as it is today in Sri Lanka. The film makes a compelling case for, why we should care and do our best to save these magnificent animals.

The Asian elephant is one of the most endangered mega-herbivores in the world. Over the last five decades, its population has declined precipitously, and the biggest threats to its survival are habitat loss and conflict with humans over crop raiding. Currently, less than 35,000 Asian elephants are estimated to survive in the wild distributed in 13 range countries. In comparison there are over 500,000 elephants in Africa. The largest terrestrial vertebrate in Asia, the Asian elephant is listed in Appendix I by the Convention on the International Trade in Species (CITES) as a species threatened with extinction and in the Red Data Book of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as an endangered species.

William Beebe, one of the most imminent American naturalist and scientist of the last century said, “The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer, but when the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.”

So please let us not allow the Asian elephant to go extinct.

Given that the remaining Asian elephant populations subsist alongside many of the largest, most rapidly growing human populations on the planet, the conservation of the Asian elephant must be given the highest priority.

Please help us to save the Asian elephant.