Today, Act Big Live Small focuses on Asian elephant conservation. Fewer than 50,000 Asian elephants remain in the wild, and they are listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List. Around one-third, approximately 15,000 elephants, are held in captivity, often in tourism, logging, or labour industries, as well as in some religious temples and institutions, where welfare conditions can be deeply challenging.

The continued capture of wild elephants to support such operations also further fragments and threatens surviving wild herds. Elephants are highly social and sentient beings, much like humans. As wild animals that have never been domesticated, they can suffer particularly severe trauma from captivity.

Asian elephants are a keystone species - their positive impact on surrounding ecosystems is disproportionately large relative to their population. If we cannot build a landscape where humans coexist with Asian elephants, we will have failed to meet an even greater challenge: creating the political and structural capability to manage land sustainably.

This is the challenge envisioned in UN Sustainable Development Goal 15 (Life on Land). Failing to achieve this goal implies that human economic models are fundamentally incompatible with preserving the biosphere.