Wondering why the article tone is so concerned, these guys look like they are having a blast. If someone staked you to go prospect in the wilderness for the summer and your upside for 2 months camping was a 1:5 to 1:3 chance at making the equivalent of $1m payout for your effort, with probably only $30k in expenses, and your alternative was working an an assembly line, why wouldn't you do it?

Mammoth tusk is in demand from luthiers who make custom guitars and other custom instrument makers. Sure, digging up anything has environmental consequences, but the scale of the demand is too low to make an ecosystem dent. It's not like paper mills, gravel pits, or metals mines. The environmental objection to this seems to be more about the men themselves and the individual entrepreneurialism, because if this were bank funded, it would be called an important industry. If they want to talk about environmental devastation, I hope they enjoyed all those newspapers they read to refine those thoughtful opinions, because if you've been to northern Ontario, the pulp industry that produced all that paper to opine on was what really killed rivers. We may look back on newspapers as one of the worst examples of devastation wrought by human vanity in history.

I don't think this mammoth tusk demand scales to where it creates environmental problems on the scale of real industries, and the guys doing it just seem like an easy target for a concern brigade who use it as leverage for influence in regional politics.

Very interesting documentary about it: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_2.0

Seems like they could really use some ground-penetrating radar! It'd also greatly reduce the environmental damage from all the futile empty holes.

Great article and expository photography!