"Weltenschiff", in German, means World Ship, or arc. I've always considered elephants extremely magnificent animals, strong and capable to bear great loads.

 

Today, they bear not only physical loads, but a symbolic one too. They are icons of the vanishing wilderness, of the green spaces that are shrinking and the jungles that are melting away to nothing, of the wonders we were granted and which were squandered.

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I felt that there was poetry in refiguring Noah's arc to be a living animal. In a way, it also recalls Hindu cosmology and the World Elephants therein (and perhaps a touch of Discworld).

 

Perhaps, someday, rather than tearing it down we can learn to help the arc, to nurture it and to protect it, before our very dreams are drained of the colour and spirit of the natural world.