About Pachyderm Power!
Kristal Parks, MA is a passionate speaker, biologist, elephant conservationist, author, environmentalist, children’s entertainer and visionary.
When I was 7 years old, my family moved to Mexico City, where I learned about the suffering and injustice of poverty. As an adult, I lived as a semi-hermit for 2 years in the intimate embrace of a forest. What I learned from these 2 formative experiences guides my vision and actions. I have volunteered in refugee camps in southeast Asia, worked as a human shield to protect Mayan activists during the civil was of Guatemala, helped end apartheid in South Africa and was jailed for non-violent peace activism against nuclear weapons. I have also advocated alongside Indigenous groups to protect the Amazon Forest, supported the disabled community and aided immigrants and refugees held in detention. I assert that collaboration with animals, plants and Indigenous wisdom is key to saving the planet.
Whenever I see an elephant family, free and happy in the wild, the little babies playfully cavorting in the mud with the female adults so tenderly and protectively looking after them, and see a majestic bull elephant in the power of his musth with so much triumphant dignity, every part of my being rises up with one purpose—to do all I possibly can to conserve them in all their magnificence. So, since 2003, I have been working in the US, Asia, South Africa and Kenya to protect and preserve elephants.
In 2005, I founded Pachyderm Power! Love in Action for Elephants which worked for 10 years to stop elephant genocide in Kenya. My pivotal efforts successfully created a national club of over 1,000 Kenyan students impassioned to save the elephant nation. In the US, my actions (including a 12 day water only hunger strike) helped end the use of elephants by Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, which finally closed in 2017. I hold a BS in Biology and an MA in Justice, Peace and Social Transformation from the Iliff School of Theology.
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