Page 100 - EarthHeroes

regularly told that climate change was not real or that if people could live in the Sahara Desert, then an increase of a few degrees in temperature wouldn’t affect the people of India.
Bittu knew that nature can heal itself and that wildlife will return if its habitat is restored. But he had grown tired of trying to stop adults destroying the planet.
It was time to take a different approach. Bittu felt sure that, unlike their country’s leaders, children understood the value of nature, as well as the threat of climate change. He believed that if every child was given the chance to fall in love with nature, then they would grow up to fight for it.
Bittu decided to start with tigers. You cannot save the tiger without first saving
its forest. When this is done, the whole ecosystem – every creature and plant in the forest – is saved too, even the insects on the tiger’s back. The surviving forest soaks up the monsoon rains to fill up the water sources that feed India’s wells, lakes, streams and rivers, providing water for millions of people. And those forests absorb carbon from the atmosphere, helping to stop climate change. So, just by protecting the home of one species, we could save all the natural world. Saving the tiger would be saving the planet.
So in 2000, Bittu launched Kids for Tigers. This environmental education programme works directly with schools to give children in India’s cities the chance to experience nature through film shows, nature walks, tiger rallies and festivals. Kids write to government officials to urge them to protect tigers and nature. In the project’s first year they collected over two million signatures and delivered them to the Prime Minister, and 25,000 children and their parents took part in a tiger rally in Delhi. After meeting with a group of these children in 2001, Prime Minister Vajpayee stood before India’s National Board for Wildlife and asked, “Our children have woken up; why are we adults all asleep?” Government committees had ignored Bittu in the past, but now children were speaking out – and even the country’s leaders were listening.
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