Page 99 - EarthHeroes

conservation. “If you teach people in the cities about wildlife,” Fateh suggested, “then maybe they will do less damage to it.”
That answer changed Bittu’s life forever. With some savings and little experience, he pulled together a small team of skilled people and set up Sanctuary Asia – India’s first nature magazine. Only 10 months after their conversation under the banyan tree, Bittu proudly took Fateh the first copy, which naturally featured a tiger on the cover.
The magazine had a shaky start and
a few times they nearly shut down due
to lack of funds; Bittu was not from
a wealthy family and he refused to borrow money from banks. However,
the magazine grew more and more popular and many of the parents who read Sanctuary Asia asked for a nature magazine for their children. Bittu realised that children no longer had the contact with nature that he had enjoyed as a child, so, in 1984, he set up Sanctuary Cub which was soon taken up by almost all of India’s school libraries.
Encouraged by the success of the magazines, Bittu began to look for new ways of spreading his message about the importance of nature. In the 1980s, he worked with a film company and some of Bollywood’s best directors and actors to make 17 documentary films on tigers and a children’s series about nature conservation. Millions of viewers tuned in to India’s national television network to see the country’s incredible wildlife and to learn the sad truth of how its natural world was disappearing.
Sanctuary Asia became one of the leading sources of information about conservation in India and Bittu was asked to join several government committees on the environment. At first he was excited at this opportunity to work together to protect nature, but he found that the government didn’t listen to his advice. They went ahead with new projects such as roads, mines, canals and railways, which destroyed wildlife habitats, and also ignored his warnings on climate change. Bittu pointed out that there was no use building expensive dams below glaciers that would soon be gone if people didn’t act, but he was
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