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India, presents these problems in a very stark way, with over 1.2 billion mouths to feed, all who vote in or out of office a range of politicians with short term and often corrupt agendas, that are only fuelling the collapse of its extraordinary biodiversity both natural and cultural. My own campaign has a Tiger title (like so many) , but to be honest the Tiger is only the iconic talisman that represents India’s natural biodiversity, most which is truly staggering and at the moment horribly undervalued.
It is here that I believe wildlife tourism has a huge part to play in conservation for today it is about the only ‘non extractive’ industry that requires pristine landscapes and bountiful wildlife to survive. It pays for standing trees, not fallen ones, it needs live animals not dead ones and it needs forests not cultivated landscapes to survive. So it has (or should have) an inherent and intrinsic reason, and an economic imperative not to destroy the very resource within which it operates.
Surprisingly tourism – with all its faults - is actually saving Tigers today in India, for it is within ‘tourism zones’ of Tiger parks that the greatest densities of Tigers still exist. This fact alone suggests we need to spread tourism to all the other 500 parks and sanctuaries that exist in India, rather than the 10 or so ‘hot spots’ that get 99% of tourism today. But what I am encouraging in India, advocated at our recent workshop is a more proactive approach to the use of tourism in India today, using its economic clout and its inherent consciousness to save greater tracts of forests in closer cooperation and partnership with local communities, making local people stakeholders again in living trees and live animals. Ecotourism does have this potential, proven in other parts of the world – but too often it is wasted and regulations set out to effect it are not enforced stringently enough or communities prepared enough to receive it.
Real ecotourism is very difficult to achieve, it’s a long end game, and investors and communities need to understand just how long it takes to achieve. It also requires consensus, something most of us are not prepared to wait for – certainly not businessmen and women, or the bankers and investors that back them, yet if conditions can be found in India, and the new Tribal Bill opens up such opportunities, tourism maybe the driving force behind the saving of huge areas of forests in India – and all the ecosystem survives that they provide to its people – for free!
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