Description

What does it mean to spend more than four decades fighting for nature  and still believe there is something worth fighting for?

For the first episode of India in Transition, Pranshu Patel and Heeta Lakhani sit down with Bittu Sahgal, one of India’s most prominent voices for wildlife and nature conservation.Bittu has spent much of his life making the case that our ecological future cannot be separated from the choices India makes about development, economics and society.

This conversation looks back at that lifetime of work, at what India has understood about conservation, what we continue to get wrong, how the environmental movement has changed and what keeps someone hopeful after witnessing decades of ecological loss and change.

At the centre of the episode is a question we keep coming back to:

What does a lifetime of hope look like?

And perhaps more importantly, what can the rest of us learn from it?

About Bittu Sahgal:

Bittu Sahgal, Editor Sanctuary Asia, Head of the Sanctuary Nature Foundation, and India’s one million strong Kids for Tigers program, is a strong voice for nature conservation, climate mitigation and biospheric health. He has made it his life’s mission to direct world leaders away from short-term development objectives that could compromise the ability of India to sustain its population of 1.4 billion people. He believes that the ecological foundations of all nations are the bedrock on which global economic and social foundations rest. Believing that climate change poses the greatest ever threat to humanity, he is a strong Nature Needs Half advocate who works with young adults and policy makers, arguing that rewilding Planet Earth is critical to the long term survival of Homo sapiens.