Dr. CJ Meadows built a tiger conservation model in the Golden Triangle that treats tigers, forests, and local people as one system. He partners with communities on solar schools, beekeeping, and a furniture factory from invasive plants, lifting daily earnings from $1 to $2. When tigers vanished from Sariska, community protection brought them back.
So you mentioned your tiger conservation efforts, and I hear that a lot of agencies such as WWF have their very special approach, and you have a very different one. Is that right?
It is. My family and our community members and I, about 15 years or so, started the Tiger Center. Basically, you know, we're members of the community and land property owners and everything, and we went out to the forestry people and said, "You know, we'd love to do something that protects this natural asset, protects the tig— it's endangered, etc. What can we do?" And they're the ones that told us, you know, "We have guards, we have the guns, we have the training, we have everything. Um, can you take care of the people?" Because the tiger needs the environment and the people who are very poor and living nearby or with the tiger, they encroach on the forest. They take the firewood, they take plants, they take bee, bee honey, all kinds of stuff. They get into conflict with the animals, etc. Also, just they themselves, if they had a way to earn a living, then it would take a lot of pressure off us, the environment, and the tiger. And from our discussions and from talking to the community and from research, We realized that the tiger, the environment, and the people, they thrive or sink together. They are integrated. You can't save one unless you save them all. So we wrote white papers about tiger conservation and the need for an integrated model which we call the Golden Triangle model of conservation. In terms of ecotechnologies, we promote ecotechnologies We use solar for our sewing schools with Usha International and biodigesters and, you know, natural means of construction, etc. So ecotechnologies. For the people programs, we have medical camps. These folks don't have any medical facilities for 40 miles in any direction, and how are they going to get there? So we partnered with a hospital and run medical camps that have treated 3,500 patients so far. We have a sewing school with hundreds of graduates. These women are now entrepreneurs, business leaders. They can earn a living for themselves and their family. We started up beekeeping and a furniture factory for the men. When they're not growing rice, one crop a year, they can work in the furniture factory with waste products from the forest that would be burned, lantana, which now they can use to make furniture. These are folks who have 75% unemployment, and they've made great progress. Earnings are up from $1 a day to $2 a day. And we happened to be meeting with the forestry people when there was a disaster. In Sariska, all the tigers disappeared overnight. Gone. Well, you know what happened to them? They were poached. They went to the people who lived there. Did you see anything? Nope. Mm-mm. Nope. Sorry, didn't see anything. If you've ever lived in a village or a small town, you know they know everything. There was conflict. The whole scene was not working. So one idea from the forestry department was, hey, could you take some of our tigers, which are actually overcrowding the only place in the world this happens, and give some of those to the Sariska people. And the native headman, elder, said, "No! If they can't take care of the tigers, they cannot have ours." So the people where we are are ferociously protective of the tiger and the environment, and because they know that they thrive partly based on that asset and the growth of things like ecotourism and some of the new economic things that we're doing there.
It's really a ground-up approach.
It's ground-up.
You need to understand the system, the ecosystem, really, where you're trying to push your tiger conservation efforts. And then from there on, you can understand what needs to be done.
Exactly.
With that approach, which is radically different, really, from anything that's being done, are you looking at any different conservation efforts, not necessarily tigers, but anything else? It feels like a very applicable model.
Yeah, we would love to replicate what we do there in other places. We're a little resource-constrained in terms of, you know, the people who are leading the organization because we're all doing so many different things. It's actually an international organization led by business people, academics, hoteliers, etc., across the world. But most, most important is the people on the ground. And the amazing things that they're doing. So yes, it is a dream of ours to both expand our efforts, for example, by building a hospital and school there, as well as replicating that in other places, because over the years now we have some track record and we've shown that it works.
