NEWS………………..
With all major newspapers carrying articles about declining tiger populations, it was natural for the topic of our online chat to be “Tiger census”. The chat was freewheeling with no expert moderating it. I urge you to go through
it. We do not probe into who speaks but listen to what he or she has to say.
Click here to read what we chatted about.
With the arrival of summer ‘Water wars' have erupted in various parts of the country. There are activists raising their voices about cola majors sucking up our ground water to sell in packaged form; there are debates on about
the ethics of pricing water-a natural resource; there is the din of politics in interstate water wars.
Saraswati Kavula continues her trek through the forests of Andhra and tells it all in sequence. The cut trees in her travelogue signify robbed
water of our future generations. If there are no trees, there is no rain, no ground water recharging.
In India , we pride ourselves in leaving a legacy for our children. A portion of our earnings is always kept aside for the son/daughter- to buy a house/car/jewelery in future. Will there be enough money for them to buy water
too?
Are we doing enough to control the environmental degradation around us? Worst still, are we aware of the extent of degradation in our backyards? Write your thoughts/opinions/ tidbits in our web log. No one is interested in knowing
who you are, where you are from. But if you have an opinion/a bit of news/ ideas we at IWC.com are all ears.
Just log on to IWC.com with your email id and password. Click on the web-log banner on the homepage and add your b-log. You can write upto 3000 words and upload instantly. ( Do preview it before final upload ). At present we
do not permit uploading links and pictures- for security reasons. But the written word is powerful! Use it to reach about a lakh wildlife/nature enthusiasts who visit IWC.com every month.
And VIEWS………….
“ Wetlands are the womb from which our ancestors emerged. In the Devonian Age, 360 million years ago, the first amphibians crawled out of the blood-warm sea, and began to breathe the damp air of the ancient wetlands. In the mangrove
forests of Andamans we have seen goggle- eyed mud skippers pull themselves out of the water, as the Devonian amphibians did, and sun their glistening bodies on the stilt roots of the wetland trees. Sadly, mankind often forgets the great protecting, recycling,
purifying, generating power of the wetlands and allows them to be drained for, so –called, “development”. If the Ministry of Environment and Forests had been more protective of our mangroves and wetlands, the teeth of the tsunami might have been drawn. Mangroves
absorb the destructive power of waves and preserved wetlands deter human settlement within reach of the sea's fury”.
-Hugh and Colleen Gantzer, in the article ‘Wetland-Wise' which appeared in
The Hindu dated 17 April 2005