August 2010: That stark sentence from Frederick Douglass more or less sums up the raison de etre of Cub magazine, launched soon after Sanctuary Asia began publication in 1981.

June 2010: Meet Budh Singh, an Ahir cowherd. If he is lucky he will be contracted to stand watch all day, 20 m. above the ground, to give park authorities an early fire warning. For his 12 hour service he will be paid about Rs. 100 per day. And that often is all that keeps hunger at bay for his family. He gets no meal allowance. No subsidised transport. No gratuity. No medical benefits. No pension.

April 2010: If Jairam Ramesh had not kick-started the climate debate in India, we would probably still be sitting around waiting for money to reach us from “rich” countries before embarking on a journey toward climate security. As things stand, we have been slow off the blocks, but at least, thanks to Ramesh, we have officially registered India as a participant in the race to fight climate change.

February 2010: Good news for climate skeptics. Membership to the Flat Earth Society, with whose members they share a penchant for delinquent denial, is still open. This might be particularly fortuitous for those who were drowning in the rising ocean of evidence that climate change is real and human-triggered.

It is funny how bent politicians and brutish financial institutions manage to twist things to suit their purpose, irrespective of how the house of cards – in which most of the world population lives – collapses.

If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in – Rachel Carson in A Sense of Wonder

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. – Carl Sagan

“Never burn your candle at both ends.” I doubt that I will ever forget that line of advice, proffered consistently by my father, Lal Chand Sahgal, through the decades. Were he alive today (he left us on August 22, 2008 after an incredibly full 97 years), he would have agreed that this image of a Periyar Tiger Reserve forest fire, raging around a high tension power cable, perfectly exemplifies the fatal ‘both ends’ developmental blunder being perpetrated on us by our go

Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink. – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

These young children are making their voices heard. For years now, Kids for Tigers, the Sanctuary Tiger Programme, has taught millions of rural and urban Indians the value of wild nature and the connection between human happiness and ecological harmony. With help from over 1,500 educationists and thousands of proactive parents, Sanctuary has taken great care to instil in these innocents the value of being direct and firm, yet polite and respectful – particu