Chapter 4

We describe the catastrophic bushfires and floods in Australia that killed more than three billion animals and show how these natural disasters are symptoms of our dysfunctional relationship with nature. But just as climate change, environmental destruction and extinction are happening now before our eyes, we show how they are not inevitable and how we can turn the tide. 

Twenty years after first visiting Pobitora Wildlife Sanctuary in northeast India, we return to report on how the park has cut poaching through strict enforcement and community support programs and ask whether it could become a model for other sanctuaries in the region. We pick up a parallel thread in 2010, when the Global Tiger Summit set a target of doubling the world's wild tiger population by 2022 — and, fifteen years on, we evaluate what was achieved and the lessons it holds. In Thailand, we investigate human-elephant conflict through a single herd of more than 200 wild elephants living in the country's heavily populated eastern economic zone: a powerful metaphor for the ever-shrinking space between people and the wild. 

We visit London's Natural History Museum to examine species loss and extinction. Finally, we show how the wisdom of indigenous people is helping us to see nature in a different light, providing important lessons for bringing species back from the brink.