We tend to think of wildlife conservation as a particularly British thing: something that we must somehow seek to impose on the barbaric foreigners. We must make them see the light, must we not? But this is not the way it works at all.
I have learnt this from my association with the World Land Trust. The trust's work of safeguarding land for conservation can only be done by finding a local partner: a non-government organisation that is brilliant, committed and highly motivated - like, for example, the Wildlife Trust for India, WLT's partner in a big project that will safeguard the future of the Indian elephant.
While I was in India the other week looking at elephants and their habitat, I was constantly blown away by the Indian partner: an organisation light on its feet, punching above its weight and constantly solving Indian problems in a wholly Indian way.
Take the whale shark campaign. Fishermen were catching these, the biggest fish on the planet, simply for their livers, which were used for waterproofing boats. And while there was a very solid education campaign, and the Government was successfully lobbied to establish legal protection, the decisive moment came with the involvement of the holy man Morari Bapu.
Morari Bapu considered the matter and then declared that the whale shark was a god. The fish was nothing less than the first avatar of Vishnu. The slaying of the whale shark, Morari Bapu declared, was not fishing but deicide.
The killing was stopped at a stroke, and the great gods of the sea cruise off the coast of India, filter-feeding as they go, unmolested by the devout. We in this country imagine that the Romantic movement gave us a privileged insight into the natural world and a consequent reverence that foreigners lack. It was, after all, William Blake who told us that everything that lives is holy. That never came as news to India.
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