Wake up everyone, open your eyes, look at the world. Is it now happy or sad? It is sad because we are still cutting the trees, killing the animals, even where they are supposed to be protected…

The lyrics of 19-year old Mana Sareewong, accompanied by the soft strains of his guitar, touch the hearts of an audience of Thai students living on the borders of Khao Sok National Park. It’s the closing of a half-day school session exclusively devoted to expanding environmental awareness of Khao Sok’s global wildlife values. In the 23 years since this national park was established, this is the first time that young people living adjacent to the park have had a school programme focusing on it.

If there’s but one lesson to be learned in the management of protected areas, world-wide, it is the simple fact that no place is ever fully protected until the people living nearby want it to be. Without the benefits of education regarding the values of a park, and ways in which people see their lives improved because of a park, it is almost pointless putting park lines on a map.

Khao Sok’s first public education programme, conducted 5-8 November 2002, targeted the seven schools nearest the park boundaries. It was spearheaded by the Thai Nature Education Co. Ltd., a new company with a strong environmental focus and a passion for education.

Thai Nature Education offers learning adventures in seven Southeast Asian ecosystems by way of a unique programme entitled "Reefs to Rainforests". International School students from all over Asia have been attending these eight-day sessions in the south of Thailand. Others have had the founder, Thom Henley, conduct workshops in their school. One of these schools — the Grade 3 students at the American School in Japan — ran a fund-raising drive to help save the Southeast Asian rain forest. Once all of their pennies were counted, the children donated their funds to support environmental education in the schools surrounding Khao Sok National Park.

Never before having had a budget for school programmes, the national park administration was supportive of the initiative right from the start. Four staff members — Sutin Buatong, Samdrui Suwankon, Kwanchai Kaewpuang and Putsadee Wedwit — accompanied the Thai Nature Education team to all the schools. What made these presentations wonderfully unique, however, was the fact that they were schemes conducted by youths, for youths, with funds raised by youths. Thai Nature Education staff Suriyo Tookdee (aged 20), Mana Sareewong (aged 19), and Saman Chakamnan (aged 18) ran all six of the half-day school sessions. Thai students are not accustomed to seeing people their own age in leadership roles — especially given the strict formality of a Thai school setting. Peer-role modeling was seen as a way of bringing even more impact to the effort.

Mana opened each session with a stunning slide presentation highlighting Khao Sok National Park’s amazingly diverse flora and fauna, as well as showing the wonderful range of recreational opportunities the park has to offer. His zany teenager’s sense of humour not only held the student’s attention but let them know, right from the start, that the entire half-day session was going to combine fun with learning.

Next to take the stage was the national park staff, some of whom had themselves been students in these very schools. Khun Sutin Buatong, chief of the Park Visitor Centre, brought along a huge aerial photo of Khao Sok to show the children where they lived in relation to the park boundaries. For nearly all of these students, it was the first time in their lives that they were given a clear picture of where the park actually was. Khun Sutin, who clearly loves working with children, held their rapt attention throughout his presentation, as he combined humour with the more serious subject of poaching in the park.

A former Wat Tham Warara School student, Yu Chanyoo, first advanced the idea of targeting local schools in an attempt to thwart poaching. Yu was being interviewed as a young eco-tour guide for a profile in the book

Waterfalls & Gibbon Calls: Exploring Khao Sok National Park, when he responded rather poignantly to this question from the author (this writer): "What is your greatest hope, your greatest fear for the future of Khao Sok?"

His reply? "I want the young people living around here to see Khao Sok’s animals and think — "Oh, what beautiful animals; I want to keep them always. Not to think, "Oh, a delicious animal; I want to eat tonight."

On the subject of his greatest fear, the young man was even more to the point: "I fear that I will not be able to show my children the animals my father has shown me. I’m afraid I will only be able to show them the photos in your book." Yu has held true to his passion to educate local youths for many years now, and was the young man responsible for approaching all of the regional schools to allow class time for this programme.

The poaching of flora and fauna is not restricted to Khao Sok National Park — South Thailand’s largest treasure house of bio-diversity. It is, sadly, widespread throughout the Kingdom, and is often initiated by powerful interests as far away as Bangkok and overseas.

Thailand has achieved a great deal in conservation. It is one of the only countries in the world to impose a total ban on logging, and it is one of the few nations to have achieved the UN-recommended goal of setting aside 12 percent of the national landbase for conservation. All too often, however, Thailand’s national parks tend only to be "paper parks", with few or no deterrents to rampant poaching. Commonly looted resources include orchids, butterflies, snakes, fish, fruits, ornamental plants, thatch, animals for bush meat, pets and the lucrative trade in animal parts for furs, medicines and aphrodisiacs.

Poaching of leaf monkeys for curry dishes and gibbons for the pet trade are both so common at Khao Sok’s Cheow Lan Reservoir that these primates defy their instincts to climb up and away from danger. They instead drop to lower canopy levels to hide at the first approach of humans by boat. If there truly was no hunting taking place, these species would not behave this way nearly a quarter of a century after a park was created to protect them.

When Mana Sareeong presents his slide show to the students, they marvel at each image. When he comes to a picture of a white-handed gibbon, and casually asks if any students have one of these as a pet, a few kids usually raise their hands. Gibbons are a protected species under Thai law, but Mana does not harp on the issue nor burden the students with public scorn and guilt. Later, through group activities and a dramatic shadow-puppet play, these students will learn of the impact on wild populations that owning these pets can have.

The only way to capture a baby gibbon in the wild is to shoot the mother. And the infant gibbons usually die when they fall to the ground clinging to the body of their slain mother. Phuket’s Gibbon Rehabilitation Project has calculated that for every gibbon baby that finds its way into the pet trade, up to 20 mothers and 19 babies die. The three students at Ban Ya Plong School who enthusiastically acknowledged that they were the proud owners of pet gibbons might have represented the loss of 60 breeding females and 57 babies, a staggering total of 117 animals. Gibbons have extremely low reproductive rates (one offspring every 2-3 years), and their populations cannot withstand this kind of poaching pressure.

The options for Thailand today are profound but simple. The Kingdom has the opportunity to raise the first generation of true conservationists, or stand by and witness the last generation of poachers. Without educating for a dramatic change in values, wildlife here will not be able to withstand the doubling of the human population in this century.

Communities surrounding Khao Sok National Park already reflect this global trend; they have doubled in population since the park was created. Most of the new immigrants have come from other parts of Thailand to grow fruit trees or work the oil and rubber plantations. No one here is dependent

on wild animal meat for survival, but the trade in park wildlife and bush meat is often used to subsidize luxury goods a subsistence level income could never provide. It becomes a bizarre paradox when wild animals are killed and sold to buy a television set so children can learn about wild animals on the nature channels.

Less than 50 percent of the children in these schools will go on to complete Grade 12 in Surat Thani. Most will live out their lives as farmers, like their parents, and will continue to live closer to the day-to-day realities of the park than most park officials. Sixteen-year-old Yod Manu Omanee, a student at Wat Tham Warara School, reports often seeing Khao Sok’s wild elephants near his garden. Another student, 17-year-old Sutep Gaonikom, tells the astonished park officials that he came upon a wild tiger just a few weeks ago while playing with friends not far from his home. None of the park officials had ever seen a tiger in the wild.

Evidence that these students are already starting to see themselves as part of the solution rather than a continuation of the problem, comes from a young boy deeply concerned that there are no substations protecting Klong Phanom National Park, just across the highway from Khao Sok. He reports to the park authorities that people are cutting down the forest over large areas to make coffee and rubber plantations.

There are two schools of thought on how best to protect Thailand’s remaining wildlife. One method, recommended by some of the top research biologists, is for the Kingdom to adopt the harsh but effective measures used in India and Africa — i.e. shoot to kill on sight anyone found poaching in a park. Thailand is unlikely to pursue a policy that requires killing its own citizens for park transgressions.