eep in the heart of Khao Sok National Park, where limestone crags rise above the jungle canopy like ancient Mayan temples, 20 Thai students from Wat Thamarara School are racing along a forest trail in their excitement to visit a cave they've heard of, but never before seen. Namtaloo Cave lies only a few kilometres as the hornbill flies from the students' village and school but, remarkably, none of these teens have ever visited it.

The excitement mounts as the eager youth enter the pitch-dark, 500-metre passageway. They will negotiate connecting chambers for more than an hour, following a river course that requires swimming through deep, chilling waterways in total darkness to exit on the other side of the mountain. Despite this Indiana Jones-style adventure, the students have but one word to describe the thrill of it all. As the leader's torch suddenly illuminates thousands of slumbering bats suspended from the ceiling of the first cave chamber, they respond with one breathless voice. "Barbeque!" They are not even half joking.

As with villagers surrounding most national parks in Thailand, these kids have virtually grown up on park wildlife: deer, wild boar, pangolin, monkey, bats, birds, fish, frogs, snakes, lizards, turtles, insects … You name it; they've eaten it. They have done so not out of necessity, but because their parents did so, and their parents before them. But if these young people continue this poaching pattern for bush meat, pets, and the lucrative trade in animal parts for fur, feathers, medicine and aphrodisiacs, they will likely be the last generation to do so.

A doubling of the local population has been putting increasing pressure on Khao Sok's wild animals in the 23 years since the park was established. With the continuing influx of settlers to the region, that number is expected to more than double again in the next decade. The lesson being learned by park planners world-wide is that it is almost futile to designate areas for protection on a map if the people living adjacent to those areas do not share the same conservation values.

It has been said that the greatest challenge of our time is having our behaviour catch up with our numbers. With the world's population at six billion people and growing exponentially, we can no longer do what we have always done in the past. More and more, certain cultural traditions must be curtailed if species are to survive. The Japanese, for instance, continue to oppose any international bans on killing endangered whales, arguing that whale meat has always been a part of their traditional diet. More than one billion Chinese—one sixth of humanity—insist on their cultural right to age-old remedies like rhino horn and tiger bone, even though these animals are now on the brink of disappearing forever. In England, centuries after the British pushed their own black bear to extinction, the Royal Palace Guards still strut around in hats made of imported bear fur.

So too in Thailand does the insatiable hunger for wildlife threatens the very survival of species in parks set up to protect them. Restaurants serve wild game in almost every national park and protected area in the Kingdom. "You kill it; we grill it!" seems to be the unspoken message to poachers. To see how brazen this illicit wildlife trade has become, pull into the parking lot of one of these establishments at lunchtime and count the number of vehicles with government license plates. Local villagers also eat wild game, but rarely, if ever, out of necessity. Wildlife offers them pets and an occasional change in menu but, most importantly, it provides them with a source of revenue to buy luxury goods.

If this all seems rather small scale, innocent and benign, think again. According to WildAid, a national conservation group, Thailand is now the world centre for the international wildlife trade. Globally, this trade is ranked as the second-most profitable illegal business after drug trafficking. So what does this have to do with a gaggle of local youth at Khao Sok National Park? A lot.

Saving Khao Sok's wildlife, and that of every protected area in Thailand, requires nothing less than a complete paradigm shift in local values. That shift is unlikely to occur within the set ways of adults, so the onus is on education to change the way children perceive protected areas and behave within them. As one former student, Yu Chanyoo, of Wat Thamarara School once said: "I want young people here to look at the animal and think, 'Oh, what a beautiful animal; I want to be able to see this forever,' not think: 'Oh, what a delicious animal; I want to eat it tonight.'"

For the past two years, the Thai Nature Education Company has worked together with park staff to bring about this paradigm change in the eight schools bordering Khao Sok National Park. The effort was initiated in 2002 by conducting half-day environmental awareness workshops in each school. Slide lectures, experiential games, songs and even a shadow-puppet play helped to get the message across. The next phase was to help the students create a sense of personal belonging to Khao Sok, instilling a sense of stewardship and caring for the place. To test the effectiveness of this method, a pilot group of students from the highest-grade level in the region were offered a weekend trip into the park. The 20 Grade Nine students and two teachers selected by Wat Thamarara School were most enthusiastic about the prospect.

These young people have grown up far removed from the drug culture and crime increasingly affecting urban Thai youth, and they know the ways of the wild very well. The several thousand students attending the eight schools located along Highway 401 on Khao Sok's southern boundary are, in fact, growing up in the centre of the largest protected area for wildlife between Bangkok and Singapore. To the north and west lie two large wildlife sanctuaries, and another national park (Sri Phang Nga) lies adjacent. Just south of Highway 401 is the vast, newly designated Klong Phanom National Park.

It's not uncommon for these students, living along the central corridor of this vast 4,400 square kilometre wilderness, to see wild elephants raiding their family sugar cane, banana and pineapple patches, or to encounter a tiger while playing on trails not far from their homes. Having park wildlife as pets is also commonplace for these kids. One village of fewer than 300 people has 10 captive gibbons, several langurs (leaf monkeys) and macaques, and a Malay Sun Bear that was stolen from its mother as a cub. The gibbons could represent the loss of 390 animals in the wild, since it is estimated by Phuket's Gibbon Rehabilitation Project that 20 mothers and 19 infants are killed for every baby gibbon that makes it into the pet trade.

Ask any of these students how much they can sell a baby gibbon for, and every single one of them will respond without hesitation: Between 2000 and 3000 baht.Black market knowledge such as this speaks volumes about the utter failure of authorities to enforce laws protecting gibbons even though these regulations have been on the books since before these kids were born. Responsibility also falls squarely on the shoulders of the school system. Never having been educated in the vital role that gibbons play in the maintenance of a healthy forest ecosystem, neither the kids nor their parents can really be faulted for their ignorance.

The Thai Nature Education Company, with some generous financial assistance from the Grade Eight students at Seoul International School, set out to see if was possible in a few days time to change these student's perceptions. It seemed a sad irony that, while budget backpackers from all over the world were flocking by the tens of thousands to see Khao Sok's world-class wonders, local teens living on the very border of the park had never had an opportunity to experience the same.

As they boated for more than an hour across Cheow Lan Reservoir to begin a several-hour trek to Namtaloo Cave, the students seemed amazed at the vastness of the park. They frolicked in the lake, canoed and kayaked along the shore, and sung songs from hammocks at Kraisorn floating raft house, their home base for two days. Once they had developed a love of the place, the real business of caring for it began.

The 20 students were divided into four teams, each group led by a trained Thai naturalist only a few years older. Peer role modelling had already proven an effective approach to getting the message across during the school sessions run by the young staff of the Thai Nature Education Company in 2002, so the value of expanding on this seemed a promising strategy.

Each of the four six-member teams focused on a specific animal: gibbons, hornbills, fruit bats or langurs. The first three of these species are considered "keystone" species because of the vital role they play in the seed dispersal of tropical forest trees. Lose these animals, and many of the fruiting trees in the forest eventually disappear along with them.

Following a detailed briefing on their assigned animal, the students set off on Khao Sok's first student wildlife survey. The team, led by Thaworn Thamluk had to count the flying foxes, or giant fruit bats, that fly from their tree perches high atop karst towers every evening at sunset. Students were asked to graph a portion of sky in their minds, do an accurate count, and extrapolate that number over the entire 20-30 minute period of the bat exodus, producing a rough estimate of the total population. Each count was recorded individually and in private, with the highest and lowest counts dismissed. Estimates ran as high as 100,000 bats, but 40,000 proved to be the average. This count alone is anything but conclusive. It will be re-counted with every Thai or international student group Thai Nature Education takes to Khao Sok. Over the years a reliable census will emerge, making it possible to monitor the effects of poaching or other disturbances on the population.

Evening and first light were devoted to surveys of hornbills, gibbons and langurs. Each team set off in different boats with maps, bird books and binoculars to record their sightings. The hornbill team was assigned the task of recording every hornbill seen in flight or feeding in trees, identifying the species and direction of flight on their map. Recording nesting sites was especially important.

The langur team had the challenging task of trying to keep count of large troops of leaf monkeys as they leapt from tree to tree, trying to map their location accurately. The gibbon team had to employ stealth, quietly sneaking up by boat on gibbons singing their morning duets. Counting the number and colour variations of each gibbon in a family, and pinpointing their location on a map will be of great assistance over time in determining home ranges and monitoring the loss of individuals to natural causes or poaching.

The most powerful part of this stewardship activity occurred back at the raft house, following the surveys, when each student was asked to write a commitment regarding something they would do in their life to help their animal. A girl on the langur team wrote this:

"If I see someone try to kill the langurs to eat, I promise to tell them not to do this. They are now like my sisters, my family, and I want them to stay in the national park forever. If I see someone want the langur for pet, I will tell them, "Don't take to your home,' because the langur wants to stay with its family in its home in the forest, not in your home."

It is said that there is nothing stronger than the heart of a volunteer, so to make this promise a meaningful and life-long commitment for the students, the Thai facilitators led their respective groups in a little ceremony. Beautiful embroidered patches depicting each team's mascot were available to each student who voluntarily took on the stewardship of their animal. No one was forced to comply or take a patch, but all were told that if they did they would become a guardian for the rest of their life. Their responsibility would be to change their own behaviour towards their designated species and educate others to do the same.

Sixteen-year-old Peeyapong Raksaeng was one of the first boys to utter the word "barbeque" when he sighted the bats in Namtaloo Cave. He's eaten plenty, he says. By accident more than design, he ended up on the bat team. The boy had this to say in his written promise to himself:

"I feel this national park is very good for the animal and the people because it gives something important to both. I learn more about the bat when I go to the cave. Some bat goes far away to eat the fruit and spread the seed to make a new tree. I never knew this before. Now I have the new idea about the bat. When I go back home I will tell the people to take care for the bat - don't kill and eat them - because they have to save and take care the trees and the national park for everyone, for always."

Thai Nature Education plans to continue this work with Thai and foreign students from every part of the world. Conversion from wildlife poachers to wildlife protectors will not occur overnight. "Too little, too late," some skeptics will say of this effort. But we should not abandon hope, nor ever underestimate the power of an individual or a small group of committed people to bring about fundamental change in the world. Far from impossible, it's the only thing that ever has.