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.

Beak practice

India is not a homogeneous society. You will, for example, find a very different India if you travel to the far northeast, to Arunachal Pradesh, and meet the Nyishi tribespeople. Out there, you don't really count for much unless you have a hornbill's beak on your head.

Hornbills make up one of those groups in which nature has given itself over to fantasy: the extraordinary bulky and elongated beaks, often with an elaborate casque above them, are among the most peculiar things you can see on the planet. To see a hornbill in flight is spectacularly counter-intuitive: you'd think the bird must nosedive and crash beak first into the ground. But the bill is a masterpiece of lightness and it is a deeply desired object among the Nyishi.

But as the Nyishi increased in numbers, so the desire for hornbill bills increased - after all, you can't get married unless you have a hornbill bill to wear. Three species of hornbills were fast being hunted to extinction. The WTI didn't make a fight of it. Instead they started to make fibreglass hornbill bills. When their first slavishly accurate bills were but a qualified success, they coloured them more gaudily: and in a flash, they caught on. Now beak-making has become a local industry, with Nyishi artisans making beaks for themselves.

Vote for goat

India has become glamorous. The world knows it: and India itself is deeply conscious of its own glamour. Wealth and prestige are an extravagant aspect of this new India, as demonstrated this weekend by the launch of the second season of the billionaire's plaything, the Indian Premier League.

Glamour matters: and shawls made in shahtoosh are the last word in restrained elegance: soft, light, warm and tinglingly expensive. You can pull your thousand- dollar shahtoosh shawl through your wedding ring. But the Tibetan antelope, or chiru, won't obligingly stand still to be sheared. You have to kill it first.

The chiru was being hunted to extinction for the sake of glamour. Time, then, for a campaign and one that didn't put the Kashmiri women who make the shawls out of work. The WTI went for a high-profile anti-shahtoosh campaign, and backed it up with promotion of a new and much finer pashmina product, with hair from a farmed goat.

This glamorous alternative was glamorously modelled, and those who chose to stick with shahtoosh have been made very aware that the stuff was illegal. I went into an upmarket tourist shop and demanded shahtoosh. I was at once told that it was illegal and here was the alternative. They passed the pashmina shawl through a wedding ring for my admiration.

These are just some of many projects that the WTI is taking on, often in a funky and left-field way that simply wouldn't occur to British conservationists: lateral thinking backed up with immaculate research and top-quality science. The partnership with the far-from-unfunky World Land Trust has been a triumph for both organisations. And as for the WTI - we can learn a thing or two from these people.

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