If you’re the person responsible for writing Roge’s Rainforest Blog, perhaps the first thing you ought to do is establish your rainforest conservation credentials. So, if you’ll bear with me for a couple of paragraphs or so, I’ll try and do just that.
Full name: Roger Littlewood. Principal activities for Children’s Tropical Forests UK – Trustee since 1995-ish and Editor and Author of CTF News since its first appearance in the Spring of 1996.
Charity begins at home, so my old Granny told me, and I cut my nature conservation teeth in Warwickshire in the late 1970’s. First, as Voluntary Warden for a little succession of Ancient Woodland Reserves purchased by Warwickshire Wildlife Trust; and then, together with the Trust and Warwick District Council, helping to establish a network of Local Nature Reserves in the County.
But at some time in the 1980’s, I decided I wanted to add a global dimension (very grand!) to my voluntary conservation work. So I started raising money at little charity do’s and sponsored thingies, first for another British rainforest charity, the World Land Trust – and then for Tina Jolliffe, who founded Children’s Tropical Forests UK in the late 1980’s after falling in love with rainforests following a trip with her husband Robin (now the Chairman of CTF UK) to Costa Rica.
After Tina’s sad and untimely death in the mid-1990’s, I contacted Robin, offering more help to CTF. I became a Trustee and at my first Trustees meeting in 1995-ish, offered to write and produce a fund-raising Newsletter, which I have done ever since.
Oh! And since 1987, I’ve spent about two years of my life, tramping round the World’s rainforests trying to see birds and animals which mostly didn’t want to be seen.
Now, a new young generation of rainforest enthusiasts is giving a fresh impetus to CTF UK led by Rob Jolliffe (Tina and Robin’s son) and Rob Llewellyn, my new blog boss. About six weeks ago, Rob (the Jolliffe one) rang me up and asked me if I would write a regular ‘blog’ for CTF’s brand new website. After a ten minute chat, I finally plucked up the courage to ask him what a ‘blog’ really was, and still in a slight fog of incomprehension, agreed to do it. So, at the age of sixty-six (clickety-click – appropriate, I suppose, for a born for the first time geek) here I go.
