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Thilo Hoffmann:The Saviour of Sinharaja Source:Sundaytimes Informed environmental activism in Sri Lanka owes its beginnings largely to Thilo Hoffmannm, a Swiss national, who made our country his home 69 years ago. His leadership of the Wildlife and Nature Protection Society and the Ceylon Bird Club proved invaluable in launching a crusade that not only saved Sinharaja but also substantially expanded the island’s protected-areas network, opening a new era of civil-society engagement in the management of Sri Lanka’s biodiversity heritage. Invited by his literary agent to recount his life, P. G. Wodehouse was at a loss. “I wrote a book”, he said at length. “Then another… And then another. Just writing one book after another, that’s my life.” Asked to relate his own life story, Thilo Walter Hoffmann (1922-2014) might have responded just as glibly: “I saved a forest. Then another. And then another. And so on.” But it wasn’t as ...