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Indian Institute of Forest Management |
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011-91-755-775716, 773799, 765125 |
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011-91-772878 |
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dnpandey@sancharnet.in, deep@inef.org, deep@iifm.org |
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Web site |
http://education.vsnl.com/deep/index.html INEF Website: http://www.inef.org |
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Deep Narayan Pandey is an Associate Professor and Coordinator at the Indian Institute of Forest Management in Bhopal. He has devoted himself to the cause of the sustainability of forests and livelihood security of indigenous communities. He is the author of several books, including Beyond Vanishing Woods: Participatory Survival Options For Wildlife, Forests And People. New Delhi: Himanshu Publishers 1998) and Ethnoforestry: Local Knowledge for Sustainable Forestry and Livelihood Security (Berkeley: Asia Forest Network 1998).
Indigenous Sustainability Science
Nature-society interactions confront a range of challenges including maintenance of ecosystem services, conservation of biodiversity, and continuance of ecosystem functioning at local and global scale. Local people over thousands of years, have developed an intimate knowledge about landscapes they interact, inhabit and manage. Natural and social sciences are now converging into a novel discipline called sustainability science. Recognizing that transition to sustainability shall be a knowledge-intensive journey, this paper argues that a careful use of Indic resources provides options to design innovative policies and programmes for management of natural resources. Sustainability science of tomorrow shall be a basket of tools drawn across disciplines from the natural and social sciences, as well as local and formal knowledge systems. Equity of knowledge between local and formal sciences results in empowerment, security and opportunity for local people. Incorporation of people's knowledge into the resource management decisions, reduces the social barriers to participation and enhances the capacity of the local people to make choices to solve the problem. In order to facilitate the humanity’s progress towards a sustainable future traditional knowledge systems and Indic traditions can contribute to local actions relevant to the sustainability of earth system as a whole.
Read the entire paper in PDF format (172K, 50 pp.). (Posted here for peer-review.)