Dear nature lovers,

Greetings from oikos !

In this twelfth month we complete a walkthrough of traditional wisdom.

A common thread in various facets of traditional life style is that local resources are used to satisfy local needs and wants. Dependency on market and resources from external world is very little. Traditional life style definitely has some footprint on surrounding landscape but it has been preserving landscape wilderness to a great extent. Also, it has kept room for non-human beings. So such life style actually proves beneficial for environment preservation and conservation.

Of course, there is a great variation amongst life style of different tribal groups and rural people. If we talk at state level, very few of them are living almost hunting gathering life style along with some subsistence farming, while major population is making their living through modern agriculture, mainly relying on cash crops along with few crops for subsistence, grown with chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Many of them are in between these two. And urban people are at extreme end living completely consumerist life style with very high ecological and carbon footprint.

Even if we accept this as the most popular trend as ‘progress’, we can’t neglect the fact that urban modern life style is changing our environs and climate to a great extent. Governments recognize traditional life style as inferior and promote economic growth amongst these communities. But most of times such exposure take these people away from their life. It would be nice if their traditional skills are respected by the modern world so that they won’t feel inferior about it and can take pride to continue their life style to a certain extent or at least they can have choice to continue it !

Regards,

Ketaki & Manasi

With Team oikos !