Across forested and montane landscapes in India, conservation has historically been embedded within belief systems and cultural practices that view nature as a living, sentient presence rather than a resource. These biocultural frameworks have enabled communities to protect ecologically significant landscapes through customary norms, spiritual values, and collective stewardship.
The Sacred Earth Trust works to document and support such indigenous, nature-based knowledge systems across regions. In Himachal Pradesh, its study of Nāg Vans in Kullu examines how forests are governed through ritual practices, spiritual institutions, and community custodianship. Similarly, in Manipur, the trust has supported research documenting sacred forests shaped by indigenous cosmologies and governance, where forest patches associated with ancestral and village deities continue to sustain both biodiversity and cultural identity.
Through participatory and ethnographic approaches, including engagement with elders and local custodians, the Trust records oral histories, ecological knowledge, and everyday practices that underpin these systems. However, such traditions are increasingly threatened by outmigration, changing livelihoods, and external socio-economic pressures, leading to the erosion of both cultural knowledge and ecological resilience.
By documenting and strengthening these traditions, the Trust seeks to support their continuity while highlighting their critical role in sustaining biocultural diversity for future generations.
Preservation of Indigenous nature based cultures
Protecting Nag Vans and Devta Cultures in Sainj, HIProtecting Indigenous Culture
Across many forested and mountain landscapes, conservation has historically been shaped not by formal policy or external enforcement, but by belief, restraint, and long-standing relationships with land. Nature has been understood not as a resource to be managed, but as a living presence embedded within social, moral, and spiritual worlds. These worldviews have given rise to practices that regulate how forests are used, how water is protected, and how extraction is limited—often with remarkable ecological outcomes.
Sacred Earth Trust’s work in this area focuses on documenting and supporting such indigenous, nature-based cultures at a time when they are undergoing rapid change. Through a new research initiative centred on Nāg Vans of kullu District, Himachal Pradesh—forest patches associated with serpent deities and local guardian spirits—the Trust is working to record belief systems, ritual practices, devta traditions, sacred grove connections, customary taboos, and community perceptions of forests and wildlife. These elements together form a conservation ethic that has historically governed access, protection, and responsibility within local landscapes.
The research process is participatory and attentive to lived knowledge. It involves sustained engagement with elders, temple caretakers, women, herders, and farmers, tracing how ecological understanding has traditionally been transmitted through oral traditions, seasonal rituals, and everyday practice. The intention is to create an illustrated and pictorial record that reflects the narrative, visual, and place-based nature of this knowledge, rather than reducing it to abstract description.
The importance of this work lies in the quiet but accelerating breakdown of these knowledge systems. Youth migration to cities, changing livelihood patterns, increasing exposure to external influences through tourism and media, and the weakening of intergenerational transmission have begun to disrupt long-standing cultural pathways. As ritual participation declines and collective governance erodes, the ecological functions embedded within these belief systems are often lost without being recognised as conservation losses.
Preserving indigenous nature-based cultures is therefore not an act of nostalgia, but a necessary response to ecological and cultural vulnerability. These traditions carry place-specific knowledge about forests, species behaviour, seasonal change, and limits of use that cannot be replaced by generic conservation models. Once disrupted, such systems are difficult to reconstruct.
Through this work, Sacred Earth Trust seeks to support continuity rather than revival, ensuring that these cultures are documented with care, represented accurately, and remain available to future generations. By making visible the conservation ethos embedded within indigenous belief systems, the Trust also contributes to a broader understanding of how ecology and culture have co-evolved, and why safeguarding one requires safeguarding the other.