For thousands of years, ritual has played a central role in governing sustainable use of the natural environment.TheTsembaga people of New Guinea for example, use ritual to allocate scarce protein for their people in a way that does not cause irreversible damage to the land.  The Tukano of the Northwest Amazon use myth and ritual to prevent over-hunting and overfishing in their territory.  And in the longest continually inhabited place in the United States, the Hopi village of Oraibi, people spend up to half of their time in ritual activity during certain parts of the year. Among all enduring cultures, ritual has been "a sophisticated social and spiritual technology" that has helped people to live in harmony with the natural world.

A recent example of the use of ritual for conservation comes from Thailand, where "environmentalist monks" are finding ways to engage Buddhism in the effort to save the country from further deforestation. In 1991, in the village of Giew Muang, a monk named Prhaku Pitak helped to breathe life into an ineffective local forest conservation movement. The effort focused on a forest used by 10 surrounding villages that had been degraded and denuded by decades of exploitation. Pitak first used slide shows, environmental education programmes, and agricultural projects to teach villagers the importance of forest conservation, finding ways to make his case in a Buddhist framework. He dubbed the Buddha "the first environmentalist," for example, because the Buddha's life was closely : " integrated with forests.  And he stressed the interrelatedness of trees, water supply, and food production, capitalizing on the Buddhist teaching of "dependent origination," the interdependence of all things.

Pitak's use of religious rituals to support the conservation efforts was perhaps his most creative and effective initiative. Because many of the villagers followed indigenous religions as well as Buddhism, Pitak first followed their suggestion to enlist a village elder in asking the village's guardian spirit to bless the conservation effort.  A shrine was built to the spirit, and offerings were made, involving every household in the village.  Then Pitak turned to Buddhist rituals. Joined by 10 other monks and surrounded by the villagers, Pitak "ordained" the largest tree in the forest, wrapping a saffron robe around it and following most of the rite used in a normal ordination ceremony. No villager actually viewed the tree as a monk of course, but the ordination gave the conservation effort a sacred meaning.Villagers no longer dismissed the effort, because it was now more than a civic activity. In seeing the trees not just as resources but as part of a larger ecological and mystical reality, the villagers were part of the millennia- long chain of generations that have used ritual to help maintain sustainable resource use.

Since the beginning of the 1990s there has been an increasing number of international symposia and workshops, and a rapidly expanding list of books and other publications on the subject of harnessing indigenous knowledge. A simple Internet search on ‘indigenous knowledge’ will produce about half a million pages. There is evidence of a global network of indigenous knowledge resource centres, focusing mostly on agriculture and sustainable development. The network is fed by a growing group scholars producing not only academic material but also feeding information into international policy circles. There are also parallel developments in other interdisciplinary, policy- relevant fields such as environmental ethics, common property resources, and environmental history.

Much of the current activity began in the 1980s when the Traditional Ecological Knowledge Working Group of the International Conservation Union (IUCN) was founded on the idea that traditional ecological knowledge for natural resource conservation and management had been undervalued. The group published a newsletter and stimulated further interest through workshops and publications. Several international initiatives were undertaken through the United Nations system. One was UNESCO's programme in traditional management systems in coastal marine areas. A second was UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Programme, part of which resulted in scientific investigations of traditional systems. A third was the work undertaken by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), which included an examination of the role of indigenous knowledge in the context of participatory management in protected areas.

The following examples of indigenous mangement systems is taken from Fikret Berkes’ book Sacred Ecology, published by Taylor and Francis in 1999.