Ecological wisdom for natural resources management and sustainability

Infinitive natural resources (NRs) are wealth of the global system to sustain the nurture and lives on the earth. NRs play a key role to maintain the structure and functions of the ecosystem and services. Sustainable management of NRs is a collective term, which represents as an essentiality to the ecosystem management, and its resilience that links with the human and animals (livestock’s) well-being, and related NR viz., forest, agriculture, agroforestry, soil quality and health, water quality and its readiness along with efficient nutrient availability and its recycling through better farming management practices. Among the all, forests itself represent as a largest NR, harboring valuable flora and fauna including many other micro- and macro-organisms, improving soil quality and health through fertility improvement, mitigating climate change, and global warming through the active absorption of carbon (C) into both vegetation and soils, respectively. Similarly, soil and water are the most important resources that are very essential for the maintaining structure and function along with yield attributes of both agricultural and agroforestry systems. For the perspective of its management, the practices of both scientific management and location specific farming practices can’t be denied and necessitate for the proper and effective utilization of resources like soil, water, nutrients, etc. Similarly, the water availability and its regulation play a key role in availability of essential nutrients to plants and maintain the soil structure and fertility through the provision of home to bacteria, fungi, protozoa, earthworms, etc. Ecological wisdom-based farming system helps in managing NR along with quality production and environmental conservation. Moreover, optimum utilization of cultivatable and forestry land helps in achieving the sustainability concept. To maximize land utilization for agriculture and its outputs that may support sustainability may be mediated by tuneful knowledge exchange among local community stakeholders towards awareness and knowledge generation from ecological perspectives among farmers and forest fringe people. Therefore, a transition from anthropocentric view towards ecology-based views must be prioritized that entails the sound partnership between nature and people through nature provides living conditions for humans by several crops, associated products, timber and nontimber forest products (NTFPs) and in turn human works for sustainability, and eco-harmony to achieve ecological wisdom. Thus, effective policies and its implementation with good governance, scientific research and development, and building effective roadmap for future strategies and ecological and local wisdom-based scientific research are effective tools for sustainable natural resource management (NRM). This chapter reviews highlighted importance of NR and its uncountable benefits to biodiversity. This chapter also highlights the ecological and environmental wisdom-based scientific practices in maintenance and sustainability of NRM through eco-friendly approaches.