ABSTRACT
For a long period of human history, people were hunter-gatherers directly dependent on nature and natural resources. They relied on wide areas to meet their needs for food, fibre, shelter and medicine. From trailside plantings they moved through
forested areas as hunter-gatherers (Hynes and Chase, 1982) and, during their socioecological evolutionary phase, they moved to shifting cultivation followed by settled farming. It was during this time that a variety of complex multi-species sedentary systems evolved within natural ecosystems such as forests, grasslands or wetlands. Traditional societies practising shifting cultivation, variously termed slash and burn , swidden and a range of local names, and other traditional sedentary systems developed in various regions of the world and continue today to be closely related to nature and based on local natural resources. The available biodiversity contributed towards meeting the basic livelihood needs of traditional societies (Ramakrishnan et al., 1996; Ramakrishnan 2000, 2008), and as these traditional cultures depended on both natural and human-managed biodiversity, they developed a culture of conserving biodiversity.
