The essay ‘Everything I need to know I Learned in the Forest’, by Vandana Shiva, highlights the importance of sustaining biodiversity in nature. However, the author does not dismiss scientific inventions and discoveries as useless. Scientific inventions and discoveries have proved successful in controlling infant mortality, increasing longevity. But some of the discoveries and inventions have resulted in damaging our eco-systems and are now threatening to wipe out life on this earth. Secondly, some scientific practices might create a crisis in the food chain itself.

Under such circumstances, we need to synthesize the wisdom of the past with modern knowledge systems. This has several advantages. For example, traditional knowledge is vital for the sustenance of natural resources including forests, water and agro eco-systems across landscape continuum, spanning from households through farms, village and wilderness.

An expert by name Caval Canti (2002) notes that a limitation of economic development is that it is pursued without any considerations in practice as to its implications on ecosystems. The prevailing economic theories treat the economic process from a purely mechanistic standpoint. Different ways exist, however, to deal with the choices that humans have to make with respect to the allocation of resources, the distribution of the returns and the fulfilment of purposes of material progress.

To understand how local people solve their economic problems in a sustainable fashion is a serious challenge. A better grasp of this issue could possibly be accomplished with the use of ethno economics or ethno ecological economics. Application of scientific research and local knowledge contributes both to the equity, opportunity, security and empowerment of local communities, as well as to the sustainability of the natural resources. Local knowledge helps in scenario analysis, data collection, management planning, designing of the adaptive strategies to learn and get feedback and institutional support to put policies into practice.

Science, on the other hand, provides new technologies or helps in the improvement of the existing ones. It also provides tools for networking, storing, visualizing and analyzing information. Thus, by developing sustainability science and ethno economics, we can synthesise the wisdom of the past with modern knowledge systems.