Q1.
Do you know of other traditional practices that help the ecosystem to stay in balance?
Answer
Yes. Most of them work the same way as the fishing custom described in the box — they hold back use at the exact time or place where the resource is regenerating.
| Practice | What it protects | How it keeps the balance |
|---|---|---|
| Sacred groves (devrai, kavu, sarna, orans) | Native forest patches | Nothing is cut, so a seed source and a refuge for birds, insects and water survive even when the land around is cleared |
| Rotational grazing and fallow years | Pasture and soil | Grass and soil organisms recover before the herd returns |
| Crop rotation and mixed cropping | Soil fertility | Different crops draw different nutrients and break pest cycles — the chapter names both under Vṛikṣhāyurveda on page 16 |
| Cow dung and other natural fertilisers, mulching | Soil life and moisture | Organic matter is returned to the soil instead of being drawn out year after year (page 12) |
| Traditional water harvesting; ponds, tanks, johads, kunds, stepwells | Groundwater | Rain is held on the land long enough to soak in, so recharge keeps pace with extraction (page 12) |
| Not felling fruiting or flowering trees; leaving part of a harvest | Birds, bats and pollinators | The animals that pollinate and disperse seeds are fed through the lean season |
| Protecting particular species — peepal and banyan, snakes, monkeys, blackbuck near Bishnoi villages | Keystone species | Removing one such species unbalances many others, so protecting it protects the web |
| Closed seasons for fishing and hunting | Fish and game populations | The stock breeds undisturbed — exactly the practice the box describes |
Why commercialisation broke the tuna custom: a village that fishes the same water every year loses if it empties that water, so restraint pays. A commercial fleet that can move on to the next fishing ground does not carry that loss — the cost falls on someone else, later. That is why, as the box says, the collapse of tuna numbers had to be answered by agreements on control of fishing rather than by custom, and why the species is still in decline even so.
Did you know? The box explains why tuna matter beyond their own numbers: by consuming smaller fish, shrimps and so on, they keep the ocean ecosystem in balance. Remove a large predator and the species it fed on multiply, which changes the whole food web beneath it.