The Ancient Roots of Eco-Conscious Business and Why It MAtters Now More Than Ever

Matri12 June 2026

Eco-Living Skills

artha, dharma, eco-conscious business, indigenous wisdom, sustainability, type-article

There is a village in Kerala where the morning begins not with the buzz of an alarm, but with the low hum of temple bells drifting through a canopy of jackfruit trees. Here, a woman named Devika runs a small textile workshop from a building made entirely of reclaimed teak and laterite stone. Her fabrics are dyed with turmeric, indigo, and pomegranate rind — the same pigments her grandmother once used, and her grandmother’s grandmother before that. The dye water, when it has given everything it has, is poured back into the garden where the turmeric grows. Nothing leaves without returning. Everything about the way Devika conducts her business is a quiet act of devotion to the Earth.

This is the oldest form of eco-conscious business. It did not begin in a Silicon Valley incubator or a United Nations conference hall. It began in the soil. In the sacred groves where nothing was taken without gratitude, and nothing was made without considering what it would leave behind.

The Thread That Was Cut

We need to name what happened. Somewhere between the spinning wheel and the spinning machine, between the village dye-bath and the industrial vat, a thread was severed. In 2013, a garment factory called Rana Plaza collapsed in Dhaka, killing 1,134 people — most of them women — who had been making clothes for brands sold in the shopping centres of London, Paris, and Sydney. The rivers running through textile towns in Gujarat and Tamil Nadu have turned the colours of the season’s fashions: pink, then grey, then black. Workers who once knew the name of the farmer who grew their cotton now assemble pieces of things they will never see whole. This is not progress that went wrong. This is what happens when Artha is severed from Dharma — when the pursuit of wealth is cut loose from the question of right conduct.

The Vedic texts always held these together. Artha — the pursuit of prosperity — was never meant to stand alone. It was woven with Dharma (right conduct) and Mokṣa (liberation), so that wealth-making was also a form of liberation practice — for the maker, for those whose hands touched the work, for the land that gave the raw materials. The ancient rishis understood something that modern economists are still learning: wealth made at the cost of the living world is not wealth. It is a debt passed quietly to the next generation.

What Devika Knows About Ahiṃsā

Devika has never used the word Ahiṃsā in a business context. She would find it strange that it needed to be said. For her, non-harm is not a principle applied to commerce — it is commerce, when commerce remembers what it is. The dyes she uses feed the garden. The scraps of fabric become stuffing for bolsters in the yoga room next door. The women who weave for her eat lunch together in the courtyard; their children go to school with her own. The water she uses, she returns.

Does this cause suffering — to the land, to the water, to the hands that made it, to the creatures who share this Earth with us? This is the question at the heart of Ahiṃsā in commerce. Not as a compliance checklist, but as a daily orientation — the way a flower turns toward light not because it was told to, but because that is its nature.

The Banyan’s First Root

Stand beneath a great banyan tree and you will see something that no other tree teaches quite so clearly: a single organism that has become an entire forest. Its aerial roots descend from the canopy, touch the earth, thicken into new trunks, and in time become indistinguishable from the original. The banyan does not grow outward by conquering. It grows by returning — by sending what it has received back into the ground, again and again, until the forest it inhabits is itself.

This is the image that lives at the heart of eco-conscious business as we understand it at MATRI — not a set of policies, not a certification, not a score on a sustainability index. A banyan. A living system in which the act of receiving and the act of giving are not separate moments but one continuous movement. Where Devika pours the dye water back into the soil, a root is touching the ground. Where the soil feeds the turmeric, the canopy is feeding the root. There is no beginning and no end. There is only the breathing of the tree.

How Devika Sources Her Dyes

Devika does not source from those who grow with indifference and harvest without restraint. She knows the names of the farmers who grow her turmeric. She visits them once a year, in the season before harvest, and they drink tea together in the fields. When she pays them, she pays more than the market price — not because she calculated a social impact metric, but because she understands that the price of a thing must carry the life of everyone who made it possible. This is what the Vedic tradition calls Sevā — not charity, but right relationship. The recognition that we are not separate from those whose hands touched what we use.

The women who weave in her workshop are part of a Saṅgha — a community of practice, in the deepest sense. They gather in the morning, not just to work, but to learn. There is always something being studied: the properties of a new plant dye, the traditional patterns of a neighbouring district, the story behind a particular motif. Knowledge is not hoarded. It moves, the way water moves — seeking the lowest place, filling every gap, nourishing what is dry.

The Wound in the Water

There is a river in Tiruppur, the knitwear capital of South India, that runs a different colour depending on the season — not because of the rains, but because of what the dyeing factories discharge into it. The farmers downstream have watched their soil harden. The fish are gone. The children swim in something else now. This is not an anomaly. It is the logical endpoint of a commerce that has learned to ask only one question: how much? — and forgotten to ask: at what cost, and to whom?

Devika’s dye water goes back into the garden. This is not a technical solution. It is a remembering. A refusal to allow the thread between the workshop and the water to be cut. The quiet economy of doing less harm is not a sacrifice of profit — it is the discovery that profit, when it flows through a living system rather than a severed one, compounds in ways that no ledger of seasons can fully capture: in soil health, in worker wellbeing, in the trust those whose lives are woven into this work place in the hands that guide it.

The Banyan Puts Down Another Root

The banyan does not announce its new trunks. They simply appear — a thickening of what was once only air, a tendril finding its way down, touching soil, holding. Transparency in business is like this. It does not require a press release. It requires only the willingness to be seen — to say, to those whose lives are woven into this work: here is where the money goes, here is where we fell short, here is what we are learning. In a world drowning in polished claims and carefully curated responsibility reports, this kind of plainness is almost radical.

The path goods travel matters. The carbon released by a container ship crossing three oceans to deliver a cotton t-shirt is not neutral. It is a choice — one that can be made differently, when the question how far has this come, and what did the journey cost? is held alongside the question of price. Devika sells most of her work within fifty kilometres of where it was made. What travels further, travels by road. This is not a policy. It is a value made visible in daily decisions.

What You Are Part Of

You do not need to be Devika to participate in this. Every purchase is a root touching the ground. Every choice about where things come from — and how they were made, and whose hands shaped them — is a vote for the kind of world the banyan builds, or the kind of river Tiruppur inherits. The choice is not between purity and complicity. It is between remembering and forgetting.

This is what we study together in the School — not as theory, but as living practice. How to bring Ahiṃsā into the choices we make every day: what we wear, what we eat, what we build, what we buy, what we refuse. How to let Dharma be not a word in a philosophy text, but a thread running through the way we make things, trade things, give things, receive things. How to be, in whatever work we do, a banyan — returning what we have been given, touching earth, becoming forest.

The ancient roots are still alive beneath the concrete. Can you feel them stirring?

The ecology.yoga community is part of this return. The asana practice that asks us to be present in the body, attentive to what is actually happening rather than what we wish were happening, is the same attention that eco-conscious business requires. Both are practices of inhabiting reality more fully — rather than extracting from it what is convenient and leaving the cost to someone else.

References

1. Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, Zed Books, London, 1988. The foundational text connecting indigenous knowledge systems, women’s labour, and ecological sustainability in the Indian context.
2. Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, Random House, London, 2017. The contemporary framework that most closely approximates the dharmic economic model — wealth within planetary and social boundaries.
3. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis, 2013. The most eloquent contemporary articulation of what it means to operate from membership in the living world rather than ownership of it.