Across India, forests protected as sacred have preserved biodiversity for centuries — accidental nature reserves.
Thousands of community-protected 'sacred groves' (devarakāḍu, kāvu, sarna) where cutting trees or hunting is taboo on religious grounds.
— Sacred groves across India (temple/folk tradition)
Biodiversity conservation and community-managed protected areas.
A genuine, defensible parallel.
By dedicating patches of forest to a deity and forbidding their exploitation, communities across India inadvertently created a vast network of conservation areas — some groves shelter rare and endemic species, ancient trees, and water sources long since lost from surrounding land. Ecologists now study them as models of community-based conservation and as biodiversity refuges.
This is well-documented and a genuinely positive story: a cultural-religious practice producing real ecological benefit, recognised in conservation science. The honest note is only that groves face modern pressures (encroachment, changing beliefs) and aren't a substitute for formal protection — but as 'conservation by devotion,' the effect is real.