For many in the Western world, the conventional notion of “development,” or the idea that societies progress through industrialization and agricultural intensification, goes unquestioned: it provides people with housing, education, jobs, food, and overall stability. Particularly in Western culture, this notion of development is widely accepted, but in a new study published in Ecology and Society, researchers are “attempting to flip this historically dominant ideology on its head,” says Ashwin Ravikumar, an environmental social scientist at The Field Museum and one of the study’s authors. Governments, says Ravikumar, have been too quick to assume that indigenous peoples’ lives need improvement, ignoring the well-being that traditional ways of life produce. Indigenous communities have not only established a high quality of life, but have found ways to manage their natural resources sustainably through traditional hunting, fishing, and small-scale agriculture.