Four decades ago the oriental white stork became extinct in Japan, the victim of rapid industrialisation and modern farm practices and heavy pesticide use that destroyed its habitat.

Today, the graceful migratory bird soars again over restored wetlands around the small town of Toyooka in western Japan, now a showcase for an ambitious conservation effort called the Satoyama Initiative.

As Japan hosts a UN conference on biodiversity this week, the high-tech nation is pushing the initiative to promote some of its ancient village wisdom as a way to heal battered environments worldwide.

The initiative draws lessons from before Japan became studded with megacities and crisscrossed by bullet train lines, when most people lived in villages near rice paddies, bamboo groves and forests. In the pre-industrial age, woodlands gave villagers plants, nuts, mushrooms and wildlife as well as natural medicines, textiles, fuel and timber for building, all usually harvested sustainably over the centuries.

These managed ecosystems – neither pristine wilderness nor cultivated agricultural landscapes – are known as satoyama, a composite of the words for villages (sato) and mountains, woods and grasslands (yama).

Today ecologists, somewhat less poetically, call them “socio-ecological production landscapes”.

At the 193-member UN meeting in Nagoya aimed at stemming the loss of plant and animal species, Japan is seeking to sign up groups and countries to exchange conservation lessons and ideas through its Satoyama Initiative. Japan’s centre-left Prime Minister Naoto Kan yesterday announced $2 billion in aid over three years to help poor countries preserve biodiversity, including through the initiative.

In Japan, as elsewhere, the human-influenced natural environments called satoyama have been on the decline as many forests have vanished, agriculture has become modernised, and small farm villages have been abandoned. Bucking the trend has been Toyooka, a town of about 90,000 people in the west of Honshu island, which prides itself on undoing much of the past damage that had wiped out the oriental white stork. The bird, which has a wingspan of two metres and is officially designated a national treasure in Japan, became extinct in the country in 1971.