What about stewardship?

What about stewardship?

Stewardship-- the conducting, supervising, or managing of something... the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one's care...

Stewardship is a word used often in the Bible and was at one time used often in England. It was used in England because the youth of the landed aristocracy was taught that they were responsible for the care of the family properties in such a way that they passed on to the next generation an inheritance equal to but more appropriately larger than that received. Each generation was not the owner but was the steward for the family estates. Any individual who squandered the inheritance was a traitor to the family.

I am inclined to think that each human generation must consider itself as the steward of the earth and therefore must make available to the succeeding generations an inheritance undiminished to that received.

In this context what does "careful and responsible management" mean? I would say that there are two things that must be begun to make the whole process feasible. The first is that the public must be convinced that it is a responsible caretaker and not an owner and secondly the public must be provided with an acceptable standard whereby it can judge how each major issue affects the accomplishment of the overall task. This is an ongoing forever responsibility for every nation but for the purpose of discussion I am going to speak about it as localized to the US.

Selfishness and greed are fundamental components of human nature. How does a nation cause its people to temper this nature when the payoff goes not to the generation presently in charge but to generations yet to come in the very distant future? Generations too far removed to be encompassed by the evolved biological impulse to care for ones kin.

How is it possible to cause a man or woman to have the same concern for a generation five times removed as that man or woman has for their own progeny?

I suspect it is not possible, but it does seem to me to be necessary to accomplish the task of stewardship.

The questions I would like to ask everyone are:

Do you agree that the acceptance of stewardship responsibility for this planet is vitally important?

Do you have a different idea whereby this stewardship might develop?

First rec!

That would mean our notion of progress would have to stop.

"The first is that the public must be convinced"

That's the first issue. Should there be a mass public? What would you have to do in order to convince them of anything? What's the penalty if they don't listen? Other than environmental destruction. Do you take something away? Time? Money?

To do what you're talking about would require the reversal of thousands of years of momentum. It would require that even just the 300 million people in this country all have to live one way. That's where we are already. The problem is organization. An individual human being, or even a small group, can only do so much damage. You start forcing more and more people into the same system, that increases our ability to impact the environment.

There is no perfect state to existence, and there never will be. Every action has that opposite reaction thing. Who annointed humans as the stewards in the first place? As soon as we take that responsibility, without the ability to account for every complex connection existence has, we start the process of domination and control that has defined the last few thousand years. That process is not sustainable, and it never has been. Look at every organized entity we call empires. They rise and fall, every time. Hell, the human body is not sustainable. We eventually die.

Diversity is a funny thing. If you want to be a steward, go for it. If someone doesn't want to be, they shouldn't have to be. Yeah, that can cause conflict. Actual diversity has that way about it. It can cause the ability to alter eco-systems. It can be the source of ever increasing organized warfare. Like I said though, there is no perfect state to existence.

It appears to me that reason may not be a useful means to achieve a consensus upon stewardship. Stewardship requires selfless motivation and I suspect reason is not strong enough to overcome the human focus upon self-interest. Perhaps religion is the only means for accomplishing a determination for accepting stewardship of the planet as a fundamental responsibility for all humans.

has a sign in the front that says;

Stewardship - A fancy word for Karma.