Our Future Environment

Stewardship can be defined as an individual’s responsibility to exercise care over possessions entrusted to him or her. Environmental stewardship implies caring for, ensuring well-being, maintaining vigilance, accepting personal responsibility, and understanding the importance of environmental accountability (Beavis, 1994). It also implies responsible management of natural resources for the benefit of present and future generations of people, plants and animals. In this sense, environmental stewardship challenges people to be good stewards, custodians, bailiffs or shepherds of creation, and charges one with the responsibility for its care (Attfield, 1983).
This notion of stewardship has featured prominently in environmental history, particularly in theological discussion of the nature of human responsibility to the nonhuman natural world (Warrren, 1994). Environmental history in the United States also has theoretical shifts of conquering or working with the nonhuman natural world (Gottlieb, 1993). At the very least, a stewardship ethic urges people to see their selves not as conquerors of other creatures but ordinary members and stewards of the ecological community. This links people directly to nature and makes humanity part of nature, not over or against it. In the context of ecotourism and community involvement, stewardship is an ethic that embodies cooperative planning and management of environmental resources with organizations, communities and others to actively engage in the prevention of land degredation and promotion of sustainability. In this sense environmental stewardship is a relationship between people mediated by objects. However, when considering how ecotourism will affect a community it is also important to consider how a connection between humanity and nature as an object is, if at all, realized among such communities.
Overall, environmental stewardship research tends to focus on it as a relationship between people and objects, and less as relationships between people mediated by objects. Most often, stewardship is discussed as a sense of responsibility individuals feel as the caretakers of a property, even though they are not the legal owners. Davis, Schoorman, and Donaldson (1997) in their stewardship theory, suggest that in certain situations individuals feel like stewards and are motivated to act in the best interest of a place rather than in their personal interests. Thus when individuals feel ‘psychological ownership’ they may feel as though they are the ‘psychological stewards’ and act accordingly.

Filed under: anthro of property, natural landscape, environmental planning on April 18th, 2008