Stewardship vs. citizenship

Background/Question/Methods

Although “stewardship” may be an environmentally useful term in some contexts, it is also limiting in many ways because it is tied narrowly to three religious traditions, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Thus, while it may be extremely helpful in reaching people who are members of one of these three traditions, people who are not followers of these religions may have difficulty with environmental material that is presented to them under the banner of stewardship. They may feel that the message they are receiving is colonizing, imperialistic, and/or totalizing. An alternative term that is religiously neutral is “environmental citizenship,” a term first used extensively by Environment Canada, but also used to some degree elsewhere, including the United Nations. In the beginning, the term dominion was similar to what stewardship has come to mean today. When the term was translated into European languages, however, it became erroneously associated with another term, domination. To capture something of the original sense of dominion, people began using stewardship, a term that appears only five times in the Bible and mostly in the context of stories about bad managers. Citizenship has much to commend it environmentally. First, it can be associated with Aldo Leopold’s remark that humans are “plain citizens” of the biotic community, opening a door into Leopold’s writings and thought. Second, it can be used to distinguish values related to being a consumer from values related to being a good citizen. This distinction is important because economists typically argue for policy in terms of consumer preferences, erroneously substituting them for citizen preferences which can be quite different. Finally, citizenship can help tie ethics and politics together in a sense promoted long ago by Aristotle, that ethics and politics are basically the same, that is, formed in terms of the same elements of moral character, but with the first focused on the good of the individual and the second on the good of the group.

Results/Conclusions

Although stewardship need not be abandoned, since spreading the word about the need to protect the environment to Jews, Muslims, and Christians is certainly worthwhile, a focus on citizenship can spread that word farther without danger of religious and cultural backlash.