Historical perspectives on Earth Stewardship

Background/Question/Methods

A historical overview of 20^th century discussions about resources, environment, and the future illustrates the challenges of relating scientific expertise to environmental problems, of fostering dialogue between scientists and the public, and of connecting stewardship to the concept of resilience (or connecting the local to the global).   

Results/Conclusions

Historical examples provide insights into how stewardship might be promoted and how to foster communication between scientists and the public.  1. The “tragedy of the commons” logic can mislead us when it blinds us to evidence of good-faith efforts to conserve common-property resources.  Failure to achieve conservation goals does not always mean that science has been compromised, as is sometimes argued. The historical picture is much more complex.   2. The need to validate scientific expertise can lead to the view that a scientific perspective opposes common wisdom, such as the popular belief in the "balance of nature."  Such dichotomies drive a wedge between scientific and popular culture and imply that the flow of expertise or knowledge is one-way, from scientists to the public, and not the other way round.  3. Although ecological education often focuses on natural systems, the lessons of ecology can be illustrated well in urban environments, where an informed citizenry can lead in the promotion of stewardship.   4. Postwar debates about the future focused on developing countries, but they failed to ask about the nature of modern society and how resilient or vulnerable to disruption our own society might be.  This bias started to change in the late 1970s and today globalization places the question of resilience (our ability to respond to shocks) at center stage.  A corollary is that ecological education ideally should promote an understanding of resilience (which leads to awareness of global interconnections), while fostering concepts of stewardship (which emerge from our relationship to the local), because the two in combination help to increase awareness of the link between local and global scales.  Again, urban environments provide ample opportunities to educate people about both of these issues.