Original title: People are good at stewardship
The paper challenges the idea that people naturally harm the environment. It argues that people can build caring, mutually supportive relationships with nature—a capacity it calls stewardshipCaring for and responsibly looking after the natural world.. The authors link much environmental damage to historical systems, including colonialism and industrial capitalism, and to the weakening of Indigenous and local governance. They say environmental work should help people use their capacity to care for nature, rather than treating harm as an unchangeable human flaw.
Imagine a shared garden where people take turns caring for the soil and plants. If the garden is damaged, blaming everyone who uses it misses the rules and decisions that may have stopped people from looking after it. In this paper, the garden’s care stands for stewardship, while the harmful rules and lost community decision-making stand for the historical forces the authors connect to environmental damage.
The way environmental problems are explained shapes what policies try to do. If people are treated mainly as a threat to nature, interventions focus on restricting them; this paper argues for supporting people’s capacity to care for and govern their surroundings.
The abstract argues for a different way to frame environmental harm and stewardship, but it does not describe specific policies, interventions, or cases showing how to put that approach into practice. It also does not detail the evidence behind the authors’ claim.
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People are good at stewardship — Philip A. Loring, Miguel Sioui — People and Nature — doi:10.1002/pan3.70454
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.