Introduction to Participatory Stewardship

The start of a life-long Inquiry

An introduction to my inquiry in Participatory Stewardship.

We, humans of modernity, have sought to become a global culture, through globalization, the internet, and interconnected monolithic cityscapes. We long to connect, to understand and learn from one another. There is great wealth in this global cultural exchange that humanity is undertaking at the moment. Yet, in this process of establishing our global culture, our awareness has become disconnected from its locality, from our sense of place. Daniel Cojanu (2014) describes our attempt at creating a global culture as paradoxical since the word “culture” describes a uniqueness and difference of human identity in relation to a place and environment.

We have come to be de-localized by the homogeneous modern world and our rapidly changing political, social, and ecological landscapes, in the attempt to become a united entity. And so, as Marc Augé (1995) describes it, globalization has transformed our places of settlement in “the way we experience them, replace[ing] many of the familiar places, to which we had in the past different expectations and different experiences, with nonplaces.”
In the forgetfulness of our participatory nature with the rest of life, rather than adapting to a place, we have adapted places to a limited, rational and mechanistic, version of the human perception. This has created a sense of separateness in the modern human.

What is Stewardship?

Stewardship is an interesting concept to track. Its earliest traceable origins come from the ancient Roman and Greek civilizations. It was a description for the role of the steward — that of a bailiff, overseer, or house-manager — who had the responsibility for managing the resources of a master on their behalf or in their absence. Specifically looking at the Greek civilization, one of the most common words used for the steward’s position is oikonomos — oikos meaning “house” or “household”, and nemō, meaning “to deal out, distribute, or dispense. This word is where the English term of Economics, came from, meaning “household management.” Here we see the role of the steward, that started as an obedient and trustworthy servant to a master, then transforming into other roles within society, that of an estate manager, treasurer, and business administrator (Wilson, 2010).

This further influenced the Abrahamic religions perspective on the role of humans as stewards of the Earth. In my experience, I grew with the Islamic concept of “Khalifa” — a word describing the role of humans as being the “vice-regents” of God on Earth (Khalid, 2002).

With the advance in science and the industrial era, modernized societies started to move away from a God figure and into a secular perspective of the world. As science separated from religion, no longer are we constrained by God’s obligations and rules. The concept of caring for and guarding the Earth became background noise to the churning financial and technological machines. Stewardship became one of the main pillars of environmental ethics, where environmental activists and advocates from the science community fought for the recognition of nature’s right and intrinsic value, distinguished from “sustainable resource use” and “natural capital management” perspectives, dominant in modern extractive economics (Nash 1989). Yet, the efforts of the environmental movement has not been enough to shift our destructive and dominating culture of modernity.

Entering Participatory Stewardship

Our short-term-focused efforts of stopping the fast degradation of our healthy ecosystems have taken us nowhere. Our problem-solving skills are looking useless in the face of this complex interaction and shifting of the Earth’s systems. It seems the issue is not the action we are taking; rather, it is our attempt in working with the world, while still feeling separate from it.

In the past, we were people that lived intimately with a place through the practicality of the everyday. Indigenous cultures’ sense of home was definite and sensuously present through the necessity of surviving with the environment (Abram, 1997). These cultures understand that for human society to keep and thrive, they must do so with the environment around them (Orr, 2004). Their way of living is imbued with an enchanted and mysterious perspective of the world.

The “participatory stewardship” perspective attempts to see stewardship as a field or quality. That there is not so much a steward, rather, there is a quality that lives within all organisms. When seen in this light, stewardship then is the primal space of participation in which beings collaborate in the creation and cultivation of life. All other beings seem to be in this field from birth, yet the human species seem to need a cultural process and continuous practice to be in the participatory nature of the world (Plotkin, 2003).

This is what indigenous cultures hold, in the way they transfer and cultivate the wisdom of how to be in the world, out of necessity. This necessity is now obvious to the modern human. We must find our foundational human forms of participation in stewardship with all other beings in the light of our modern era and expanded view of the Earth.

We must find new cultural processes in which we can continuously cultivate our relationship with the rest of the world, and provide forms in which each person can find ways in understanding our human species role in the maintenance, care and regeneration of our home.

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Curious? The inquiry continues here…

This is an introduction to my inquiry in Participatory Stewardship. The text edited and picked, from my MA dissertation in Ecological Design Thinking at Schumacher College, in order to give a taste of this inquiry.

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References

Cojanu, D. (2014) Homo Localis. Interpreting Cultural Identity as Spirit of Place. Procedia — Social and Behavioral Sciences, 149 (2014), 212–216.

Augé, M. (1995) Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Verso Books. Translated by John Howe.

Wilson, K.R. (2010) Steward Leadership: Characteristics of the Steward Leader in Christian Nonprofit Organizations. Aberdeen University.

Khalid, Falzun M (2002) in R. E. Munn (ed.) Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Change (p. 332–339). Vol. 5. Chichester. New York, Wiley.

Nash, R.F. (1989) The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics. Madison, Wis., University of Wisconsin Press.

Abram, D. (1997) The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. 1st Vintage Books Ed edition. New York, Vintage Books.

Orr, D.W. (2004) The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention. New Ed edition. Oxford, Oxford University Press, USA.

Plotkin, B. (2003) Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche. 9.10.2003 edition. Novato, Calif, New World Library.