42. The Great Stewardship

The New Civilization does not own the world. It stewards the world — for the good of all current and future generations of Life.

We listen to The Voice of Nature. The most important members of the Living System are the most silent — the Amazon, the Arctic, the Oceans, the soils and waters and small lives beneath notice. The Movement learns to hear them, honors and integrates the Wisdom and principles of Nature into all planning and action, and measures every proposal by its regenerativity before resources flow.

We steward the resources of every bioregion. A Bioregional Resource Stewardship Network — with georegional, bioregional, and local Resource Trusts — stewards natural, social, and economic resources as a multi-generational trust. Degenerative extraction ceases; the corruption and arming of local factions to strip the world's resources is stood against as a united Force For Good; Reciprocity and Flow are kept throughout The System.

We heal and clean up the mess. Human creativity and agency take their irreplaceable place as healers: landfills and waste streams become the primary mines (Circular Economy); pollutant flows are stopped at their sources, prioritized by Pareto analysis; the poisoned places — groundwater, munitions in the waters, the superfund legacies — are cleansed with the best of our science and the emerging arts of remediation; and the waters, airs, and soils are returned to the sacred healing forces they are. Partnering with Nature, every act of cleanup unleashes Cascading Benefits.

We steward land, home, and the built environment. The paradigm shifts from ownership to multi-generational stewardship: the ancient boundaries reexamined, a Jubilee declared, and every family and tribe ensured a Domain Of Responsibility And Authority to steward and flourish upon, where their Free Will cannot be violated. The reckoning is faced squarely: most of the Built Environment fosters illness rather than flourishing, and over the coming one to two centuries some ninety percent of it — and the housing of most of humanity — will be reimagined, redesigned, and rebuilt regeneratively through Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science, the LIØNSBERG Instantiation Hubs, and building practices worthy of the generations. What is built is built to last.

We steward the commons of water and the meters of life. No one owns the water; the corrupt bargains that sold it are undone, and its quality, quantity, and Flow are stewarded for All. And the Meters — of water, energy, data, and exchange — pass from the hands of The Giants to We The People, ending the piped, wired, and metered exploitation of humanity.

We honor the first stewards. Indigenous and original peoples hold an equal and honored seat at every table: their wisdom engaged with reverence and validated alongside modern science; their communities supported as they choose, protected from corruption, division, and dispossession; their knowledge shared on their own terms, through their own trusted networks; and their guidance sought first in restoring the lands and waters they have stewarded longest.

See also: 36. The Instantiation Hubs and the Commons · 39. The New Economy · 40. Resilience and Emergency Response · the Earth region of the concept space