Stewardship

The wise and responsible management and care of everything that is entrusted to us, such as time, attention, energy, resources, relationships, ecosystems, and communities, with the intention of ensuring long-term health, resilience, and regenerative capacity. Stewardship encompasses a commitment to protecting and nurturing the well-being of the society, the planet and Future Generations, encouraging us to recognize the long-term and multi-dimensional consequences of our actions in an interexistent world.

The responsible management and care for the resources, ecosystems, and communities on which we depend. Stewardship involves an ethic of service, cooperation, and long-term thinking to ensure the well-being and sustainability of our shared planet.

As a Living Gradient

Lived, Stewardship is a verb — tending — the sustained orientation of one who holds anything in trust rather than in possession (The Living Gradient). Its gradient runs from Inversion (extraction — taking value out of what was entrusted and leaving it diminished) through Distortion (use without care, ownership without obligation) and neglect, through maintenance and care, to its fullness: regenerative tending — leaving everything entrusted to us more alive, more capable, and more coherent than we received it (Regenerativity).

Its subtlest distortion is control wearing stewardship's clothes — "caring for" what we were never asked to govern, managing beings who are sovereign (Sovereignty). The steward tends conditions; the tended flourish as themselves.

Practices: know what is actually entrusted to you — time, attention, energy, relationships, land, institutions, the canon itself · leave every crossing better (Transmission) · account honestly for what was received and what is returned · think in Future Generations · tend the smallest entrusted things with the same fidelity as the greatest.