Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Every person can experience a wonderful progression – a progression from awareness, to appreciation, to stewardship of the biosphere. Awareness involves seeing, identifying, naming, and locating, and can lead to Appreciation. Appreciation involves tolerating, respecting, valuing, esteeming, and cherishing, and can lead to Stewardship. And stewardship means using, restoring, serving, keeping, and entrusting. At the heart of stewardship is a loving and caring keeping of whatever we hold in trust. Stewardship principles of Earthkeeping, fruitfulness, rest, and recreation come together in the principle of Con-Serving, which means that as we are served by the biosphere's ecosystem services, we return these services back to the biosphere with services of our own. Stewardship seeks harmony of humankind with the entire biosphere. Stewardship dynamically shapes and reshapes human behavior in the direction of maintaining individual, community, and biospheric sustainability in accord with the way the biosphere works.The major challenges facing us today are: (1) for physical and biological scientists to define more clearly the limits and interactions within ecosystems and the biosphere, and to develop economies more in conformity with such limits; (2) for social scientists to design the institutions that will bring about the transition to a steady state and permit its continuance; and (3) for ... log in or subscribe to read full text