Establishing Our Connection With The Environmental World

Putting our hands around nature.

This carries notions of taking responsibility, expressing care and compassion, and making things happen to achieve results; communicating both an individual responsibility to be careful with nature and the shared effort of joining hands to achieve societal, behavioural and cultural change, in the interest of our co-dependency on nature.

The idea of our hands directly applied to nature, even greeting it, ‘shaking its hand’, gives a sense of connectedness, of embodied care as opposed to the bureaucratic or professionalised meanings often associated with stewardship.

Putting our hands around something.

It is what you do for a heartbroken friend or a neglected houseplant and it is what we ought to do with the environment more broadly. The metaphor of the hand even provides a helpful way of thinking of the different steps involved; in the friendly greeting and familiarisation, the hearty embrace and commitment, the concrete action and manual labour and also in the symbol of the raised fist, a more transformative struggle to overhaul unsustainable societal and economic structures.

Stewardship is not the same as ownership, however it does mean taking ownership of your place, voice, and power in the world. 

We all have a stake in caring for our local environments, whether we own an inch of ground or not.

I understand stewardship to consist of both caretaking for and claims-making on the environment. Anyone can have a personal experience of being a steward through acts of hands on work, engagement in advocacy, expressions of love and transformation of systems.

It has been noted that individuals rarely engage in stewardship alone and often it takes the form of local civic engagement. Many stewardship groups start from a shared experience of friends or neighbours, out of a desire to improve a local community, restore something that was lost or create something new; there is incredible power in these municipal groups.

People steward nature however in countries where millions of people are unemployed it is not a priority. There is systematic destruction of the rich ecosystems in countries such as Brazil, caused by the myopia of the economic system, that only perceives the economic value of what is beneath the rich forests and the potential for economic growth on hard infrastructure, thereby destroying rivers and forests, with hydropower damaging rivers and culture, and new roads, crisscrossing protected areas.

We need more than ever to be ashamed of this predatory vision of permanent growth. 

We need to be guardians, protectors and defenders. 

We must resist.

In the rural villages of Kenya for example, where farming is predominant, farmers are regarded as stewards of their lands, farm animals, and produce. 

It is evident that people do not easily carry a feeling of responsibility regarding the built environment because it is always with a legal possessor; urban residents use the term ‘protection’ more frequently than ‘steward’ due to the urgency of their built environment being damaged. 

Passionately taking care of something owned by another party is far from being a common phenomenon within urban mentality.

The subtle difference between stewardship and environmental protection reveals an essential effort of landscape architects; it is necessary to lift the importance of biodiversity in the city environment, for people to recognise it as a basic need and to cultivate or recapture a residency where everyone has a stake in their city.