Words We Need: Stewardship

Last October, I attended a conference in Jackson, Wyoming, called “Managing Wildlife in Large Landscapes,” convened by the University of Wyoming’s Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources. Despite coinciding with the beginning of (yet another) federal shutdown, it was a lively event, featuring conversations among park managers and conservation advocates from the U.S., South Africa, Mongolia, Peru, Sápmi, and elsewhere. During a panel about human-wildlife coexistence, Lesli Allison, the executive director of the Western Landowners Alliance, said something that I’ve been reflecting on since:

Stewardship is the overlooked and most important leg of the conservation stool. When people talk about conservation, they usually talk about preservation and restoration. Stewardship is the active care and daily management of land and natural resources to ensure their health and productivity into the future. It means managing our forests and rangelands and croplands not just for food and fiber but for their full range of values, including clean water and wildlife and a healthy climate. When there is good stewardship, the need for preservation and restoration diminishes, and in fact, protection without stewardship is incomplete.

A look back at my own writing shows that I often do talk about protection (or preservation) and restoration without mentioning stewardship — including, until right this minute, on my own dang About page. I suspect the same is true of many conservationists steeped in Western perspectives.

I don’t dispute the importance of stewardship as Allison defines it. Far from it. And many fine conservation initiatives do emphasize the importance of stewardship. At some level, though, I think I’m reluctant to admit — or remind others — that even most protected ecosystems need to be cared for by humans in order to flourish, especially given how thoroughly our species has altered the planet. Forests in legally designated wildernesses may need cultural burns or other forms of prescribed fire; wild and scenic rivers may need their banks stabilized or their water quality monitored; as climate extremes become norms, protected habitats may need to be planted with species more resilient to heat and drought.

For those of us raised to romanticize landscapes that seem beyond human reach, this pervasive need for stewardship can look like a tragedy. It’s no longer possible, if it ever was, to protect a place and just leave it in peace.

But this impossibility is also an opportunity. The modern conservation movement is very good at describing the harm humans can do to land, air, and water. It’s not so good at showing people how to repair that damage, much less avoid inflicting it in the first place. The many tools and traditions of stewardship help people to live well within the ecosystems that sustain them, from city parks to farm fields to remote forests — to practice, in other words, what Aldo Leopold called “the oldest task in human history.”

To acknowledge that the stewardship of all these places is as important as their protection and restoration is to remind ourselves that conservation is not a single act but a relationship, an active, ongoing process in which each of us has a constructive role to play.

• Speaking of stewardship, I had the pleasure of attending one of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Plant Baby Plant events in Portland, Oregon, last week. The rallying cry of Plant Baby Plant, which just celebrated its first anniversary, is “raise a garden, raise a ruckus” — and its expansive definition of “garden” includes “a restored prairie, a healthy forest, a revitalized public park, or any landscape shaped by sustained care and attention.” I like that Kimmerer isn’t plowing new ground, so to speak, but using her star power to energize stewardship projects already underway. The event I attended was hosted by the SLUG (Student-Led Unity Garden) Project at the University of Portland, and was enthusiastically attended by all ages in spite of the cold rain and wind.

• The number of monarch butterflies overwintering in the forests of central Mexico is up for the second year in a row, reports WWF Mexico. The heartening increase is probably due to all the rain in the U.S. Midwest last year, which led to more flowers for butterflies to feed on during their southward migration this fall. But monarch biologist Karen Oberhauser told Benji Jones of Vox that backyard gardens may have also played a part. “Our efforts can make a difference,” she said. Plant baby plant.

• Also from the Glimmer of Hope Department, Panamanian golden frogs are back in their former habitat. Captive-raised frogs were released late last year as part of a study of the dynamics of Bd, the fungal disease that extinguished the free-living population of the species in the early 2000s. Though Bd is still a threat to frogs worldwide, some populations may be acquiring resistance to the disease.

• I appreciated this review of recent research on awe, which reports that “awe can help individuals reorient their worldview away from human dominance towards an outlook where their personal concerns are balanced with the needs of others and the environment.” Let’s try replacing fear appeals with awe appeals.

  Finally, I was surprised and then amused to see myself quoted in Isabel Ruehl’s thought-provoking review of Rob Macfarlane’s wonderful book Is a River Alive? I stand by my characterization of nature writing as the Most Hated Genre, if only because so many of its own practitioners like to crap on it. Maybe we could start to overcome its limits by simply calling it … writing.