Humanity as tenant and keeper, not owner: inquiry and use bound by accountability to the earth’s Owner and to those who inherit it.
Stewardship reads the Genesis mandate as tenancy: the earth is the Lord’s, humanity its keeper, accountable for the state in which it is handed on. As a model of science it licenses inquiry and use while binding both to care — of species, of places, of the people downstream of every technology. It is the operative model in most contemporary Christian environmental statements and in ‘creation care’ movements, and it has parallels in the Islamic office of khalīfa (vicegerent) and the Jewish law of bal tashchit (do not destroy).
Stewardship’s characteristic question is not ‘can we?’ or even ‘may we?’ but ‘what does faithfulness to the Owner require of the tenant here?’ — which is why its documents dwell on particulars: this watershed, this species, this generation’s debts.
References
- Pope Francis, Laudato si’ (2015)
- Lynn White Jr., ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’, Science (1967)