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For implementing an Earth stewardship it is indispensable to overcome the current
state of impunity in which idiōtēs gain power; instead, nation-states and citizens
should recover their capacity to enforce laws, and sanction their violations. It is not
Mankind or the human species as a whole that is responsible for causing the
Anthropocene and the current unsustainable environmental footprints, as it has been
mostly portrayed for over a century. However, it is the whole humanity and commu-
nity of life who is in peril due to the actions of a few specifi c agents, who need to be
reoriented. To achieve Earth stewardship, omitting this specifi cation in the diagnosis
of global environmental change would be a mistake as serious as a physician that
treats a patient with an infectious disease and blames microorganisms in general for
this disease, instead of identifying the specifi c organisms that are actually responsi-
ble for the infection. As Aldo Leopold ( 1949 , 258) stated, “health is the capacity of
the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this
capacity.” A biocultural approach to Earth stewardship helps to achieve a better diag-
nosis of specifi c threats and a better identifi cation of opportunities that already exist
in many communities for conserving the health of the land and the people.
Acknowledgments This chapter benefi ted from discussions at the Departamento Ecumenénico de
Investigaciones (San José, Costa Rica), especially with Roy H. May Jr., and Francisca Massardo. I
thank Irene Klaver, Kelli P. Moses, Eugene C. Hargrove, and Shaun Russell for their constructive
comments on the manuscript, and Paula Viano and Paola Vezzani for their artistic help in the prepa-
ration of Fig. 9.1 . The National Science Foundation (Project SES-10581630), and the grants PO5-
002 ICM and PFB-23 CONICYT awarded to the Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity, Chile,
provided valuable support.
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