The Centennial Return of Stewardship to the Ecological Society of America - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 165

Shelford responded by forming the independent Ecologists' Union (EU)—which
was joined not only by a sizable number of ESA members, but was also open to
non-ecologists (Kinchy 2006 ). As the membership of the EU swelled, its overlap
with the ESA membership was attenuated. By 1950, the EU transformed itself into
The Nature Conservancy (TNC). There is an irony in this history. The EU was
formed in order to free members of the ESA to continue independently agitating and
advocating for governmental policy and legislation that would protect and preserve
natural conditions. The goals of the TNC remained the same, but the TNC aban-
doned this method for another: raising money and purchasing the properties wanted
for protection and preservation—to hell with the government, so to speak. A further
historical irony is the election of Aldo Leopold as president of the ESA for the year
of 1947—and no one was more surprised by that than he.
However hard to kill, superorganismism had pretty much died out by the mid-
1970s, supplanted by a neo-Gleasonian paradigm in ecology (Pickett and Ostfeld
1995 ). Although aggressive Shelfordian agitation and advocacy has not been re-
institutionalized in the ESA, growing alarm at planetary-scaled environmental
change, especially global climate change and the down-scale impacts it entrains,
has moved the ESA to embrace an environmental ethic under the rubric of “steward-
ship”—fi rst “ecosystem stewardship” (Chapin et al. 2009 ) then “planetary steward-
ship” (Power and Chapin 2009 ) and fi nally “Earth stewardship” (Chapin et al.
2011 ). Three past presidents of the ESA, Mary E. Power (2009-10), F. Stuart
Chapin III (2010-11), and Steward T. A. Pickett (2011-12) have led the ESA's stew-
ardship initiative, the culmination of its renewed social engagement, begun in the
last decade of the previous century as the Sustainable Biosphere Initiative, under the
leadership of Lubchenco (et al. 1991 ), also a past president of the ESA (1992-93).
Chapin, Pickett, Power, and three other authors begin their initiative-defi ning
tract with a historical contextualization of “stewardship” and how it might be
adapted to present environmental concerns: “A century ago, stewards were respon-
sible for managing estates or keeping order at public events. Today the Earth is one
global estate and improved stewardship is vital for maintaining social order and for
preserving life on Earth” (Chapin et al. 2011 , p. 44). But back in the day of stew-
ards, estates had proprietary lords and many believe that the Earth also has a propri-
etary Lord. In response to a sharp critique of the Judeo-Christian worldview by
Lynn White Jr. ( 1967 ), Christian theologians developed a Stewardship Environmental
Ethic (Barr 1972 , Black 1970 ).
White had based his critique on narrow but powerful textual evidence—Genesis
1:26-28—in which God creates humans in His own image , gives humans dominion
over the other creatures , and commands humans to subdue the Earth . But, respond
the Stewardarians, prior to these verses, God declares the pre-human creation to be
“good”—that is, he invested it with what environmental ethicists call intrinsic value.
That humans alone are created in the image of God, they go on to note, is a double-
edged sword. True, by that token, humans have a unique right to use the Earth and