Earth Stewardship: An Initiative by the Ecological Society of America to Foster Engagement to Sustain Planet Earth - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 172

different as U.S. environmental policy, strategies for sustainability in developing
nations (UN 2010 ; WCED 1987 ), and adaptive ecosystem management (Chapin
et al. 2009 ; Christensen et al. 1996 ; Szaro et al. 1999 ). The concept of stewardship
is familiar to the general public and has essentially the same meaning in lay terms
as we intend in its scientifi c usage. Its goals are thus widely accepted by scientists,
policy makers, and civil society, although their application inevitably raises conten-
tious issues regarding tradeoffs (Clark and Levin 2010 ). The familiarity of the term
stewardship facilitates communication with the larger civil society, although its
diverse connotations can be problematic in some quarters (Hargrove 2015 in this
volume [Chap. 20 ] ), just as with “sustainability”.

12.2 Evolution of ESA's Stewardship Approach

Since ESA's founding in 1915, the society has sought to provide leadership in both
cutting-edge science and its application to environmental issues. Early leaders such
as Victor Shelford and William Cooper played important roles in establishing
National Parks and other areas for conservation. Eugene Odum advocated passion-
ately throughout his career for the protection of Earth's endangered life-support
systems (Odum 1989 ). However, tension between “basic” and “applied” research
caused a group of ecologists to split away from ESA and form The Nature
Conservancy in 1951 to pursue issues of explicit societal relevance, leaving ESA as
the home for “basic” scientifi c ecology (Callicott ( 2015 ) in this volume [Chap. 11 ]).
Beginning in the late 1980s, ESA developed a research agenda for ecology.
Under the leadership of fi ve successive ESA presidents (1988-1992), the society
came together to establish the Sustainable Biosphere Initiative (SBI), whose goal
was to “defi ne the role of ecological science in the wise management of Earth's
resources and the management of Earth's life support system” (Lubchenco 2012 ;
Lubchenco et al. 1991 ). The SBI identifi ed three research priorities requiring par-
ticular attention in addressing global environmental problems: global change , bio-
diversity loss , and sustainable ecological systems . An important contribution of the
SBI was the recognition of tight coupling between human activities and ecological
processes on an increasingly human-dominated planet, with an emphasis on the
application of ecological science to address these issues.
There were several important outcomes of the SBI. Membership in ESA broadly
embraced the SBI's commitment to research that bridged basic and applied ecologi-
cal science to contribute to the wise management of Earth's resources. As part of
this commitment, ESA established an SBI offi ce 1992 in Washington, D.C. to facili-
tate access to national government and relevant agencies and to inform government
more effectively about the ecological repercussions of its policies. ESA established
a policy offi ce in 1983, which developed an education program in 1998 that subse-
quently branched off as an independent education offi ce in 2003. The SBI offi ce
became the ESA science offi ce in 1997. Together these offi ces foster the develop-
ment of societally relevant ecological science and its application to policy and