Arts and Humanities Efforts in the US Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network: Understanding Perceived Values and Challenges - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 260

between empathy and ethics (Gruen 2009 ; Moore and Nelson 2010 ), clarifi es the
bond between ecological research and ethics. If arts and humanities inquiry can
enhance the empathetic quality of ecological work for scientists and also inspire
empathetic awareness for audiences, then arts and humanities inquiry is both con-
tributing to the work of ecology and doing work ecologists deem important. Teasing
out these connections and perhaps even demonstrating them empirically could fur-
ther illuminate the role of arts and humanities within the LTER Network. The open
reception the respondents gave empathy on the survey, likely an unfamiliar metric
for environmental inquiry, invites further work.

16.6 Implications for an Earth Stewardship Initiative

The relationship between empathy, ethics, and ecology—facilitated by long-term
observation of and commitment to place—underlies the goals of the Earth
Stewardship Initiative. For Earth stewardship is the effort to “respectfully cohabitate
with” the planet with the goal “to maintain not only human welfare but the welfare
of the whole community of life” (Rozzi et al. 2012 , p. 234). This notion of com-
munity building and maintenance is central to contemporary environmental ethics
(Leopold 1949 ; Moore 2004 ; Goralnik and Nelson 2011 ) and lies at the heart of the
kind of empathetic relationship-building we discuss here.
As well, the goal of Earth stewardship is “to enhance ecosystem resilience and
human well-being” (Earth Stewardship) and “to rapidly reduce anthropogenic dam-
age to the biosphere” (Power and Chapin 2009 ). Certainly, such a stewardship effort
demands a great deal of ecological information about the world, and across multiple
scales. Ecologists and ecological networks can contribute to Earth stewardship by
learning how ecosystems work and how the resilience of those ecosystems is likely
to be altered in the near future. But information alone cannot deliver Earth steward-
ship. Stewardship is “bigger than ecology” (Power and Chapin 2009 ). It is as much
an ethic as it is about science- a decision about how we ought to live in relationship
to the world around us.
In order to “profoundly reorient our endeavors” we must “radically redefi ne our
relationship with the planet” (Power and Chapin 2009 , p. 399). In short, “Earth
stewardship requires a new ethic of environmental citizenship” (Earth Stewardship).
This kind of commitment to relationship demands work, for relationships are recip-
rocal, contextual, and require virtues like humility, empathy, and patience. The pur-
suit of Earth stewardship, therefore, logically requires a fusion of the biophysical
and social sciences with the humanities (most notably with ethics). The history of
ecological science is populated with leaders who opened the door to ethics, who
recognized “the choices faced by human society are ethical ones, for which the
ecological sciences provide essential knowledge to inform responsible societal
decisions” (Rozzi et al. 2012 , p. 233). As noted above, empathy is a moral frame-
work amendable to ecology. As well, the LTER network appears amenable to the