Stewardship Versus Citizenship - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 313

religiously, stewardship may be a good if not the best approach especially for people
within appropriate religious traditions. At the same time, citizenship could also be
promoted. People who are willing to embrace environmental stewardship reli-
giously can no doubt also embrace environmental citizenship. Citizens in such
countries who fi nd stewardship culturally offensive can be approached in terms of
citizenship alone. Likewise, in countries where Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions
are not dominant, a similar approach can be followed but with a focus on the more
neutral notion of citizenship with perhaps a minority focus on stewardship.
The environmental or Earth citizenship approach will not directly lead to an
international environmental ethic. However, it may in the long term. In the United
States, there is a tendency to encourage states to experiment with solutions to prob-
lems independently. This approach prevents the entire country from suffering from
a policy that works in some states but not in others. Furthermore, trying out compet-
ing solutions at the state level improves the chances that a policy may eventually be
found that works everywhere for everyone. The development of culturally diverse
environmental ethics throughout the world will likely improve the environment on
the short term more effectively and perhaps through cultural borrowing eventually
lead to an internationally inoffensive environmental ethic, should it actually be pos-
sible. Citizenship is compatible with this approach in all countries, since citizenship
is unlikely to be considered a foreign intrusion in any of these countries and stew-
ardship, though more limited, will likely be benefi cial in those countries religiously
compatible with it. Environmentalists and environmental groups who wish to pro-
mote stewardship alone should probably restrict their efforts to places where
Christianity, Judaism, and Islam can strongly support it.
However, even in the United States an education program based on Earth or
environmental stewardship may be diffi cult because of the two-century-old Culture
War, 23 which began in the fi rst decade of the nineteenth century, when Catholics
entering the United States were displeased to fi nd Protestant religion and ethics in
the public schools. To attempt to resolve this problem and get the Catholics to send
their children to the public schools, ethics and religion was gradually removed from
them. By 1860 it had been largely eliminated (Jorgenson 1987 , p. 110), and thereaf-
ter watch groups formed in most of the major religions to ensure that ethics would
not be reintroduced. Today, when teachers try to teach ethics they are usually
accused of trying to indoctrinate the children into their personal ethical values.
When they respond that they are providing alternative perspectives and are therefore
not indoctrinating, they are accused of teaching relativism: that ethics is just a mat-
ter of how individuals feel emotively and it has no non-arbitrary meaning or stan-
dards. Such criticism began to be applied to higher education when Ronald Reagan
became President of the United States, though less successfully, especially through
the National Endowment for the Humanities. Because stewardship is a recognizable
religious term, a program of Earth or environmental stewardship is more likely to
encounter strong opposition, especially at the primary and secondary levels, than
23 See Hunter ( 1991 ) for an overview of the Culture War, and Hunter ( 2000 ), for a detailed discus-
sion of the impact on ethics education.