Broken Words by Jonathan Dudley

Author:Jonathan Dudley [Dudley, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-72079-5
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-04T16:00:00+00:00

THE REINVENTION OF ENVIRONMENTAL STEWARDSHIP

Although the seventeenth-century understanding of “environmental stewardship” persists in the work of Beisner and others today, it is no longer the mainstream understanding. Clare Palmer, a professor of philosophy and environmental studies at Washington University, has argued that the currently popular understanding of “stewardship”—that humans are to care for nature and protect it from abuse—arose in part from financial problems in churches in the mid-1900s. A popular way of framing church-based fund-raising appeals was to say Christians must use their money wisely because it really belongs to God. “There is only one legitimate answer to the financial problem,” The Christian Century declared in 1950, to “teach our people to practice Christian stewardship.” The environmental crisis came to light in the midst of these appeals. And in 1967, historian Lynn White published a famous article declaring that the Christian idea of “dominion” (in Genesis 1:28) was largely to blame. “Christianity,” White wrote, “not only established a dualism of man and nature, but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.”

Christians seeking to counter White’s thesis and vindicate the Bible in the face of a growing environmental crisis extended the financial understanding of “stewardship” to include the natural world. As Palmer argues:

It was probably this availability of the metaphor [i.e., stewardship] that first led to its wide application to the natural world. It could easily be extended from money, talents and human resources, to refer to (so called) natural resources.… [By] the use of the word “steward”, the natural world is linked to money and resources.… We are here to look after it, cultivate it, develop it, use it—but prudently.… We must not destroy it by “spending it all at once.”

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