Stewardship in the Polycene

Irina Wang

PART I: TO DO, OR NOT?

Stewardship — Etymology & Context

Human agency and environmental stewardship are under scrutiny in the Anthropocene, the so-called “Age of Man.”¹ Given that the charge of responsible management has still landed us in a climate crisis with quantifiable disruption of earth’s equilibria for limitless industrial growth, it’s easy to draw a line of accusation between claiming a moral responsibility and reinforcing a license to exploit. When stewardship operates under the assumption of dominion over an assigned domain, its results are calibrated to myopic opportunism and anthropocentric exploitation. As long as duties and rights are conflated, the practice of stewardship will walk too fine a line between guarding against destructive behavior and enabling it.

Theological stewardship is often cited as the parochial source of our misguided attitude concerning human and non-human life—the belief that our species has been assigned agency to orchestrate earth’s systems and inhabitants. But at the core of this philosophy is a condition lost on many contemporary environmentalists and extractivists alike: stewardship is the responsible management of resources on behalf of another. Before it was used to translate the New Testament occurrences of the Greek word oikonomos (manager of a household), the word steward came from combining the Old English stig (hall; cattle pen; part of a house) and weard (ward; guard; keeper). A household steward was in charge of bringing meals to the dining room, and the same role applied to stewards onboard a ship or train. By the late 14th century, it references a class of English and Scottish officials managing affairs on behalf of their employers, the estate owners. So while stewardship following Biblical interpretation is a temporary moral duty carried out on behalf of the creative source of earth itself (the God of Abrahamic religions), a secular interpretation of environmental stewardship might substitute deistic accountability to similar effect. The transferable premise is recognizing that any resources in question are not one’s own, and that the spirit of stewardship is therefore incompatible with ownership or sovereignty. While owners have rights, stewards bear responsibilities.

A steward might believe in responsibly managing their relationship with the earth on behalf of their children and future generations, on behalf of current populations suffering disproportionately under environmental injustice, on behalf of synergistic networks of interconnected organisms and Gaian systems, on behalf of fortifying richness and diversity of life forms independent of human utility or interest, and so on.

Stewardship — Conflation & Distortion

Whether secularly or spiritually rooted, stewardship must untangle responsibility from entitlement. Of course, even referring to non-human life and earthly elements as “natural resources” that are subject to careful “management” is to defend the environment using the language of a centuries-old extractivist framework.

Certain linguistic, political, economic, religious, and sociocultural conditions tend to encourage the conflation of responsibility and entitlement. Respectful accountability and diligence likely coexisted with attitudes of self-interest and abuse of power when 1500s stewardship meant managing daily meal rotations in the Duke’s castle kitchen. And long after the curtain opened on naïve Adam and Eve tending to a lush Edenic ecosystem, centuries of corrupt ecclesiastical practice have distorted the theological tenet of stewardship as the suspension of earthly interactions within the careful humility of borrowed time and place. Instead, the human assumption of divine auspices is more likely to see the proverbial garden conquered, felled, drilled, developed, quantified, converted to capital.

Like a teenager trusted to babysit younger siblings on a Friday night, humankind is often eager to wield responsibility as both a shield and a sword. We haven’t grown out of it—not even close. What does today’s Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan do but painstakingly maintain and prolong the full destructive capability of US nuclear warheads? Which part is considered “responsible” when stewardship consists of replacing aged radioactive cores with freshly mined plutonium pits using billions of the federal budget? In the antiquated name of deterrence, what exactly is being managed but firepower and toxic masculinity under the guise of global security—and on behalf of whom but the elite handful in positions of geopolitical authority?

It’s consistently difficult for humans to act as good stewards because it’s difficult to contain the power-happy ego that insists on blurring the distinction between duties and rights, between means and ends.

Agency — Possession & Diffusion

There cannot be a discussion of ego without a discussion of agency, and the root of confused stewardship is directly related to the interpretation of human agency as unilateral in nature. Side-stepping canonical prerequisites like intent and willpower, we can think of baseline agency as effective action.

For the vast majority of their existence, Homo sapiens have been scattered blips on the map—in the middle of the food chain and at the constant mercy of weather, earth systems, natural phenomena. But for the first time, the human population has accumulated the mass of a global network affecting the planet physically, not just biologically.² With or without self-assignment and intentionality, agency follows. Despite its remarkably uneven distribution across the Global North and South, the agency of humankind is collectively potent at this point in geological history and one form of its manifestation is anthropogenic climate change.

At the same time, agency has never been exclusive to humans. Jane Bennett, champion of vibrant matter and thing-power, reminds us that “there was never a time when human agency was anything other than an interfolding network of humanity and nonhumanity”₃. Yet much of human culture continues to think and act otherwise, and present-day reality is rife with consequences of this conceit. The species has achieved incredible technological competence and social complexity, all while this pervasive illusion of unilateral agency twists the concept of environmental stewardship into an oxymoron.

Belief in the exclusivity of human agency is synonymous with ownership and possession of singular power; it is fundamentally incompatible with environmental stewardship, which is a framework for acting upon our surroundings with deferred agency. A steward is concerned with agency on behalf of the why above agency exercised over the what.

Agency — Admission & Persistence

To shrug off a human assumption of unilateral agency can be countercultural and counterintuitive, requiring conscious and consistent effort—agency again! This is the paradox of Anthropocene action employed to restrict its own efficacy. Here, it’s contextualized as multilateral in nature, with human agency as just one thread woven into an elaborate biospherical tapestry.

The effort to fade human agency into the background of interlaced assemblages, however, poses a risk of overcorrecting to similar effect. It might be exacting and self-critical work to shift a paradigm that has dominated centuries of Western thought and development, but even trickier to avoid steeping in smugness on the other side. The conceptual dethroning of the human species is also a temptation to follow cathartic logic to the conclusion that human agency itself is illusory, pointless, or even morally reprehensible.

While debunking anthropocentrism means subscribing instead to the delightful possibility that natural systems in their self-organizing totality will never be fully manageable or knowable, assuming they are therefore invincible or immune is another form of the original conceit. A single thread among billions can still unravel a tapestry.

Perhaps the only thing more anthropocentric than overestimating ourselves—the damage we can do and the damage we can repair—is overestimating the magnitude of human-inflicted violence the planet should bear, if only because it can. The bolstering of “resilient nature” has long been a reassurance tactic of oil companies co-opting environmentalist language to defend drilling rights, testing the limits of natural systems by claiming limitlessness.

The admission and exercise of human agency is not just compatible with recognizing nonhuman planetary agency—it’s arguably the only consistent and sufficient response. Put simply, it is laughable arrogance to assume geological history begins and ends with our species, and it is malicious arrogance to declare our agency negligible and do nothing anyway. This is not enlightened humility; it is anthropocentric cynicism. If rejection of human hubris always finds resolve in nihilistic forfeit, then self-indulgent myopia will define our generation—and perhaps our species.

Stewardship & Co-Agency

The way we frame stewardship in (and after) the Anthropocene must therefore take these geophysical realities and distributed agencies into honest account. If we maintain our linear relationship to nonhuman life on earth, then any attempt to charge ourselves with responsibility simply gives us permission to exercise our agency as ownership.

Instead, we can imagine ongoing cycles of agency within and between effective human and nonhuman action, where dominion has no conceptual foothold. Cause of effect is diffused; intent is decoupled from origin. As the unilateral illusion again gives way to multilateral reality, stewardship will finally have room to exist between pockets of agency, in the latticed arrows and interwoven threads of input and output. In these ways, Post-Anthropocene stewardship can only be realized as the coordination of co-agency.

By elevating and endowing a narrow slice of humankind with fabricated unilateral agency generation after generation, Western development discourse and growth paradigms have already caused—or at least coined—the Anthropocene. If the species is to coexist into the next geological era, it must land on a Post-Anthropocene philosophy that acknowledges, reframes, and instrumentalizes the agency that brought us here, mastering our mastery on behalf of the other, any other, every other.

Even as we embrace the idea of co-agency in theory, can we meaningfully steward domains without assuming dominion? As we intellectually reject entitlement, can we navigate the thin line between implicit hubris and nihilistic negligence? Can we wield our agency as though it were incidental rather than inevitable? Simultaneously acknowledging the faculty of planetary systems and the quantifiable effects of human activity upon them, the question is how to construct a beneficent framework and how to act within it. What does this action look like, especially as it moves to limit itself?

PART II: HOW TO

The First Choice: Action Typologies

Acknowledging that we must grapple with shared agency doesn’t imply that action is a monolithic choice, broadly justified. Consider the issue of the climate feedback loop and the human agency affecting anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

Bearing with these oversimplified categories for the sake of illustration, we begin broadly with two options: exercise stewardship, or do not exercise stewardship. Crucially, choosing not to practice stewardship is far from a successful denial of agency—it is only a disengagement that defaults to cumulative harm. The current runaway impact of industrial civilization is chugging along under a broken growth paradigm, and the climate emissions feedback loop means that lack of action is in fact directional (x=x+1).

Opting instead to engage in Post-Anthropocene stewardship is to coordinate co-agency with the biosphere. If we frame climate change as a feedback loop of increasing emissions, we see our agency is most concentrated in two activity spaces: ① wherever there is possibility of human action affecting concentration of atmospheric gases, and ② wherever human action responds to planetary consequences of rising temperatures.

Subtractive & Additive Actions

To focus on the former—reducing our impact on atmospheric gas concentration—is mitigation. Mitigative interventions, like renewable energy and reforestation, tend to the cause of climate change by decreasing our emissions. I consider it subtractive action because it moves to limit itself; it is human agency responding to planetary agency by decreasing its own output. Its effectiveness is longer-term and wider-ranging, which also makes it politically difficult to implement. A localized mitigation effort would be costly and deliver little short-term return, whereas the maximized net global benefit would require global coordination and buy-in.

To focus on the latter—reducing our vulnerability to the effects of climate change—is adaptation. Adaptive interventions, like flood walls and drought-tolerant crops, address the impact of global warming by increasing our resilience. I consider it additive action because it often requires erecting and enacting new defense measures. It’s generally easier to rally around and achieve political implementation for adaptive solutions because they address short-term urgency, often at local levels. However, the ability to adapt corresponds to the power and resources of each community and nation, making it easy to fall short of a globally equitable and just transition.

Towards Proportional Mitigation

Both mitigation and adaptation are valuable and necessary. But if meaningful stewardship requires us to halt a feedback loop, then the overdeveloped West—the wealthiest 10% responsible for 50% of emissions—must engage in subtractive action with more ferocity than we take additive action. The more mitigation is emphasized, the less adaptation is required down the line. Restoration and reparation are always fraught, and at times impossible; rather than scrambling retrospectively to make amends, we must begin acting with foresight to prevent new and disproportionately distributed harm.

The mitigation described here includes any active cessation of human activity that reins in emissions towards zero. Whether it’s one localized instance or many long coordinated efforts (like an individual bringing reusable bags to the grocery store or a series of state and federal regulations on supermarket policies), cessation at its best can mark a clausal decrease but results only in a net neutral effect (5+0=5) on the feedback loop, which itself is cumulative and directional. So while net neutral action has potential power to slow the acceleration rate of global warming—and exercises the atrophied muscle of self-regulated agency!—it cannot halt or reverse the change alone; net negative interventions are the only form of subtractive action that can begin to this.

Looking back at the illustrated climate change feedback loop, net negative intervention describes a form of mitigation that actively draws existing CO2 out of the atmosphere rather than simply limiting what we add—a transfer of carbon from atmosphere to geology, facilitated by human activity. A net negative intervention can either sequester carbon without additional extraneous emissions (like peatland restoration; (0–5=-5)) or sequester more overall carbon than it emits in the process (like powering Direct Air Capture machinery to suck in ambient air and chemically separate molecules of carbon dioxide; (3–5=-2)).

Paths to Net Negative

Since we’re a long way from wondering how much mitigation is ‘enough’ to stave off the 1.5°C tipping point, net negative action in the form of carbon sequestration is what I’m most interested in discussing, advocating, scaling, and coordinating across local and global efforts.

In reality, these illustrative boundaries drawn between subtractive/additive actions are just as blurred and intertwined as the mixed agency that shepherds between them. Adaptive solutions can be simultaneously mitigative. Relocating coastal neighborhoods and housing displaced climate refugees, for example, can be an architectural investment in alternative carbon-negative building materials and integrated renewable energy infrastructures. The opposite is also true. Restoration and reforestation of desertified land will result in a more flood-resilient soil structure.

Entanglements come into play particularly within the realm of net negative set-ups I consider increasingly arithmetic (((5(6+2))/40)-6=-5), where all sorts of newly conceived emissions are required (and often extraneous) before arriving at net negative. While the final net amount of sequestered CO2 may end up being the same as that of pure subtraction (0–5=-5), numeric abstractions no longer capture the values and wider implications of various mitigation strategies.

The Unexamined Choice: Growth & Glamour

Today, the loudest and most visible climate change interventionists have gained cultural traction for lowering carbon footprints and sliding back along the quantitative emissions axis, but there has been little consideration about how they’re going about it. What about the positioning of interventions and mitigation strategies along the qualitative growth axis? To this end, Cara Daggett has diagnosed the kings of the top-left quadrant beautifully:⁴

Instead of the ”limits to growth” mood of the 1970s [...] ecomodernists claimed that ‘there was no conflict between economic growth and environmental problems’ and that technological solutions, often private and market-based, would solve any difficulties, a belief that continues to reign in much of Western corporate culture. Not only was growth not a problem—it was the solution, the very foundation of the innovation and entrepreneurship required to fix things.

Indeed, it’s more difficult to imagine the West choosing to quietly and collectively engage in the simple math of subtractive mitigation; meanwhile, the glamour of carbon calculus and investment continues to attract audiences and feed insatiable growth imperatives.⁵

The charge of stewardship in the Anthropocene is both technological and philosophical, technocratic and visionary, because the problem of climate change is a powerful combination of escalating greenhouse gas emissions (physical human activities) and embedded growth paradigms (socioeconomic human constructions) that have ushered civilization to this point. The problem is so sprawling and urgent that ideals and ethics are consistently trampled in our rush to address it. The slow work of repairing harms and dispelling fantasies can seem, well, too slow. While some fast fixes are non-negotiable and have incredible power to divert immediate damage, they’re also disproportionately represented in a daydreaming design industry that has been self-instructed to solve problems.

Interventions must be both fast and slow, hard and soft, short- and long-term. Creative coordination of co-agency must take priority over the fireworks and cartwheels of unilaterally exercised agency, fueled by capital and hurtling towards make-believe limitlessness. Stewardship happens in the bottom-left quadrant, fostering reduction that is generative rather than nostalgic or recessive. Because the main mechanisms for amplifying information and changing behaviour are ensnared in the growth paradigm itself, we must coordinate new ways to scale up the idea of scaling down. With every transition and transaction, we will wonder what ratios of visionary idealism and pragmatic complicity are required for ethical and urgent systems change.