Stewardship, religious and secular, its critics and UNESCO

1
Stewardship, religious and secular, its critics
and UNESCO

• by
• Robin Attfield
• presented by Johan Hattingh

2
Central concepts

• We are members of a transgenerational community
  of moral agents, inheriting both benefits and
  burdens from our predecessors and passing them on
  to our successors
• We are entrusted by our ancestors with the care
  of the planet and its systems
• We share this task with our successors who will
  benefit if we play our task with integrity

3

• Religious stewardship
• Judaism, Christianity, Islam
• Critics Matthew Fox and Clare Palmer
• Anthropocentric, managerial, aloof from nature,
  not useful to guide environmental ethics
• Defend stewardship by giving a fuller statement
  of it (p 6-7)

4

• History of stewardship in Christianity
• Biblical Old Testament (Genesis Leviticus)
• To dress and keep the garden
• Land not owned by humanity rather a leasehold
• Biblical New Testament
• Teachings of Jesus
• Lilies, birds, domestic animals have independent
  value and moral standing
• Parables of stewardship and accountability also
  extend to use of resources

5

• Stewardship caring management
• Alternative tradition to perfect nature
• Both traditions combined in
• Benedictine monasteries (6th 12th Century)
• Basil the Great (4th Century founder of Orthodox
  Monasticism)

6

• A conflicting view
• Lynn White Jr
• The historic roots of our ecological crisis
  1967
• Christianity a source of dominance and despotism
• A misinterpretation?

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Secular stewardship

• Stewardship without God?
• To whom are secular stewards answerable?
• Future generations?
• Karl Marx a transgenerational community of
  humanity
• All predecessors, contemporaries and successors
  who, as moral agents, care for the earth

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And UNESCO?

• Introduction of UNESCOs book on environmental
  ethics Environmental Ethics and International
  Policy (2006) characterize stewardship as
  anthropocentric
• Attfield takes issue with this

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Conclusion

• Indeed stewardship remains not just a coherent
  position but also a motivationally
  self-sustaining one, arising historically at it
  does from our great theistic traditions. Whether
  it is held in a religious or a secular form, this
  already widespread stance promises to become a
  vehicle for environmentalism and for its serious
  application to policy. UNESCO would be sadly and
  seriously mistaken to say otherwise, and both
  Russia and the rest of the world would be worse
  off if stewardship were to be abandoned.
• Attfield, p 31