Stewardship: We Are Only Passing Through (#733)
There is an old idea that seems increasingly important in a world obsessed with ownership.
Stewardship.
A steward is not an owner.
A steward is someone who has been entrusted with something valuable for a period of time and accepts responsibility for caring for it before passing it on.
That distinction changes everything.
If I own something, I might reasonably ask:
What can I get from it?
If I am its steward, the question becomes:
What condition will I leave it in?
And perhaps that is one of the questions we should be asking much more often.
The Land
The idea of stewardship is easiest to understand when we think about land.
A farmer may possess the title to a piece of land. Legally, it belongs to the farmer.
But does it really?
The soil was there long before the farmer arrived. The microorganisms, fungi, insects, grasses, trees, birds and mammals are part of ecological systems that existed before any property boundary was drawn.
And, eventually, the farmer will leave.
Someone else will inherit or purchase the land.
Regenerative agriculture recognizes this. Its central question is not simply how much can be extracted from the soil this year, but whether the soil can be left healthier, more fertile and more biologically alive than it was before.
That is stewardship.
The measure of success is not merely production.
It is what remains.
The Natural World
The same principle applies to wildlife.
We speak casually about our national parks, our forests, our rivers and our wildlife.
But a rhinoceros does not belong to us.
Neither does an elephant, an albatross, an ibis, a whale or a flightless cormorant.
We have simply inherited a world in which they happen to exist.
The extraordinary biodiversity surrounding us represents millions of years of evolution. Yet a species that has survived for hundreds of thousands - or millions - of years can disappear during a few decades of human activity.
That gives our generation an extraordinary responsibility.
We did not create these species.
We cannot recreate them once they are gone.
We are their temporary custodians.
Our Professions
Stewardship applies to professions as well.
I spent much of my life in veterinary medicine. When I entered the profession, I inherited something that generations of veterinarians, scientists, teachers and students had built before me.
Knowledge. Standards. Institutions. Traditions. Professional ethics.
A commitment to animals and to the people who care for them.
During our careers, we inevitably change our professions. Some changes are technological.
Some are economic. Some are cultural.
But those of us who spend our lives within a profession are not merely its beneficiaries.
We are also its stewards.
The question therefore becomes larger than:
What kind of career did veterinary medicine give me?
It becomes:
What kind of veterinary profession will we leave behind?
Will the next generation inherit something stronger, more humane and more intellectually curious?
Or simply something more profitable?
Universities
Universities provide an especially interesting example.
A dean does not own a school. A chancellor does not own a university. Faculty members do not own their departments. Donors do not own the institutions they support. Students do not own them either.
Each participates in something that existed before they arrived and, one hopes, will continue long after they leave.
That makes leadership fundamentally an act of stewardship.
University leaders temporarily hold authority over institutions built through generations of public investment, philanthropy, scholarship, teaching and service.
Their responsibility is therefore not simply to make decisions.
It is to protect the integrity of the institution entrusted to them.
That includes its reputation, traditions, academic independence and systems of governance.
And stewardship requires something else:
Listening.
If an institution belongs, in a meaningful sense, to generations rather than individuals, then consequential decisions should not be treated merely as transactions among the people who temporarily occupy positions of authority.
Faculty, students, staff, alumni, donors and the public may all have legitimate interests in what that institution becomes.
Shared governance, at its best, is therefore not an administrative inconvenience.
It is a mechanism of stewardship.
Leadership
This distinction between ownership and stewardship also changes how we think about leadership.
Ownership concentrates authority.
Stewardship emphasizes responsibility.
An owner can say:
I have the right to do this.
A steward must ask:
Should I do this?
Those are very different questions.
The best leaders understand that the organizations they lead are not monuments to themselves. Their names, titles and offices are temporary.
Leadership is borrowed authority.
Eventually someone else will sit behind the desk.
The meaningful measure of leadership may therefore be less about what happened while someone held office than about the condition of the institution when that person left it.
Democracy
Democracy itself depends upon stewardship.
No generation invents democracy anew.
We inherit institutions, laws, conventions and expectations from those who came before us.
Some deserve preservation. Others deserve reform. Still others may need to be discarded.
Stewardship does not mean resisting change.
Quite the opposite.
A good steward repairs what is damaged.
That is why stewardship and regeneration belong together.
Preservation asks us not to destroy something.
Stewardship asks us to care for it.
Regeneration asks whether we can leave it better than we found it.
That progression matters.
What Do We Leave Behind?
Perhaps stewardship becomes more understandable as we grow older.
When we are young, life appears to stretch endlessly ahead of us. We build careers, acquire houses, accumulate possessions and sometimes imagine that the things surrounding us are ours.
Eventually another realization arrives.
Almost everything is temporary.
The house will belong to someone else. Someone else will occupy the office. Someone else will teach the students. Someone else will walk through the forest. Someone else will stand beside the river.
Even the trees we plant may reach their greatest size long after we are gone.
There is something strangely liberating about that.
Our task was never to possess the world.
It was to participate in it.
To enjoy it. To learn from it. To repair some small part of it where we can.
And then to hand it on.
Perhaps that is the simplest definition of stewardship:
We inherit something we did not create.
We care for it for a while.
And we try to leave it better than we found it.
We are not owners.
We are only passing through.
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