I’m transcribing interviews from last weekend. I’ll not post extensive quotes; however, here is one from Anthony Hodgson of the International Futures Forum.
bq. The word steward implies that one does not own and in a capitalist society ownership is everything; so stewardship is a difficult perspective for most people to adopt because we are deeply inculcated that “if it’s mine, I can do what I like with it” mentality. But, in an uncertain world, ownership is up for grabs—it doesn’t mean the same thing as what we’ve assumed. Stewardship is a holistic concept; good stewardship is always looking out for the whole on any scale and trying to be responsible in the micro, meso, and macro levels. I think the deeper meaning is more reflected in indigenous societies; I’ve been recently studying the Peruvian shamans and their language of Pachu Mama, the Mother Earth. Whereas we got thrown out of the Garden of Eden and have been fighting nature ever since, in those societies nature is the provider, the Mother, the being in whom we live and have our being. Stewardship without a paradigm shift in capitalist views or communist views or all the “usual” philosophies, to me, is going to miss the point. I don’t know what the new paradigm is—but I know we need one; so a constant checking of what the foundations are in which we are placing this idea of stewardship is important. The thing about this new paradigm is that it will certainly include a gift economy or gift transactions; where the reason things are done is because of where it fits in the scheme of things not what its cash value is or how it contributes to our various prides and vanities.