SECTOR 2:00 — Earth Stewardship
Earth Stewardship
Earth stewardship is a value system applied into the real world based upon cultural values emerging from a felt sense of responsibility for that which is beyond self and for those who will live in the future. Thus this sector bridges the space between cultural values and ideas and physical engagement. As we turn around the wheel after some felt spiritual connection we begin to find our way into the world, wishing to leave behind more beauty and more health than when we arrived. Thus the expression of earth stewardship is the presentation of a more mature human being. This is why we may see some hint of this pattern within the conformist vMeme series, but ultimately, full expression of the earth stewardship sector, when applied to a region beyond one's immediate surroundings, emerges with the affiliative vMeme worldview and those which arise afterwards. This critical value/ideal will manifest to different degrees of effectiveness depending upon the cultural evolution of a given social group in the various sectors. For instance, if a given social group is predominantly egocentric with regards to land ownership in land speculation, then sector two may have a lot more talk than meaningful accomplishment at least when it comes to individually owned land.
Earth Stewardship: Individual
Earth stewardship is a set of values that is held by individuals and communities but ultimately we each hold an awareness of caring for our world. The individual journey of personal and spiritual development relates quite specifically to a deepening awareness and capability to participate meaningfully in the creation, maintenance and evolution of a Sustainable Culture.
Earth Stewardship: Family or Group
Family and group, or community is such an important element of the human cultural experience that it has its own sector in the Seed Logos. Earth stewardship is such an important set of values and perspectives with regards to sustainable culture, that is also has its own sector indices logos. So this 'cell', the first order human group in sector two, has particular meaning for the sustainable culture model.
Earth stewardship values are first learned in family and community, and systems of consumption, resource use and waste management have primary significance in the household and at the scale of village. For instance a family group collectively chooses whether or not to consume organic food, to use her niches insecticides in the house, what can the coals to use for cleaning home and car, whether or not to produce food on the land and in other ways how to spend or invest capital. The village scale community can share and improve efficiency in the use of resources, possibly having collective ownership of tools, equipment and land.
Earth Stewardship: Village
The village significantly reinforces positive or negative value ideals and children; the uncles and aunties have an important role in teaching children about respect and caring for their world and its denizens. When parenting is supported outside of the single nuclear household, adults have more time for each other their children and making good decisions about the use of resources, and then made better participate in other collective decision processes, such as county or district wide use of public land.
In addition, when villages are well organized and hold coherent value positions about their welfare and concern about stewardship of the land in their regional context, then people can effectively organize to challenge other forces that may not have those interests at heart. Large commercial interests, corporate power, corrupt politicians and even exploitative tourism enterprises can only be challenged by a well-organized people who have a long-term investment in their local communities and the well-being of their context ecosystems. Thus, we see how earth stewardship values cohered at Village and regional scale have direct impact on sectors nine and ten, governance and social justice, most particularly when actualized through sector four, community.
Earth Stewardship: Bioregion / Region
When people have an identification with the land of their particular region, and assume responsibility for protection of those ecosystems, this collective sentiment and resulting action has particular importance in maintaining the condition of sustainability. This is the actualization of earth stewardship values in a culture of sustainability. Regional scale organizing may often be the only effective challenge to powerful multinational corporate interests. Thus the affiliative worldview, once matured, can effectively temper the excesses of the achievist paradigm.
Earth Stewardship: World
The concept of earth stewardship at the scale of planet is being tested with the emergent challenges of global warming, nuclear technologies, genetic engineering, fisheries management, wholesale forest destruction and species extinctions. At this time we are well into a massive planetary change of geological proportions induced by human activity. Earth stewardship principles applied in intergovernmental treaties, called for by all peoples of the world; this is the crown of sustainable culture. Nothing is of greater importance in our time, yet perhaps nothing is more challenging for the human race. The motivations of the achievist and egocentric worldviews run counter to protecting our collective commons, and yet present such an aggressive impact on collective human enterprise including formation of political process, corporate enterprise and of course human organization of extreme corruption and exploitation typical in the West over past centuries if not millennia. The challenge is to find a path to change the general course of human history, to redirect tremendous momentum. The journey is nothing short of a massive evolution of human society, the emergence of an authentic Sustainable Culture.
Varadaan (Ben Lipman) 2012