People are good at stewardship
- 1The Nature Conservancy Arlington Virginia USA
Abstract
Environmental sciences and policy have long been framed on the premise that environmental harm is an expression of human nature rather than a product of specific historical and political arrangements. This framing has shaped a generation of interventions designed to constrain human behaviour rather than enable human capacity. We argue for a different starting point that the capacity to live in generative, reciprocal relationships with the rest of nature is one of our defining strengths as a species and that the evidence for this claim is now extensive, cross‐disciplinary and consequential. We recommend reorienting both research and practice around the acknowledgement that environmental degradation is not a human baseline to be incrementally mitigated, but a historically recent pathology rooted in settler and extractive colonialism, industrial capitalism and the deliberate dismantling of Indigenous and other local governance systems. Recentring the human capacity for stewardship shifts the primary focus of the pro‐environmental enterprise from mitigating a flaw to enabling a human strength. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
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BibTeX
@article{loring2026people,
title = {{People are good at stewardship}},
author = {Philip A. Loring and Miguel Sioui},
journal = {People and Nature},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.1002/pan3.70454},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.70454},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - People are good at stewardship
AU - Philip A. Loring
AU - Miguel Sioui
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/04
JO - People and Nature
DO - 10.1002/pan3.70454
UR - https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.70454
AB - Environmental sciences and policy have long been framed on the premise that environmental harm is an expression of human nature rather than a product of specific historical and political arrangements. This framing has shaped a generation of interventions designed to constrain human behaviour rather than enable human capacity. We argue for a different starting point that the capacity to live in generative, reciprocal relationships with the rest of nature is one of our defining strengths as a species and that the evidence for this claim is now extensive, cross‐disciplinary and consequential. We recommend reorienting both research and practice around the acknowledgement that environmental degradation is not a human baseline to be incrementally mitigated, but a historically recent pathology rooted in settler and extractive colonialism, industrial capitalism and the deliberate dismantling of Indigenous and other local governance systems. Recentring the human capacity for stewardship shifts the primary focus of the pro‐environmental enterprise from mitigating a flaw to enabling a human strength. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
SN - 2575-8314
ER -