Every American generation inherits the question of how to manage our natural resources. Our debates about environmental policy swing between two approaches—environmentalism, which urges restriction, and conservation, which urges restraint. Neither offers the best solution. The ideal that should guide us into the future is more grounded in our national history and culture: stewardship.
Environmentalism treats humanity as nature’s adversary. It assumes that the best way to protect our resources—including our public and private lands—is to limit human activity, often through sweeping mandates and restrictions. That view may further the desire to “do no harm,” but it also freezes innovation and alienates the very people whose participation is essential—farmers, developers, workers, and communities who live closest to the land.
Conservation similarly views nature as an always finite resource facing harm by man that must be restored. It emphasizes biodiversity and sustainable use. Yet it is based on a false equation where we must conserve if we wish to consume. What’s missing is a sense of purpose beyond preservation for its own sake.
Stewardship fills the gaps. It begins with the simple premise that we should neither worship nor exploit nature, but manage it with humility, foresight, and respect so that it flourishes for community and personal benefit.
Stewardship means more than just "avoid harm." Stewards invest in long-term conditions even as they reap reasonable near-term rewards. With natural resources, that means cultivating soil instead of depleting it and adding improvements that benefit nature. It also means not using resources indiscriminately, and making the best use of every resource every day.
Stewardship invites us to see natural resource care not as a necessary protection against perceived indulgence, but as a model that balances humility with dominion—our resources belong to us, even as we recognize that our choices about them ripple forward through generations.
This idea is not new to our national culture. From early agrarian ethics to Roosevelt-era policies, Americans have considered that development comes with duty. Our best moments in resource management—whether in agriculture, forestry, or urban development—have come when we treated our resources as entrusted to us rather than just owned by us.
Stewardship values local and individual responsibility over distant control. It encourages innovation to sustain resources, as well as investment to balance what we extract. And it builds on the best parts of the American ethic, resulting in scientific awareness and economic advancement paired with civic responsibility.
Today’s American resource management policies should reflect this mindset. They should provide incentives for care of our resources based on how that care leads to the best possible utilization of those resources. In every case, the best utilization balances the importance of economic advancement with the importance of avoiding total depletion of our natural resources if new or alternative resources are not already available.
The question for Americans is never whether we love nature, but whether we can live up to the responsibility of tending it. Stewardship offers a framework that is practical and profound. It requires us not to place the natural world off-limits, but to honor it through full engagement for the benefit of current and future generations.
Margaret Byfield is the Executive Director of American Stewards of Liberty.
