A Culture of Stewardship

While he never said it outright, I could tell my father was disappointed that I never joined the Lodge. Like his father, and generations of male Chases before him, we had always been Masons. I liked them. Brothers frequently stopped by the house to conduct lodge business. Courteous and jovial, they remembered our names and asked how we were doing in school. What stood out most to me was that the bond they shared with my dad was as evident as the differences between them: mechanics and bankers, rich and poor, conservative and liberal. I sensed the camaraderie and was moved by their dedication to community service, health care for children and seniors, and the stories of fraternal support when life became difficult for one of the brothers. But my father made it clear that these benefits were not the reason to join the Lodge. They were the result of belonging to something larger than oneself. 

I got the point, but I simply preferred to spend my free time outdoors fishing or birding, where the company of fellow humans was not necessarily a bonus. Besides, I grew up in a small island community and felt I had all the intimate human contact I could handle. As it turned out, my brother fulfilled the family legacy, while I later discovered that I was part of a much larger exodus away from civic engagement.

As made famous in Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, there has been a documented and dramatic drop in community participation since the mid-twentieth century, including diminishing civic engagement, voting, local meeting attendance, and involvement in community organizations. At first, the trend meant little to me. I assumed I knew all about community participation and belonging — until I spent a single day volunteering with a group just outside Chicago.

At that time conservationists were just learning how to restore a globally rare ecosystem, the Coastal Sandplains. Martha’s Vineyard, where I was born and where I worked as a conservationist, still retained many fire-adapted sandplain habitats, such as grasslands, heathlands, and oak barrens. But one was missing: oak savannas. Imagine widely scattered, open-crowned oak trees with grassy and shrubby understory, home to a suite of rare species found in neither oak woodlands nor grasslands. That was one landscape type that early explorers and colonists described, but we had no reference community to emulate, much less an idea of how to restore it. So, at the invitation of a friend, I traveled to Barrington, Illinois, the epicenter of oak savanna research and restoration.

On a Saturday morning, we joined about 20 Citizens for Conservation volunteers at the nursery of organization leader Tom Vanderpoel. The group included retirees, high school students, city yuppies, an elderly farmer, homemakers, a sorority sister, and even a conservationist or two. We were handed tools, received instructions for the day’s goals, and carpooled to a nearby park where oak savanna restoration was underway. We paired off and set to work.

It was a hundred degrees and a hundred percent humidity. Maybe two hundred. And we were hauling brush, pulling weeds, and collecting seeds. Within minutes, everyone was soaked. I worried about some of the older volunteers, but everyone stayed hydrated and kept going. By morning’s end, the amount of land we had cleared and prepared for fire and planting was astonishing. But that was not what impressed me most.

Throughout the morning, everyone was engaging in the kind of easy banter that’s born of familiarity and trust. A private conversation passed between two veteran volunteers. Someone cracked a joke loud enough for all to hear. Another called everyone over to see a rare plant. We gathered in a circle to learn about savanna ecology. Restoration, it seemed, was not the goal, but rather the outcome of a community coming together.

Years later I would learn that Citizens for Conservation had amassed a pool of more than one thousand volunteers from across the Chicago metropolitan area, ranging from those who came once a year to those who came nearly every weekend. Friendships formed. Expertise and task specialists emerged. Students chose ecological majors. A widow and widower met, fell in love, were married at a restoration site, and invited fellow volunteers to the wedding. Based on the diversity I saw on that one day, I’m sure that, across this vast number of volunteers, there was every stripe of American — politically, ideologically, religiously, economically, and ethnically. I told my host I had come to learn how to restore oak savannas, but I left learning how to restore community.

Eventually, it dawned on me that this was what my father meant about the Lodge and belonging. I called it community, but for him the more apt term may have been fellowship, where people of different stripes gather under shared values for a common purpose.

One of the great privileges of my current work as the executive director of Village and Wilderness is that I get to witness the emergence of other nature-centric communities, often under the most unlikely circumstances. Take, for example, the work of MiniNature Reserve in the low-income and ethnically diverse neighborhoods comprising Oxnard, California, part of metropolitan Los Angeles. There, when formal permission was not initially granted, citizen guerrilla gardeners banded together to revegetate neglected roadsides and city lots with native plants. Soon, formerly barren parts of neighborhoods began to flourish, and the organization was given permission to rewild additional lands. In the process, community pride developed. Neighbors learned how to identify, collect, and nurture native plants. Next, they learned from Indigenous residents how to sustainably harvest and prepare these plants for food and medicine, and how to save and replant the seeds for the next generation of pollinators and people. A diverse community welded itself together through nature restoration.

Or consider the example of Love Your Alley in Bexley, Ohio, which took backyard rewilding to a new level. Neighborhood volunteers went door to door and convinced thirty of fifty contiguous property owners to remove invasive plants and replace them with natives, restoring a patch of land far more attractive to passing pollinators and birdlife. In the process, something else happened. Neighbors considered how their landscaping might appear when viewed from next door. A fence came down. Someone brought cookies to a volunteer crew. Neighbors were invited to Thanksgiving dinner. Others attended a funeral. Through the act of caring for the land, neighbors who had barely known one another came to care for each other, too. Whether this caring transcended differences or simply bypassed them by focusing on a common cause, I can’t say. What appears consistent in all these stories, however, is that stewarding the land expanded into stewarding the stewards themselves. In other words, stewardship was not a task; it became an ethic.

We have all seen times when a community comes together heroically after a catastrophe, and we have seen the intense bonding among teammates who work together to help those in need. No one focuses on individual differences; the collaboration itself becomes the story. But as humbling and uplifting as they are, these collaborations seldom span decades or continue across generations.

There are, of course, many examples of transgenerational stewardship. Hunters, fishers, falconers, gardeners, and birders have long taught the next generation technical skills, the ethics of protecting a resource, and the discipline of restraint. I imagine similar transgenerational knowledge and ethics exist across many vocations, avocations, and civic organizations. Not often, however, do they embrace large numbers of otherwise dissimilar citizens simply because they all happen to live in the same community. When people of different backgrounds in the same place share an ethic of stewardship over decades or generations, the ethic becomes culture. I call it a culture of stewardship.

In one of his most prophetic essays, The Land Ethic, Aldo Leopold wrote, “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the [human] community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” How does it emerge? “We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.” I have a hunch about why volunteer-driven, nature-centric programs are particularly good at developing a land ethic that grows into a culture of stewardship. I will leave it to some enterprising sociologist to confirm or refute it, but here is my theory:

• Nature-centric programs build a culture of stewardship because:
• The goal is perceived as greater than the interests of the individuals pursuing it.
• The intended outcomes take time to accomplish but are composed of achievable, repeatable tasks with tangible results.
• Programs are open to all participants and stakeholders, regardless of differences, and require collaborative effort.
• They occur in places of beauty, or places in the process of becoming beautiful.
• The work is enjoyable, even when it is hard, and sometimes because it is hard.
• And finally, one’s pleasure and pride in the work are socially reinforced by others who share the dream and the labor.

Late in life, I think I have finally come to understand the value my father and the generations before him found in the Lodge. It was not the rituals or the titles that mattered, but belonging in service to something larger than oneself. Civic and faith-based organizations have long provided this, and they continue to matter deeply. At a time when our differences are magnified, when social media isolates more than it connects, and when people yearn for the steadiness of real community, we need that sense of belonging more than ever. Today, we have added strains on society: climate change, biodiversity loss, and children cut off from nature. So I advocate for an additional path, one my father might not have recognized at first but would have instinctively understood: the shared work of tending the land together. For all its challenges, restoring nature restores us too, and in that shared labor, the fellowship I once overlooked has begun to grow again, rooted this time not in a lodge hall but in the living world that surrounds us.

Tom Chase is the founder and executive director of Village and Wilderness.

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