A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
steward
A steward is someone who manages property or resources on behalf of others rather than owning them outright, and stewardship is the idea applied to land: that the holder of ground is answerable for its condition to people who are not present, including those who come after. It is the framework most conservation policy is written in and it carries a specific claim about ownership being conditional.
Etymology
The term is Old English and is built from the word for a hall or a house and the word for a guardian, but the first element is specifically the sty, so a steward is, at root, a keeper of the pigsty. From that beginning, it rose steadily through the household to become one of the great offices of state, and the royal house of Stewart takes its name from the position.
Notes
Aldo Leopold’s land ethic is the sharpest statement of the idea in English, arguing that a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. The word’s history is a useful corrective to how lofty the concept has become, since the whole idea began with somebody being responsible for the pigs and their muck.