Environmental stewardship is a broad term that covers a variety of activities performed by individuals, community groups and other organizations who support nature. The term can refer to strict conservation of the environment or active restoration efforts. It is practiced both locally and internationally in rural and urban areas. There are a myriad of studies that examine this issue. However most of them concentrate on a particular subset of the various factors that could support or affect environmental conservation. These include ethics, motivations and capacity, as well as institutions, networks and context. 2013; Silbernagel et al. 2015).
The most important aspect of environmental management is direct stewardship, such as planting trees, removing undesirable species, protecting waterways, or restricting recreational activities in wilderness areas. This can also mean educating others on the importance of environmental issues as well as encouraging civic action, such as writing letters or petitions to legislators, or voting for candidates who support sensible environmental policies.
Environmental stewardship activities can have positive social effects in addition to ecological benefits, such as restoring ecosystems that have been destroyed. These are a mix of cultural, economic, and governance-related outcomes. For instance, when buying food items from a local farmer’s market or community-supported agriculture program consumers are engaged in environmental stewardship by supporting the production of sustainable foods and reducing the demand for semi-trucks in order to transport their goods across the country (Breslow and co. 2016). In some cases, the outcomes of stewardship could be detrimental to the desired result. For instance in indigenous communities that depend on the harvesting of large mammals for their cultural identity and livelihoods, a no-take conservation approach could be in opposition to their holistic social-ecological worldview (Clarke 1999).