Care and stewardship: From home to planet

Care may be a way to engage people in planetary stewardship by connecting their responses to what they notice in everyday life with their effect on larger environmental systems. Care is a deep, pervasive cultural norm that is imposed upon what is noticed and noticeable to others. At the same time, care often evokes an immediate aesthetic response. Both responses provoke behavior to change, maintain, and protect landscape appearance. This essay examines whether the immediacy of the care response can be extended to effect stewardship at broader time and spatial scales. It describes how landscape evidence of care has a halo effect in which an overall impression of the appearance of the landscape affects assumptions about the people who are responsible for providing care, as well as assumptions about resource characteristics. Finally, it suggests that this halo effect of care can contribute to design and planning strategies that benefit environmental health and ecosystem services at broader scales.

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