ABSTRACT
The idea that human beings should understand themselves as stewards of the environment is likely to be familiar to anyone with an interest in ecology. Mike Hulme suggests that it is common to several religious traditions (148), 1 and it can also often be found in more secular environmentalist texts. Naomi Klein, for example, has recently distinguished between stewardship, “which involves taking but also taking care that regeneration and future life continue” and extractivism: “a nonreciprocal, dominance-based relationship with the earth, one purely of taking” (169). As an ecological concept, however, stewardship clearly has its problems. It might be seen to underpin an assumption of human power over the nonhuman world and therefore paradoxically to endorse the exploitation against which it is meant to guard (Mabey 108-9). This chapter will analyze the relationship between the North American natural historian William Bartram and the British Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in order to explore a similar problem with the idea of environmental stewardship: its imbrication with a discourse of plenitude that imagines the world as an infinitely abundant creation of divine providence.
