Chapter 24 - Stewardship and Resilience

Summary

Although the dominant meaning of virtue today concerns human ethical capacity, the word had a much broader scope in Aristotle’s natural philosophy and in early-modern herbal and agricultural literature. This chapter tackles this ecological sense of “vertue” (as it was often spelled in the period), unpacking the resilient force it named in natural matter and the skill and virtue of stewardship it solicited from the humans entangled in its management in household, garden, or apothecary. As this chapter shows through readings of examples from Shakespeare, early modern practical texts, and modern environmental thinking, stewardship and resilience promise to capture the skills and virtues of household management in its broadest sense, to include care for the oikos shared by human and nonhuman creatures and systems – especially, in contemporary settings, in times of catastrophe. As keywords of contemporary environmental ethics, however, they have also been criticized for individualizing environmental virtue, undermining necessary structural change in favor of personal care and tenacity. This chapter suggests we might clarify this debate through a return to early modern vertues, by engaging the powers of nonhuman virtues and the legacy of these mixed and distributed agencies in the present.