When Leadership Remembers the Earth: Embodying the Future Through Stewardship
Ceremony in Baja California Sur, Mexico, honouring the grey whale migration season. Photo Credit: Ioana Todosia
There is a kind of leadership the Earth knows well. It is not found in titles or hierarchies but in the steady, deliberate act of tending—ensuring the world is left more thriving, generative, and alive than before we arrived.
The root of the word “tend” comes from the Latin tendere and the Proto-Indo-European ten, meaning to stretch, extend, and offer. From this root grows not only our words for care, intention, and attention but also tenderness—softness, vulnerability, and a willingness to stretch beyond the edges of comfort. To tend to life is to embrace this tenderness, offering ourselves fully to the care of what emerges when we reach the perceived limits of possibility. Tenderness, then, could be the guiding principle of leadership as stewardship. It asks us to stretch systems outward in service to life, to meet tensions with care, and to make offerings where they are most needed.
To lead tenderly is to meet the world with reciprocity, to engage in the quiet exchange of giving and receiving that sustains all things. It is to ensure that the intricate threads of the Earth’s web continue to stretch outward, flourishing with each new generation. Leadership, then, begins with the Earth—not as a resource to be managed but as a living partner, asking us to remember our place within its vast, interwoven and intelligent design.
Indigenous and multi-knowledge systems have long taught that humans are not separate from the web of life but an integral thread within it. Our role is one of care—a keystone species tasked with tending the balance that sustains all. In ecosystems, a keystone species holds things together, maintaining harmony. Like the wolf in Yellowstone or the mangroves in tropical coastal ecosystems, with their complex root systems that stabilize shorelines, filter pollutants, and act as natural buffers against storm surges, humans also hold ecosystems together, safeguarding their vitality through the intentional ways we interact with the Earth. When we forget our role as caretakers and collaborators of the Earth and remove ourselves from the networks we belong to, imbalance ripples outward, unravelling the web of life. To reclaim this role is not to dominate but to restore: to listen, to mend, and to co-create alongside the more-than-human world. It is to be the hands that plant seeds for forests we may never see, the voices that speak for life-giving waters still flowing seven generations from now, the bodies that channel more thriving futures into creation. It is to understand that our actions and capacity for creativity are the whispers of spirit carried forward, shaping futures that depend on our care today.
How we lead reflects how we see ourselves in relation to the world. For far too long, leadership has mirrored disconnection and hierarchy. We have treated the Earth and its lifeforms, including ourselves, as resources to be exploited and systems as tools for increasing profit and growth without limits. Progress has been framed as a race to escape the boundaries of our planet, rather than as a practice of tending to the conditions for life that have always sustained its thrivability. Indigenous and ancestral biocultural wisdom can offer us profound alternatives to seeing and creating the world through different perspectives. Among the Haudenosaunee, the Seventh Generation Principle reminds leaders to consider how their actions will echo across time. It asks us to listen—not just to the present moment but to the stories of ancestors whose care brought us here and to the future generations who will inherit the world we leave behind. This leadership stretches beyond immediate gain into the multidimensional realm of legacy, asking us to listen deeply to the land, the waters, the more-than-human world, and future generations.
Stewardship begins with healing. The fractures we see in the Earth’s systems, in our communities and our socio-political and organizational structures are mirrored in ourselves. They are clear reflections of our severance, from land, from ourselves, from each other, and from the rhythms and cycles that hold life together. To lead with integrity, we must first begin the inner work of restoration that repairs these fractures and brings our fragmented parts back into wholeness. Healing is not self-indulgence; it is remembrance and reconnection. It may be as simple as kneeling beside a river, feeling the rhythm of its current, and remembering that you are part of it. Or planting a seed with reverence for the soil that cradles it, knowing that the act of growing sustains not just the body but the spirit. These acts remind us that we are not apart from the Earth—we are of it. Healing, then, becomes a way of realigning with the Earth’s rhythms, grounding us in the clarity needed to act with care.
From this foundation, healing ripples outward toward everything we touch. Stewardship reminds us that leadership is not about individual indulgence but for the collective ecosystem. It asks us to embody new systems of wellbeing within so we may project them outward and design systems that strengthen community networks. Relational wellbeing is the foundation of thriving. Among the Coast Salish Peoples, the tradition of potlatch ceremonies exemplifies this principle: leaders give freely, redistributing wealth as an act of reciprocity that strengthens the whole. This is leadership rooted in abundance, not scarcity—an understanding that the wellbeing of one is inseparable from the wellbeing of all.
The Earth, too, carries scars but holds immense capacity for renewal when partnered with relational care. Practices like the controlled burns of Indigenous firekeepers or the rotational grazing of the Maasai show us how humans can act as collaborators in regeneration. In Europe’s Carpathian Mountains, a remarkable example of stewardship is taking shape with the reintroduction of wild bison. Once extinct in this region, the bison are being returned to the Romanian wilderness in a collaboration between conservationists and peasant farming communities. This initiative is about more than bringing back a species; it is about restoring biocultural diversity, reviving degraded landscapes, and rebuilding a relationship between people and the ecosystems they inhabit. This is regenerative healing in action.
Similarly, we might look back to the Ancient Nabataeans of present-day Jordan, who developed sophisticated engineering that carved water systems into the desert, creating oases of abundance to sustain a large population living in arid lands. In Mesoamerica, the milpa farming system—intercropping maize, beans, and squash—nourished not only a growing civilization but the soil itself, ensuring abundance for future harvests that have persisted for thousands of years. These ancient practices remind us that stewardship is not about control but co-creation, not just pragmatic but ceremonial expressions of reciprocity that design systems mirroring and collaborating with the Earth’s gifts and regenerative intelligence.
This is the essence of rooted futurism: a futurism that does not seek to escape into the future but honours the wisdom of the past while imagining thriving systems of life in the face of accelerated change. Rooted futurism reminds us that thriving is not about anxiously inventing new solutions but about reweaving and co-creating with the rhythmic intelligence of the Earth that has always sustained us and is always communicating with us, because it is a part of us. It asks us to draw from ancestral wisdom while imagining new systems that honour patterns of renewal. Like the Māori concept of whakapapa, a genealogical framework that connects people not only to their ancestors but also to the land, waters, and sky as part of a greater living lineage (or system). It views all beings as interconnected threads in a vast network of relationships, where humans are not separate from the environment and cosmos, but deeply embedded within it. Whakapapa teaches that each generation inherits a sacred responsibility to care for these relationships, ensuring the thriving of the whole for those yet to come. It is both a call to remember where we come from and an invitation to act with integrity in creating the future.
In Baja California Sur, the relationship between people, desert, and grey whales offers a profound example of cyclical futurism. Every year, whales migrate thousands of miles from the Arctic to the lagoons of the Baja Peninsula to mate, give birth, and nurture their young, connecting distant oceans to desert sanctuaries where life begins anew. After this sacred time, they return to Arctic waters, completing a cycle that has persisted for millennia. This annual migration is not merely a biological event but an ecological and spiritual rhythm that ties together the Arctic, the Pacific, and the Baja Peninsula in a dance of interdependence.
For the coastal communities of Baja California Sur, including ancestral fishermen, the whales’ migration is regarded as both sacred and reciprocal. The whales are seen as ancestors and guardians—beings with whom humans share a profound relationship of care. Stories, ceremonies, and songs honour this connection, reflecting an understanding of life’s cyclical nature—that what is nurtured today will return, that life is interconnected across time and space, and that the continuity of these cycles is vital to the health and continuity of all beings. By protecting the lagoons and ensuring the whales’ safety during this vulnerable and vital part of their life cycle, the peoples of the Baja Peninsula act as stewards of cycles that have endured for millennia. In doing so, they sustain biodiversity, the delicate balance of marine ecosystems, and the cultural integrity of their people. This is the heart of cyclical futurism: a vision of thriving that is not linear but rhythmic, not extractive but regenerative. It calls on us to honour the cycles that sustain life and to act in ways that ensure their flourishing for generations to come.
What might all of this look like in practice? Imagine what might emerge if leadership was rooted in this same ethos of care and reciprocity—if we led our lives as though we, too, were stewards of vital cycles. Imagine embodying these frameworks and extending them out as local and global structures. Envision education systems that teach how to listen deeply to the land, cultivating generations that prioritize connection, collaboration, and wellbeing over competition and hierarchy. This is leadership as an offering: a way of guiding with humility, restoring connections, and stretching the future outwards where thriving might be shared by all.
Picture cities designed like ecosystems, where buildings purify water and restore biodiversity in increasingly arid landscapes. Envision economies modelled after nature’s cycles, functioning like the mycorrhizal networks of forests, where waste becomes a resource and growth regenerates and nourishes the whole rather than depletes it. Imagine global routes of exchange mirroring the migration of whales, regenerating cycles of continuity as we move and share across territories.
What if technologies honoured and protected the sovereignty of Indigenous knowledge, enhancing practices that have cared for the Earth over vast periods? Picture technological advancements that mimic the intelligence of Earth’s living systems—supporting its rhythms rather than disrupting them—and enhancing humanity’s ability to protect cycles of continuity and renewal. Imagine governance systems that prioritize seventh-generation thinking, recognizing that every decision ripples across generations and ecosystems.
Imagine all of the different possible futures.
These are not distant or abstract dreams. They are the seeds of futures already being planted and cared for by those who listen to the Earth’s intelligence. The Earth remembers this kind of leadership. It exists in the resilience of forests after fire, in rivers that find their way to the oceans, and in the ancient memory of whale songs that return to their sacred lagoons across generations. If we listen, we can remember that it exists within us, too. To lead as a steward is to step into this memory, to weave care into our actions and the fabric of the worlds we create. With hands in the soil, hearts open to futures we may never see, and spirits attuned to the rhythms of the Earth, we can begin the quiet, essential work of tending a world in need of our human presence, creativity and care.
