Environmental Stewardship

UPL asks its followers to practise sustainable living, environmental education, and active ecological preservation.

The peoples who have lived longest with their lands carry the oldest teaching on this. For the Māori, kaitiakitanga is the guardianship a people holds for its own land and waters. The Haudenosaunee open and close their gatherings with words of thanks to each part of the natural world, from the waters to the sun and the moon. Native Hawaiians speak of aloha ʻāina, love of the land, and mālama ʻāina, the responsibility to care for it. These teachings belong to those peoples. UPL learns from them and does not claim them.

The scriptures carry the same respect for the natural world as part of God’s creation. The Qur’an calls humankind successors upon the earth, often understood as its stewards, and warns against excess. Jewish teaching draws from a law against cutting down fruit trees in wartime a wider ban on needless destruction, which many now apply to the care of the earth. Francis of Assisi sang of the sun, the wind and the water as brother and sister, and the Catholic Church has named him patron of those who promote ecology. Seicho-No-Ie speaks of the grand harmony of God, nature and human beings.

This belief is lived out in Environmental Stewardship and the Sacredness of Nature.