Our World Needs More Stewards

Twenty years ago, I spent a summer home from college working in the gift shop of my local art museum. Selling tea towels with Monets on them was not my idea of a fulfilling summer experience (I’d wanted a curatorial internship), but the job came with one magical perk: opening the museum.

Every morning, I came in through the security entrance in the back and collected my keys from the guard. Then I ascended through the darkened galleries, turning on the lights as I climbed, and ultimately rolled up the motorized gateway at the front of the museum. On the way, I got to be alone with art.

How do I capture what it feels like to stand by yourself in a shadowy room in front of the muted hues of Monet’s Water Lilies and Japanese Bridge, then watch it erupt into color as you turn on the light? It is something like a cross between a curtain being yanked away for a dramatic reveal and opening your eyes after falling asleep in the sun. I could only linger there for a moment, but in that moment, I illuminated this masterpiece and prepared it to be marveled at for the day. In one small way, I got to care for it.

These little acts — opening the gate, turning on the lights — granted me a sense of stewardship over the art. The fact that they were simple tasks performed by a 19-year-old slinging souvenirs is the point. I wasn’t a conservator or a curator, but I got to feel like the art was in my care, too. I was also its custodian.

There is a strong and mutually re­inforcing connection between our sense of self and the things that we care for. Who we are is defined in part by the things that we think are worth caring for, and whether we care for these things, in turn, shapes our sense of self. To identify as an environmentalist, for example, involves having a strong interest in the health of our environment, which then makes you want to take an active role in protecting it. To identify as a book-lover involves caring about books, which will dispose you to do things that support book culture (joining a book club, shopping at your local bookstore, volunteering at the library, or simply making time in your life to read).

Like my summer working at the art museum gift shop shows, there are many ways (some small, some surprising) that people can take on a sense of agency for the things they value that reinforces their relationship and sense of responsibility toward them. You don’t need to work for a conservation organization or devote all your weekends to climate activism, for instance, to feel like environmentalism is central to your identity. Even finding little ways to care for the environment (volunteering in a community garden, picking up trash while out on a walk) helps reinforce your sense that being an environmentalist is a part of who you are.

The more that people can involve themselves in caring for the things that matter to them, the more they will also be able to see themselves as caretakers — and the better off those things, from the natural world to the written word, will be.

Advancing a more custodian-oriented culture should not minimize the importance of large-scale institutional actions and the role of specialists to safeguard what we care for. Rather it’s that we need all types of support to do this work. So much of the world’s fantastic richness is found outside of the domains that highly trained experts tend to dominate: encyclopedic museums and national parks and the like. When it comes to the local traditions, regional cuisines, and hidden vistas where you live, you’re probably as well-positioned to help save them as anyone is.

Being a caretaker can be a burden, without a doubt. But seeing yourself as a caretaker is also a generative way of organizing your life, guiding the expenditure of your time and energy to activities of maintenance, repair, and cultivation. These may be viewed as undesirable tasks in a culture that is so obsessively focused on innovating and creating. But they can also be an anchoring source of meaning for those who feel unmoored by a culture that increasingly plays out in digital spaces or is obsessed with the next great idea, often oriented toward securing the future rather than appreciating the present (or the past). When we care for things, we simultaneously cultivate our attachments to the world: We strengthen the bond between ourselves and the things that we care about, and make them that much more central to who we are.

I applied to the museum because I cared about art. The opportunity to do something in support of it helped foster my concern for it. I didn’t end up following a museum path, or even majoring in art history. But that experience helped me recognize the range of ways I could see myself as a custodian of art. Now I teach and write about the philosophy of art, and those too are ways of supporting the arts, of caring about the role that art can play in our lives.

We find ourselves again in a political moment where funding for conservation may be increasingly hard to come by. Those in positions of institutional authority over conservation (whether of art, culture, or the environment) should reach out to their communities and invite them into the practice of caretaking. Because we are going to need more caretakers — more custodians, more stewards, more people who see themselves not only as entitled to but as responsible for all of the amazing objects, practices, and places in our world. Unless everyday people can see themselves as protectors of the many things worth saving, we may quickly find that there is no one left to stand between these wonders and their loss.

Erich Hatala Matthes is associate professor and chair of the philosophy department at Wellesley College. He is the author of What to Save and Why: Identity, Authenticity, and the Ethics of Conservation. This essay originally appeared at Zócalo Public Square (zocalopublicsquare.org).

This article is featured in the May/June 2025 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.