The Steward

In the Chāndogya Upanishad, a homeless person named Raikva tells Jānaśruti, the richest man of the town, a tale that illustrates who the true owner of this world is. One day, while two learned men were eating, a student came up to them and asked for food. When the men turned him away, the student said, “Who is that being who guards this world and to whom all this wealth truly belongs? Though unseen by all, he is present everywhere.”

One of the men reflected on this question and then replied thoughtfully, “This being is the Ātman, the true devourer of this world whose greatness is beyond measure. He is the one we worship.” The man then turned to his companion and said, “Let us share our food with this student.” After narrating this story, Raikva told Jānaśruti, “All this truly belongs to the Ātman, the great being that has grasped this whole world with his teeth. The one who knows this truth can sink his teeth too into this world and become ever nourished.”

Mahatma Gandhi, who possessed less than ten things at his death (including sandals, an eating bowl, a watch, and spectacles), is one of the best exemplars of the stewardship principle of supporting oneself through renouncing ownership. He thought that the third line (“Support yourself by renouncing ownership”) in the first verse of the Isha Upanishad ought to be considered one of the great sayings of the Upanishads. He went even further and said that if all of Hinduism’s sacred texts were to be lost suddenly, their core meaning could be reconstructed fully from the first verse of the Isha Upanishad.

At the heart of the stewardship concept is the emphasis on long-term outcomes that go beyond one’s own lifetime and pleasures. As stewards, we preserve and renew nature and its resources for the living beings that come after us. They are not just for our own pleasure because of the simple reason that we are not their true owners.

Consider the remarkable story of the late Ray Anderson, founder and former CEO of Interface, a billion-dollar US based carpeting company that he started in 1973 after a trip to Europe where he discovered modular or “tile” carpeting. He was the first major American CEO to have come out strongly for protecting nature, pursuing it with a passion and pragmatism that made him a hero to many. He was often called the "greenest” CEO in America during his lifetime. However, for the first twenty years of the company’s existence, he was mainly concerned with making profits and implementing a business model that was radically new to the industry.

Everything changed in 1994. Anderson was trying to come up with a sustainability vision for his company that year and all he could think of was to comply with the many rules and regulations that the government produced. But he happened to read Paul Hawken’s Ecology of Commerce, which had just come across his desk. He said that the experience was “an epiphany, a rude awakening, an eye opening experience, and the point of the story felt just like the point of a spear driven straight into my heart.”

Anderson felt he was “convicted as a plunderer of the Earth.” Business’s impacts on nature, particularly due to its dependence on fossil fuels, felt to him like “the theft of our children’s future” that would someday be considered a crime. He resolved to make his company fully sustainable and set the then unprecedented goal of zero impact on nature by 2020. He pursued this goal (“Mission Zero”) with tremendous focus, reaching 60 percent of it when he died of liver cancer in 2011.

Ray Anderson continues to inspire the people in his company, and their memorial to him is touching and simple in its genuineness. They were inspired by his vision of changing the world and by his humility as a person. His successor recalled in an interview, “He always put the company and the people ahead of himself.” He was very clear that sustainability was good for business. It helped Interface cut $400 million in waste and double profits.

He said in a moving TED Talk in 2009, “I always make the business case for sustainability. It’s so compelling. Our costs are down, not up. Our products are the best they’ve ever been. Our people are galvanised around a shared higher purpose and the goodwill in the marketplace. We might not have survived the recession without the advantages of sustainability.” He concluded, “We are each and everyone a part of the web of life. We have a choice to make during our brief visit to this beautiful blue and green living planet: to hurt it or to help it.” Although no longer in this world, he continues to top many people’s list of CEOs as stewards.