A Giant's Strength

Thoughts on Time, Stewardship and Responsibility

“It is excellent
To have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.”

Measure for Measure

From fire and agriculture to settlement and infrastructure, human societies have long reshaped their environments. Rivers have been rerouted, forests cleared, and cities raised - each choice rippling outward, shaping worlds in ways often invisible to their makers.

Many societies understood consequence and inheritance not abstractly, but as an organising principle of daily life because the effects were felt in real time - local, unavoidable, indisputable. What distinguishes the ‘modern’ era is not ignorance, but a loss of care at scale. Power has accelerated faster than moral attention can follow, harms are outsourced geographically and time has become something to externalise rather than inhabit. The result of this care deficit is the current heady mix of malaise, greed, disenchantment and confusion we see appearing on our screens, in our media, and in our institutions.

Stewart Brand, co-founder of The Long Now Foundation - a framework and institution dedicated to extending collective responsibility across centuries - captures astutely this rupture in time consciousness, “a grave disconnect is in progress. Our ever hastier decisions and actions do not respond to our long-term understanding, or to the gravity of responsibility we bear.¹” The Long Now materialises a relationship with time itself, one in which the future becomes a visible constituency rather than a distant abstraction; a reality to which we are morally accountable.

Yet this awareness is far older in human culture. We have the Haudenosaunee who weigh the impact of a decision on the seventh generation yet unborn. Similar practices guide the Māori concept of kaitiakitanga which translates to guardianship and protection of the natural world. Countless Indigenous traditions around the world share this core orientation towards care and relationality; stewardship is the framing, and is not adopted as a role, but lived as a condition of belonging. Decisions are inseparable from their consequences, woven into daily life and community.

Modernity displaced these frameworks not because they were wrong, but because speed, extraction, and short-term optimisation unlocked powerful and profit of a hitherto unknown scale. These logics pushed harms downstream, and they failed morally by normalising indifference to inheritance. John Berger in his seminal Ways of Seeing² notes that such failures begin in perception: “the way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe.” When consequences are distant, fragmented, or invisible, care erodes. The modern world has fundamentally skewed the ways we see and value what we create. A dam is built without care for the hundreds of ecosystems that rely upon that river’s specific pulse and flow; a city grows without pausing to consider the global disruption to pollinator pathways; human energy and creativity must yield a monetary return, otherwise it is deemed as wasted effort.

We are in dangerous territory now owing to scale, pace and persistence.

Ideas no longer remain local.

Technologies spread near instantaneously.

Institutions ossify around early assumptions.

Planetary systems are irrefutably harmed by cumulative human behaviour, crossing generations.

Climate systems, infrastructure, and global networks reveal that there is no meaningful separation between present action and future condition. Nora Bateson’ work with Warm Data Labs³, asks us to take seriously the interconnected nature of complex systems and inter-relationality of information. Here she speaks to the limitations of the purely quantitative approach of late modernity: “to lock down the delicate filigree of life in explanation is to lose it, but not to see it is disastrous” but it also applies to our refusal to see how utterly entangled all life is, including time lines. The future is embedded in the now; we cannot defer it. Every choice - from the way we farm, build, or govern - already stretches forward and rather dizzyingly, reframes how we see our past selves, too.

Much unmaking and remaking will have to occur. It will take serious work. It will be messy, iterative, unrelenting. But first, before all the doing starts, we need to awaken to a paradigm many cultures never abandoned - one that recognises humanity as a planetary force bound by continuity. As Sociologist Elise Boulding astutely notes, “the image of the future is what determines present behaviour.” When futurity collapses, responsibility collapses with it. Stewardship restores the future as a shared moral space, allowing us to act with intention, care, and integrity.

Human impact has reached a point where it can neither be ignored nor outrun - whether understood as the Anthropocene or as a time of Homo Oblivious, in which humanity has forgotten its right relation to the rest of life. Age of the Steward posits as an alternative civilisational narrative. It is a story we are invited to inhabit as an act of agency, rather than passively accepting the narrow, techno-dystopian vision we are currently barreling towards.

In contrast to the modern identity, which often assumes a very human mastery or dominion over the world, a steward sees themselves as embedded within it, charged not to control but to care. Whichever nuance we are drawn towards - guardian, steward, kin, custodian, caretaker - each term signals an active, ongoing relationship with what we inherit and what we pass on. For the TLDR crowd, to be a steward is to orient action around responsibility rather than dominance, foresight rather than expedience.

In this context, stewardship is not a posture or personal ethic layered onto an unchanged world. It is a re-imagining of individual identity and collective cultural re-programming. Age of the Steward is an invitation to re-orient how we relate to time, creativity, technology, and responsibility in late modernity.

Permission to do the right thing may actually also solve part of the alleged ‘meaning crisis.’

This awakening is not only about safeguarding what comes after us; it is also about restoring depth, quality, and meaning in the present. Contribution becomes more than effort; it becomes an act of adding lasting significance. In reclaiming slowness, attending to detail, and nurturing what endures, we resist the hollowing forces of speed, churn, and trivialisation (nb: enshittification). When action reconnects to consequence, ambition aligns with care, and creation becomes a medium for enduring value. Stewardship offers satisfaction not by fleeting reward, but by participating in a story that spans time, communities, and generations. A person tending a community orchard, or designing a long-lived building for example, participates in a lineage of care that is both immediate and generational.

Stewardship does not demand moral heroism or purity. It asks for realism about power, honesty about time, and the willingness to carry what we already affect. It is an invitation to act with care, depth, and meaning at the scale of our reach - to shape a world we will not be present to finish, yet for which we are nonetheless responsible.

I will leave you with Edmund Burke, a man of many views but with a perspicacity here that feels as timely now, as it did back in 1790,

“Society is indeed a contract…it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

Reflections on the Revolution in France

We are but giants in a thimble-sized world of our own making. At the scale of the cosmos, we are temporary visitors on a miraculous planet, with a humbler opportunity: to tend to life and hand it off with grace to the next generation.

Always,

H

1. The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility by Stewart Brand (1999)

2. Ways of Seeing by John Berger (1972)

3. Warm Data Labs, Bateson Institute