People are good at stewardship

Abstract Environmental sciences and policy have long been framed on the premise that environmental harm is an expression of human nature rather than a product of specific historical and political arrangements. This framing has shaped a generation of interventions designed to constrain human behaviour rather than enable human capacity. We argue for a different starting point that the capacity to live in generative, reciprocal relationships with the rest of nature is one of our defining strengths as a species and that the evidence for this claim is now extensive, cross‐disciplinary and consequential. We recommend reorienting both research and practice around the acknowledgement that environmental degradation is not a human baseline to be incrementally mitigated, but a historically recent pathology rooted in settler and extractive colonialism, industrial capitalism and the deliberate dismantling of Indigenous and other local governance systems. Recentring the human capacity for stewardship shifts the primary focus of the pro‐environmental enterprise from mitigating a flaw to enabling a human strength. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.