Intergenerational Knowledge Stewardship

Sor Juana received intellectual traditions across centuries and languages, preserving and advancing them while making them relevant to her own moment. She modeled knowledge stewardship—the responsibility to receive what previous thinkers discovered, engage it critically, and transmit it enhanced to future generations. Climate justice requires this same sensibility toward ecological knowledge: indigenous practices refined over centuries of relationship with specific places, agricultural techniques that sustained communities without depletion, architectural and technological wisdom about living within limits. It also requires stewardship of scientific knowledge about planetary systems, honestly communicating both what we know with certainty and what remains uncertain. This contrasts sharply with extractive approaches that strip knowledge from communities (bioprospecting without benefit-sharing, appropriation of indigenous practices), that suppress inconvenient findings (tobacco industry suppressing health research), or that treat each generation as free to start afresh without learning from predecessors' mistakes. Intergenerational stewardship means recognizing we are trustees, not owners, of knowledge and ecosystems. We receive them from ancestors, use them responsibly in the present, and must pass them forward—ideally improved—to descendants.