Caring for Community: Stewardship for the Seventh Generation
By Staci Mercado
As a dual-credit English instructor at an Iowa high school, I’ve been teaching Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael in an Introduction to Literature class for many years. There aren’t many books I feel everyone should read, but this is one of them.
With the help of this novel, my students and I consider a question that carries our classroom conversations into the world beyond: What would change if we understood ourselves not as owners of the natural world, but as members of its community?
Our young people are inheriting an Iowa facing difficult questions about the health of its people and its land. Concerns about cancer, water quality, and the loss of fertile soil are part of the future they are preparing to enter. It is easy to mistake the most visible parts of teenage life—the phones, the social media feeds, the search for belonging—for the whole of what matters to them. But in our classroom conversations, I hear concerns that reach far beyond the next notification. My students are not only asking what kind of world awaits them; they are asking why it should fall to them to repair the damage earlier generations have left behind. That frustration deserves more than reassurance that they can make a difference. It deserves a response from those of us who still have the power to act. If we believe in caring for future generations, we cannot simply hand them our unfinished work and call them our hope.
Taking that responsibility seriously means asking not only how to repair the damage, but why we keep creating it. This is where Ishmael opens our inquiry. The novel follows an unnamed narrator who responds to an unusual newspaper advertisement offering instruction to someone determined to help save the world. His teacher turns out to be Ishmael, a silverback gorilla whose perspective challenges the stories humans tell about our place on Earth. The novel asks us to examine the assumptions behind our actions—and consider what becomes possible when we learn to think differently.
Quinn gives two contrasting cultural stories the names “Takers” and “Leavers.” In the Taker story, the world belongs to humanity, and other forms of life must make room for our ambitions. In the Leaver story, humanity belongs to the world, living within a community whose other members have claims of their own. Our guiding question is: What story are we living by?
A Taker belief Ishmael challenges is that humans are fundamentally flawed: destined to damage the world, unable to learn how to live differently. That story offers a convenient kind of surrender. If destruction is inevitable, what responsibility do we have to change?
In my classes, we try a thought experiment: What happens when we turn that story around? It looks something like this:
The world was not created for humans alone, and we are not doomed to destroy it. We can learn, reconsider, and choose differently. Knowledge about how to live is not forever beyond our reach; we can seek it in the living world, in our own reflection, and in the experience of people who have practiced reciprocity across generations. We can make room for other ways of living—including the lives of beings whose needs are not our own.
Quinn carries this challenge into his interpretation of the Garden of Eden. In Ishmael, the forbidden knowledge becomes the presumed authority to determine which beings may thrive and which may be eliminated for humanity’s purposes. His reading asks us to consider what happens when one species claims that power over the rest. We don't need to accept his interpretation as biblical history to recognize the question it raises: Does belonging to the world give us the right to rule it?
That question leads to another: How can we live in ways that replace entitlement with reciprocity?
The understanding that care carries obligations across generations did not begin with Quinn. Seventh-generation stewardship draws on Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) teachings associated with the Great Law of Peace, asking people to consider how today’s decisions will affect those living seven generations into the future. It extends responsibility beyond immediate needs, encompassing the relationships that sustain communities across time.
Pawpaw, wild senna, and rose mallow seeds collected by Jesse Wilken and Sawyer Mercado, both in their twenties. Their care for the living world is a reminder that younger generations are already helping shape its future—and that those of us who came before them share responsibility for that future.
As we bring it into our thinking about Iowa, we can acknowledge its source while taking its challenge seriously: What would we do differently if the people who inherit our decisions mattered as much as the people making them?
A recent Vatican theological document brings another perspective to this responsibility. In developing the concept of “ecological sin,” the International Theological Commission describes environmental harm, through actions or omissions, as a breach of our relationships with God, our neighbors, our communities, and the environment. It calls for preserving Earth for future generations and for life beyond our own species. In that view, caring for the world is an obligation that reaches beyond our own lives.
These traditions are distinct, but both challenge us to look beyond our immediate wants. What do we owe those whose lives will be shaped by our choices, even when we will never hear their voices or know their names?
Our descendants will never know many of our names. They will know something of our choices, however, through the land and water we leave them. What will they be able to grow? Where will they find clean water? Which birds will return in spring? What opportunities will they have to experience the wonder that makes us care about this place?
This issue, “Caring for Community: Stewardship for the Seventh Generation,” asks how we might live as caretakers whose decisions ripple forward to descendants we will never meet.
We follow bison at Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge and trace the deep roots of the compass plant, considering what it means to care for land that outlives us. We turn to Cornelia Mutel for an account of how two centuries of change have reshaped Iowa’s soil, water, air, and life—and for practical pathways that benefit both agriculture and our wild neighbors.
Jim Colbert reflects with wit and wisdom on a lifetime of fishing and his hope that those who come after him will find similar joy.
A. Kimimila Crow Dog invites us to consider whether our time here will be defined by the care we give to one another and to the land. And the Lobe Rangers bring stewardship into the daily work of farming, exploring how conservation practices can support both the land and the financial health of their farms.
“Caring for community” is an active practice: restoring a wetland, planting a prairie strip, reconsidering a grazing plan, or beginning a conversation that connects town and country. It means asking not only what a decision gives us now, but what it makes possible—or takes away—for those who come after us.
Ishmael closes with paired questions linking the futures of humans and gorillas. Here in Iowa, we might bring that challenge home:
What hope can we offer the prairie?
What hope can we have without it?
The seventh generation cannot speak to us yet. But my students can—and they are asking what we will do with the time and influence we have now. We owe them more than our hope that they will make things better. We owe them our care, our effort, and a living world in which they can shape a future of their own.
Staci Mercado won a Midwest Book Award for her historical fiction novel, Seeking Signs (Four Feathers Press, 2013). She has published work in Hippocampus, Broad Street, Barely South Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, Fiction Southeast, Canary, and Litro. She is the co-founder of Iowa Natives.