The worldStewardship

The belief is that human beings are stewards of God's creation and must improve their mastery over their own desires if they want to help the world achieve balance.

The Guru Granth Sahib teaches that Sikhs show respect and responsibility towards creation and bear in mind the needs of future generations, as well as their own current needs.

Environmental responsibility

For many Sikhs, the guiding principles regarding the environment would be to live simply in this world, to respect the nature that God has created and to continue to work towards equality by equally sharing all resources. A growing number of Sikhs understand and apply these principles to the question of looking after the environment in a variety of ways:

• focusing on trying to repair the damage that humans have done to the environment
• challenging all Sikhs to support all environmental programmes, especially those which use recycling, clean and renewable energy supplies and locally grown food sources
• ensuring that people around the world have access to clean water as the source of life that brings food for both humans and animals - it is a good symbol for the whole environment and the interdependence of creation
• teaching that all lifestyles should be based on sharing the world's resources fairly and a simple lifestyle allows this to happen more easily
• working to ensure all forms of exploitation of people and of resources are ended, and that a lack of social justice is the underlying root problem that is reflected in the misuse of the environment