🤝Stewardship isn’t a photo op—it’s showing up when no one’s watching. When I sat with John Sterling of Conservation Alliances in the mist-shrouded highlands of northern Luzon, Philippines, he didn’t hand me a press kit or rehearse talking points. He handed me a pair of worn rubber boots, a bamboo water bottle, and asked if I knew how to identify a healthy native fern from an invasive one. That moment—kneeling in damp loam under dripping *Cordyline* leaves, soil crumbling between my fingers while John quietly named three endemic orchid species blooming beside us—was the first real answer to what ‘stewardship travel’ actually means. It’s not voluntourism dressed up as ethics. It’s slow listening. It’s learning whose land you’re on before you unpack your bag. And it’s understanding that conservation work rarely looks like glossy brochures—it looks like muddy socks, shared meals cooked over firewood, and decisions made by elders whose knowledge predates colonial maps.
I’d arrived in Baguio City in early June—a time locals call “the breathing season,” when monsoon rains haven’t yet saturated the Cordillera mountains but humidity hangs thick as wet gauze. My flight from Manila landed at Loakan Airport just after dawn, and I took a white van marked “Benguet Transport” down winding roads carved into volcanic slopes. The air cooled rapidly: 22°C in Baguio versus 34°C in Manila, a relief so immediate it felt physiological. I’d come to interview John Sterling—not for a magazine feature, but because his work with Conservation Alliances had quietly reshaped how community-led land management functions across rural Luzon. Unlike many international NGOs, Conservation Alliances doesn’t fundraise globally or publish annual impact reports with pie charts. They don’t own land. They don’t run training workshops on Zoom. Instead, they embed—sometimes for years—with Indigenous communities who hold ancestral domain titles under the Philippines’ Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act (IPRA) of 19971. Their role is facilitation, not direction: helping map watersheds using GPS and oral history, translating customary law into documentation acceptable to local government units, and supporting seed banks that preserve heirloom rice varieties like tinawon and unoy.
My original plan was straightforward: spend two days in Baguio interviewing John at his office, then drive to Sagada for a quick overview of their reforestation partnership with the Kankanaey elders. But on Day One, as we reviewed field notes in his modest apartment above a sari-sari store, John paused mid-sentence, looked out the window where fog curled around pine trunks, and said, “You won’t understand stewardship if you only talk about it.” He slid a laminated map across the table—a hand-drawn topographic sketch overlaid with inked annotations in Kankanaey and English. “The trail to Bokod starts at 5:30 a.m. We walk. No vehicles past Barangay Poblacion. You carry your own water. And if you ask questions, listen to how long people wait before answering.”
🌄The turning point: when the map didn’t match the ground
We left at first light. The road to Bokod wound upward through terraced fields still slick with overnight rain. Rice paddies shimmered silver under low cloud. At the barangay center, a cluster of concrete buildings painted in faded municipal blue, we met Maria Laya, 68, chair of the Bokod Ancestral Domain Council. She wore a woven inabal shawl patterned with geometric motifs representing mountain ridges and river currents. She greeted John with a nod—not warm, not cold—and handed each of us a small bundle wrapped in banana leaf: boiled sweet potato, roasted corn, and a slice of smoked pork. “Eat first,” she said. “The path speaks louder than words.”
What followed wasn’t hiking. It was navigation by memory and relation. The “trail” vanished after 400 meters—not due to erosion, but because it wasn’t meant to be permanent. Maria led us off-path, stepping onto moss-covered stone slabs laid centuries ago by her ancestors, then veering into a narrow ravine where ferns brushed our shoulders and water trickled over black basalt. John didn’t consult his phone. He watched Maria’s feet, the angle of her wrist as she pushed aside a hanging vine, the way she paused at a boulder shaped like a crouching deer and touched its surface with her thumb. When I pulled out my GPS device to mark coordinates, she glanced at it, then said softly, “That tells where you are. But not why you’re allowed to be here.”
That afternoon, in a thatched communal house called a balai, the conflict crystallized—not interpersonal, but epistemological. A younger council member, Benjie, brought out a printed copy of the official Ancestral Domain Survey map issued by the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP). It showed clear boundaries, numbered parcels, and a dotted line marking the “conservation zone.” Maria unrolled her own map: a cloth scroll painted with charcoal and natural pigments, depicting not lines, but relationships—“where the eagle nests,” “where the wild ginger grows thickest,” “where the old man’s cough eased after drinking spring water.” Neither map was wrong. But they served different purposes—one for legal recognition, the other for intergenerational continuity. John didn’t mediate. He translated terms, clarified timelines, and asked only one question: “Which map helps your grandchildren know where to gather medicine when the clinic is closed?” Silence followed. Then Maria tapped the cloth scroll and said, “This one remembers what the land teaches. The paper one only remembers what men wrote down.”
💡The discovery: stewardship as verb, not noun
Over the next four days, I stopped taking notes every five minutes. Instead, I helped harvest ubas (wild grapes) with Maria’s granddaughter, learned to split bamboo without splintering the fibers, and sat through two hours of quiet discussion about water rights while rain drummed on the roof. John never positioned himself as expert. He passed around a notebook where elders recorded rainfall patterns since 1972—not in millimeters, but in comparisons: “less than the year the landslide took the school,” “enough to fill the stone basin near the old bridge.” He explained later that Conservation Alliances’ most consistent contribution isn’t funding or technology—it’s time. Time to sit. Time to translate oral histories into formats usable in land-title applications. Time to wait while consensus forms across generations.
One morning, walking back from checking sapling survival rates in a newly planted alnus grove, John pointed to a patch of disturbed soil near a stream bank. “See those tire tracks? From a logging truck last month. Not illegal—technically permitted under a ‘temporary use agreement’ with the municipal government. But the council never signed it.” He didn’t condemn. He didn’t call it a violation. He simply noted: “Stewardship isn’t enforced. It’s practiced until it becomes inseparable from identity.” Later, Benjie showed me photos on his phone—satellite images comparing forest cover from 2010 to 2023. The data was stark: 12% net gain in native tree density within the domain, despite nearby municipalities reporting losses. But Benjie didn’t gesture to the screen. He gestured toward a boy climbing a lumot tree, laughing as he shook down ripe fruit. “He knows this tree. His father planted it. His grandfather told stories beneath it. That’s how you keep forest—not with laws alone, but with belonging.”
🗺️The journey continues: beyond the interview
I stayed eleven days—not because I’d planned to, but because leaving felt premature. On Day Seven, Maria invited me to join the monthly panagbenga (flower festival) preparation in the village plaza. Not the tourist version in Baguio, but the local iteration: weaving garlands from native blooms, grinding rice paste for ceremonial cakes, singing chants that predate Spanish orthography. John translated fragments, but emphasized that full meaning resided in rhythm and repetition—not dictionary definitions. “Some knowledge lives in the body before it lives in language,” he said.
Practical realities surfaced daily. Electricity cut out at 8 p.m. consistently—no generator backup, just kerosene lamps and shared conversation. Water came from springs piped downhill via gravity-fed bamboo channels; during heavy rain, sediment would cloud it for hours, requiring settling tanks we cleaned together. When I asked about health access, Maria walked me to the barangay health station—a single-room structure staffed by a nurse who visited twice weekly and a community health worker trained in herbal remedies and basic diagnostics. “We don’t wait for hospitals to fix what the land already provides,” she said, handing me a pouch of dried lagundi leaves. “But we also don’t refuse penicillin when the fever won’t break.”
John’s approach to logistics reflected this duality. He carried satellite messengers for emergencies, yes—but also knew which families kept spare bicycle inner tubes, which households distilled tuba (palm wine) strong enough to sterilize wounds, and which elders could identify edible fungi growing only after specific rain patterns. His “field kit” included a digital recorder, a set of hand-carved wooden survey markers, and three notebooks: one for technical notes, one for Kankanaey translations, and one filled entirely with sketches of plants, tools, and faces.
💭Reflection: what stewardship travel asks of you
This wasn’t transformative in the way travel writing often frames transformation—no sudden epiphany, no dramatic reversal of worldview. It was quieter: a recalibration of expectation. I’d arrived thinking stewardship travel meant observing best practices. I left understanding it demanded participation in uncertainty. Not performing sustainability, but practicing humility in contexts where my expertise—journalism, urban navigation, digital literacy—held little currency unless anchored in local priorities.
I’d assumed “interviewing John Sterling” meant extracting insights. Instead, it meant receiving them conditionally: only after carrying water uphill, only after failing to tie a proper bamboo lash, only after sitting through silences I initially mistook for disengagement. Stewardship, I realized, isn’t transferable knowledge. It’s relational infrastructure—built over decades, maintained through reciprocity, and vulnerable to disruption when external actors prioritize speed over consent.
The biggest shift wasn’t intellectual. It was somatic. I noticed how my shoulders relaxed when I stopped checking my phone. How my hearing sharpened—the rustle of gabi leaves, the pitch of children’s voices echoing off limestone cliffs, the subtle shift in birdcall before rain. How time ceased feeling like inventory to manage and became texture to inhabit.
📝Practical takeaways: what this taught me about preparing for stewardship-aligned travel
None of this required extraordinary resources—just intentionality calibrated to place, not itinerary. Here’s what changed in my planning:
- Pre-trip research shifted focus: Instead of scouring “top things to do in Bokod,” I studied NCIP’s guidelines on ancestral domain governance 2 and cross-referenced them with recent ethnobotanical surveys from the University of the Philippines Baguio 3. Knowing the legal framework helped me ask better questions—not “What can I do?” but “What decisions are currently being made, and how might visitors witness them respectfully?”
- Logistics were negotiated, not booked: I didn’t reserve homestays through platforms. John introduced me to Maria’s cousin, whose family hosted me after a shared meal and direct conversation about expectations, duration, and mutual responsibilities. Payment wasn’t fixed—it was discussed openly: “What supports your household right now? What would help maintain the spring pipe?” The amount settled on covered food, lodging, and contributed to school supplies for the balai’s informal literacy program.
- Equipment choices reflected context: I brought a solar charger (reliable in highland sun), waterproof notebooks (pages wouldn’t warp in humidity), and fabric bags instead of plastic—knowing waste disposal infrastructure was limited. Crucially, I left behind drone gear. Not because it was prohibited, but because aerial footage felt like surveillance in a landscape where spatial sovereignty is actively reclaimed.
- Language prep went beyond phrases: I learned basic Kankanaey greetings and verbs related to giving/receiving, but more importantly, I studied nonverbal norms: avoiding direct eye contact with elders as sign of respect, accepting food with both hands, waiting for invitation before sitting on woven mats. These weren’t “cultural tips”—they were entry requirements for minimal trust.
Stewardship travel doesn’t demand perfection. It demands presence calibrated to place—showing up with questions you’re willing to hold unanswered, with skills you’re ready to offer without presumption, and with the patience to let relationships unfold on their own timeline.
⭐Conclusion: stewardship as orientation, not destination
Leaving Bokod, I didn’t feel like I’d “completed” an experience. I felt like I’d entered a longer continuum—one that began long before my arrival and would continue long after my departure. John walked me to the roadside where the white van waited. As I climbed in, he pressed a small cloth pouch into my palm. Inside: three seeds—coffea liberica, castanopsis philippinensis, and phoebe macrocarpa—native species thriving in restored corridors. “Plant them where you live,” he said. “Not to save the world. But to remember that care isn’t abstract. It’s daily. It’s local. And it always begins with knowing what grows beneath your feet.”
