The Vatican’s global Laudato Si’ Movement offers the Laudato Si Action Platform – seven goals designed to support individuals and communities as they journey toward a just coexistence with the rest of nature. Each week of Lent, The Basilica’s Creation Justice Committee (CJC) will highlight one of these goals in the bulletin and offer ways we may serve as “instruments of God for the care of Creation.” (LS, 14). We begin with Laudato Si’ Goal #1:
Pope Francis calls us to care for our common home and to respond to the “cry of the Earth.” As an ecologist, when I think about caring for our common home, I think about all of the other species that we share our home with. There are about 9 million species, each of which is a unique manifestation of God’s creation. And about half of them could be lost in my children’s lifetime.
What can we do to be better stewards of God’s creation? The biggest threats to species are the loss of habitat, overexploitation, and climate change.
Habitat is being lost primarily due to the expansion of agriculture to feed a growing and wealthier population. Wealthier is good – an important way to alleviate poverty is through economic growth and policies that support families’ transition out of poverty. But we can choose foods that reduce our impacts. For example, it takes about 27 times more land to produce beef as it does chicken.
Wildlife is threatened with overexploitation from illegal hunting in many parts of the world, but hunting in the United States is well-managed. But as consumers, we may inadvertently contribute to the ongoing to unsustainable fisheries, which can impact both the species targeted for harvest, and “by-catch” species that are accidentally harvested along with the target species. Efforts like the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s seafood Watch (https://www.seafoodwatch.org) can help us make informed choices.
Finally, a rapidly warming climate could drive many species to extinction. We can avoid this by reducing our consumption of fossil fuels by more rapidly switching to more efficient and less polluting technologies.
We can also directly respond to the cry of the Earth by taking local action – planting pollinator-friendly plants in our yards or volunteering to plant trees or remove invasive species (e.g., with the Tree Trust or Great River Greening).
During this Jubilee year, Pope Francis has called us to be Pilgrims of Hope. These actions are ways that we can live this value – creating hope that, collectively, we can choose to care for our common home.
Written by Joe Fargione
Member of The Basilica Creation Justice Committee