Perspective -- Laudato Si' and Landscape Planning and Design: Great Hopes for Global Environmental Change

Baby Cardinal in Hand. Credit: Public Domain

Laudato Si’ is a call from the Catholic Church for all citizens of the earth to care for all of God’s creation. It is a landmark piece of ecclesiastic writing. This encyclical is sobering, full of truth about the problems of human-driven climate change, and it is also incredibly hopeful. To put the hopefulness in perspective; Laudato Si’ made addressing human-driven climate change a moral imperative for the 1.2 billion Catholics in this world—and they are doing things. Catholics are building rain gardens, fasting and praying rosaries for climate change action, and planting trees alongside ideas for a brighter, more sustainable future for the planet. Some Catholics are taking the Pope’s message more seriously than any of the previous calls to climate action - and when that “some” is a subset of 1.2 billion people throughout the world, the potential impact is huge. I find even more hope in realizing that it is entirely possible that Catholic-affiliated properties comprise the world’s largest non-governmental network of landholdings. Managing just a fraction of this land in an environmentally could have a global impact on the direction of climate change.

Leading up to the release of this encyclical, I found myself inspired to deepen the relationship between my faith and my education at Conway. Since its release, I have come to grasp in a very profound way how ecological design truly is a form of charity—it constantly gives to the communities that encounter and embrace it, as well as the ecosystems it lies within. The landscape is a place where the known and the unknowable can couple together to produce great designs. Landscape planning and design are co-creative acts because they inherently involve many elements beyond the designer’s control.  The verdant areas of academic explorations between faith and design illuminate questions about co-creative spaces of the landscape designer and how the controllable and uncontrollable work into the choreography of plans and designs across a dynamic landscape. Serious academic discussions about the spatial elements of virtuous acts and how spiritual paradigms intersect with design practices and theory provide fertile ground for future explorations. I am glad that Laudato Si' has helped till the soil for more of these discussions.

 

This Pope hears the cry of the poor and vulnerable in the face of human-driven climate change. I heard this cry in the Sahel of Mali, in West Africa, while working on agriculture and water infrastructure planning. It’s the cry that “if there is no rain, we die,” as well as a cry that braces for yet another devastating typhoon. It’s the cry of the victims of violence caused by climate-escalated conflicts related to unjust resource distribution. While climate change may be the most difficult struggle of our times, the potential positive impacts of the Catholic Church with its massive landholdings, large population, and organized structures rallying behind the cause of climate change action is a source of incredible hope. Part of that hope for me is that the world will continue to move toward a future in which the lives of all people are improved, and that consideration for the lives of the most vulnerable among us are placed at the forefront of discussions about planning and design.

Author: Molly A. Burhans
goodlandproject.org

Photo credit: Chris Hendershot, 2015. Well Digging in the Djangoulas [chris.g.hendershot at gmail dot com]. This photo was taken during our time in Mali in our final semester at the Conway School, while partnered with Mali Nyeta. The village residents had to dig 9+ meters to reach the water table and they said the distance was increasing every year. This decrease in water table is due to increasing drought, deforestation and desertification in the Sahel.