Back in 2009, I ran a very large event in the Ha’apai Islands of Tonga. We managed to motivate over 3,000 people (from a total population of 4,500) to clean up the coastline and shipped 50 tonnes of rubbish to a location with a proper landfill to make an example of how a waste management Read more
Pope Francis has said that his recent encyclical Laudato Si’ is not an encyclical on the environment. Rather, it is a social encyclical, he told 70 mayors from big cities at a two day workshop at the Vatican this week addressing modern slavery and climate change. It is a social encyclical, the Pope said, because Read more
Pope Francis deliberately restructured his environment encyclical Laudato Si’ in order to make it accessible to everyone. Italian Bishop Mario Tosi, formerly secretary of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, said the Pope changed the structure of the document from its first draft. The initial version had a long introduction of a theological, liturgical, Read more
Everybody is talking about the Pope’s new environmental encyclical, even though there isn’t much that’s unusual about it. In fact, it’s a document so perfectly in line with usual Catholic teaching that the most illuminating piece of commentary on it I could find was perhaps this 2009 column by The New York Times’ Ross Douthat Read more
Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’ quotes the New Zealand Catholic Bishops’ statement on the environment which they published in 2006. Paragraph 95 of Laudato Si’ reads: “The natural environment is a collective good, the patrimony of all humanity and the responsibility of everyone. If we make something our own, it is only to administer it for Read more
In a new encyclical, Pope Francis has acknowledged “very solid scientific consensus” that humans are causing climate change that is endangering the planet. In Laudato Si’, on Care for Our Common Home, released on June 18, Francis urged the world to embark upon a revolutionary ethical rethink and change of heart in its relationship with Read more
School children have helped hone the environmental monitoring the dredge at Port Taranaki. As a result of a project undertaken by Room Four at St Pius X School, Taranaki Regional Council [TRC] has increased their monitoring of effects from dredging. “We were on an extensive monitoring programme already,” TRC scientific officer marine ecologist Emily Roberts said. Read more
Pope Francis’s much anticipated encyclical on the environment will be released on June 18, the Vatican has confirmed. Earlier unconfirmed reports had put the release date two days earlier. “To avoid confusion on the diffusion of non-confirmed information, it is communicated that the foreseen date of the Pope’s encyclical is the next June 18, Thursday,” Read more
The Vatican’s Secretary of State has warned there are no political barriers behind which people can hide from environmental and social degradation. Cardinal Pietro Parolin sent a message to a conference on “The New Climate Economy” in Rome. “When the future of the planet is at stake, there are no political frontiers, barriers or walls Read more
The Vatican has denied that Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment had been delayed over doctrinal fears. Veteran Vaticanista Sandro Magister claimed on his blog Settimo Cielo on May 11 that the Pope had “binned” the first draft of the encyclical in March. Magister said the Pope feared the first draft would have been “demolished” Read more