Pope Francis, the first Latin American pontiff, was as much a tireless advocate for nature as he was the poor and marginalized the world over. While his death leaves a vacuum of moral environmental leadership within the globe’s largest religion, the words of Francis still echo through tropical rainforests and grasslands, across rivers and oceans. The pope, who died April 21 in Rome at age 88, never attended a United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. But in this astute observation in Laudato Si’, the pioneering Catholic teaching document released in the summer of 2015 in defense of the natural world, Francis eloquently voices the biennial meeting’s defining spirit: “It is not enough … to think of different species merely as potential ‘resources’ to be exploited, while overlooking the fact that they have value in themselves. Each year sees the disappearance of thousands of plant and animal species which we will never know, which our children will never see, because they have been lost forever,” Francis wrote with both biological accuracy and spiritual authority. “The great majority become extinct for reasons related to human activity. Because of us, thousands of species will no longer give glory to God by their very existence, nor convey their message to us. We have no such right.” When it was released, the uncompromising message of Laudato Si’ reverberated round the world and it is reflected throughout the preamble of the historic Paris Agreement on climate change of 2015. Its essence also reverberates in the 2022…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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