Religious Biodiversity and Our Common Home

P ope Francis’s ecological muse in his 2015 encyclical on climate change and inequality is also his namesake. The pope begins his letter with lines from a canticle attributed to the long departed friar from Assisi. The saint is the first to evoke our human sisterhood with the feminized figure of our planet.1 But the pope’s subsequent admonishments are contemporary, and his own: “This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her” (§2). Our violation of her gendered body—to her detriment, as well as our own—is the central subject of the pope’s lamentation. And it is the figure of Saint Francis, filled with a love for all creatures, who models another possible world for the pope. Saint Francis, however, is a complex figure. One can see, in his passionate love for other creatures, the flicker of a desire to convert and domesticate them. The creatures who populate the body of this feminized sister Earth are also conscripted for the Father’s kingdom. The pope marvels at the saint’s commitment to commune with other creatures—one that even drew him to preach to the flowers, calling them to praise his Lord (§11). While this certainly illustrates the nature and extent of the saint’s connection with the nonhuman, it also (as I have put it elsewhere) illuminates in him “the glimmer of a missionary evangelist to another continent.”2 It is not merely the case that Saint Francis tells us (the humans) that these flowers reveal the glory of the Lord.