In celebration of the 10th anniversary of Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato si, the Lane Center is sponsoring the Laudato si Research Collaborative from 2024–2025. We have hosted three public events engaging the topic of integral ecology, fostering important interdisciplinary conversations. In October 2023, the Rev. Canon Sally Bingham, founder of Interfaith Power and Light, discussed her work mobilizing over 10,000 congregations to take bold climate action. In December 2023, Erin Lothes, PhD, spoke on the personal and political dimensions of Catholic responses to the climate crisis. In April 2024, Chad Baron, co-founder of Degrowth California, spoke on Catholic social thought and how degrowth promotes economic and environmental justice. We look forward to continuing this event series highlighting marginalized perspectives and voices.

As part of the collaborative, we are convening a cohort of USF faculty scholars from various disciplines over the next year. The collaborative will read and discuss Laudato si over the summer and participate in nature immersions together during the fall semester. We will culminate in a conference on April 10, 2025, where faculty will present their findings. We are thrilled to be working with such brilliant faculty who are critically engaging with Laudato si
through diverse lenses and multifaceted projects. To build a cohort and develop fruitful, critically engaged, and creative research projects, the method of the collaborative is fourfold: 1) Gather faculty from across departments to engage in interdisciplinary research and dialogue; 2) Read and engage Laudato si to develop shared theoretical and scholarly references; 3) Participate in nature immersion experiences; and 4) Share research findings with the public.

Why Nature Immersion?

As scholarship is oftentimes a solitary activity done indoors, I want to highlight the intention behind including nature immersion experiences as a part of the collaborative. In short: Immersive outdoor experiences encourage us to move from our heads to our hearts. There is power in feeling the elements on our skin. That, in itself, is knowledge. It is embodied knowledge that may not yet have a framework to comprehend its incomprehensiveness, but it is felt. We begin to think with the Earth and connect to our nonhuman ancestors through encounter. The way a vine reaches for, and wraps around, a post, the tendrils of our minds do with the surrounding world. By partnering with our nonhuman neighbors, opening our senses to hearing the “voice of the Earth” (Theodore Roszak), we begin to develop new entanglements with living beings, offering nutritive feedback loops of mind, body, and spirit.1 Outside the walls of the academy, we begin to literally think outside the box since straight lines and right angles are rare in the natural world.

While it is no surprise that spending time in nature is linked to heightened creativity and expansive thinking, there are a multitude of other benefits as well.2 It has been shown that inhaling mycobacterium vaccae, a bacterium found in soil, enhances learning.3 Spending time in nature addresses “direct-attention fatigue,” which occurs when one’s attention has been focused on one topic or task for too long, making abstract, long-term goals difficult.4 Research also shows that spending time in nature enhances cooperation and conflict resolution.5 Out-
door immersion experiences soften ego boundaries, which tend to harden when there is not enough elemental exposure. Boundaries in nature are more immediate, permeable, and moving, which mimics boundaries of the self that sometimes aren’t modeled in academic circles.

The multi-faceted dimension of our ecological crisis calls for interdisciplinary scholarship and cross-departmental collaboration. Pope Francis agrees, as he proclaims in Laudato si: “The fragmentation of knowledge proves helpful for concrete applications, and yet it often leads to a loss of appreciation for the whole, for the relationships between things, and for the broader horizon.”6 Our multifaceted ecological crisis calls for wider lenses and ecologically oriented solutions, including attention to interconnection, intersectionality, and intergenerationality.

Ecology—the science of relationships and interconnectedness—offers methods and tools for this type of analysis. In Laudato si, Pope Francis calls for an “ecological conversion,” where one opens to the elemental powers of the Earth, allowing them to catalyze personal and collective transformation.7 In this sense, he’s not asking us to convert to Catholicism, but rather that we convert to ecology. An integral ecology considers nature and culture to be inextricably intertwined, where “economic, political, social, military, educational, urban, agricultural, and other questions are all subject to ecological consideration.”8 It is through this intersectional framework that environmental solutions should be analyzed.

Global environmental issues—including, but not limited to, climate change, wildfires, ocean acidification, species extinction, racial and economic injustice, war, land grab, genocide, pollution, etc.—do not ascribe to human-made, categorical boundaries. The forces of the wild do not obey the tidy nature/culture dualistic categorical framework that underlies our techno-industrial built environments. Integral ecology offers a holistic perspective, considering ecology through every field of study. Consider a waste management perspective. The waste, or “away,” from throwaway culture eventually becomes the “here” of another’s home. This is why the global environmental crisis calls for us to listen to the voice of the poor—their homes are often the sites of toxic waste. This example demonstrates how environmental justice is racial justice.

The Cry of the Earth, the Cry of the Poor

Ecology is about feedback loops and homeostasis (balance). The dominant socioeconomic organizing principle/system of our planet is late-stage, modern capitalism, which is structured by one-directional hierarchical systems. Profit is a mixture of land and labor, where commodities are created by taking life from the Earth and giving nothing of benefit in return. The waste from this commodified Earth ends up in “sacrifice zones”—low-income areas of scorched lands, toxic pollution, underfunded public facilities, food deserts, high cancer rate,
and lower life expectancy.

Capitalism creates a damming of feedback loops, demonstrated by the low agency of those in sacrifice zones. In natural, wild areas, feedback is multidirectional. If a system is off-balance, Earth will rebalance itself. Since human-made systems have dammed this feedback, we can’t hear the voice of the wild. If we can’t hear the voice of the wild, how will we know what is needed to usher in an integral ecology? Integral ecology calls for us to welcome in non-anthropocentric and non-androcentric perspectives and voices so that we don’t re-create the very problems we seek to do away with.

Since it is anthropocentrism, specifically androcentrism, that has gotten us into this mess, it is up to humans to hear the cry of the Earth through the cry of the poor and respond to rebalance the Earth. Eco-liberation theologian Leonardo Boff points out that where the Earth hurts most, the poor hurt with it. Climate change is affecting, and will continue to affect, marginalized communities unequally. In addition, those who live closer to the Earth through sustenance livelihoods are most detrimentally affected by climate change because their survival is intertwined with the Earth’s.

The needs of marginalized communities are the needs of the environmental crisis. We can hear the cry of Mother Earth as we hear the cry of any living being. Whether that is the cry of Appalachian communities bathing their children in black sludge water—a byproduct of “clean” coal—or through the birth defects of marine mammals contaminated by parabens in hair and bath products, these cries are the cries of an integral ecological crisis. Through a Gaian lens, we can perceive wildfire as a fever breaking over the Earth. A fever is an attempt to rid the body of disease. The disease spread across the planet is the attitude of greed and spiritually misaligned morals and values. Gaia does not wish to rid the Earth of humans, but rather, the malignant attitude that is harming the Earth and the poor.

As the principle of Catholic Social Teaching offers a preferential option for the poor, may we learn to see through the lens of integral ecology to extend concepts of the poor to include the natural world and those most affected by the climate crisis. We live in a time where the influx of media noise and information saturation make it difficult to hear the cry of the Earth, opening that resonant space within each of us—the space of wisdom. The Laudato si Research Collaborative is our way to create a space of resonance to hear the voice of wisdom as offered through the call of the wild. To hear is to inherit responsibility. Responsibility does not imply it was necessarily our fault, but rather, we are called to respond.

KIMBERLY CARFORE teaches in both the Theology and Religious Studies Department and the Environmental Studies program at the University of San Francisco. She also leads outdoor ecotheology immersion programs for international universities and here at USF.

1. Theodore Roszak, Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology (Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press, 2001).
2. Chin-Wen Yeh, Shih-Han Hung, and Chun-Yen Chang, “The Influence of Natural Environments on Creativity,” Frontiers in Psychiatry, No. 13 ( July 27, 2022), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9363772/. Also see Dacher Keltner, Awe: A New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life (New York: Penguin Press, 2003).
3. American Society for Microbiology, “Can Bacteria Make You Smarter?” ScienceDaily (May 24, 2010),
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/570221.
4. Stephen Kaplan and Raymond De Young, “Toward a Better Understanding of Pro-social Behavior: The Role of Evolution and Directed Attention,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25, No. 2 (2002): 263-264.
https://public.websites.umich.edu/~rdeyoung/publications/IFS_version_commentary_on_rachlin_bbs_(2003).html.
5. American Institutes for Research, Effects of Outdoor Education Programs for Children in California (Palo Alto, CA: American Institutes for Research, 2005). Available on the Sierra Club Website. Retrieved from
https://www.air.org/resource/report/effects-outdoor-education-programs-children-california.
6. Francis, Laudato si’, (Vatican City: Vatican Press, 2015), sec. 110. Pope Francis affirms that ecology is “the science which would offer solutions to the great issues.”
7. Ibid., 216.
8. Leonardo Boff and Virgilio Elizondo, “Ecology and Poverty: Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor,” Concilium: International Journal of Theology 5 (1995): ix-x.