Laudato Si

One of my favorite passages in Laudato Si is section 124.

124. Any approach to an integral ecology, which by definition does not exclude human beings, needs to take account of the value of labour, as Saint John Paul II wisely noted in his Encyclical Laborem Exercens. According to the biblical account of creation, God placed man and woman in the garden he had created (cf. Gen 2:15) not only to preserve it (“keep”) but also to make it fruitful (“till”). Labourers and craftsmen thus “maintain the fabric of the world” (Sir 38:34). Developing the created world in a prudent way is the best way of caring for it, as this means that we ourselves become the instrument used by God to bring out the potential which he himself inscribed in things: “The Lord created medicines out of the earth, and a sensible man will not despise them” (Sir 38:4).

The Pope is not a radical environmentalist who thinks that humans are a sort of "earth-blight." He expresses in this passage how we are called to develop the earth, and yet to do so with care, "in a prudent way." One of the aspects of his "integral ecology," I believe, is the idea that as we are part of creation, we are called to work with it; not against it, yet not without it either. When we labor in such a way that we are "tilling the garden" of this world, we are truly in keeping with our calling both to guard the world and to be "fruitful and multiply."