Care for Our Common Home in a Time Such as This

Hilda P. Koster is the Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto Associate Professor of Ecological Theology and Director of the Elliott Allen Institute for Theology and Ecology at the Regis St. Michael’s Faculty of Theology, University of St. Michael’s College.

In 2026, it is hard not to ask where we find ourselves. Climate disruption now shapes the air we breathe, the places we live, and the futures we can imagine. Across Canada, its effects are no longer distant projections but realities that increasingly press into everyday life.

What makes this moment especially fraught is not only the intensification of climate impacts but the broader pattern of political obstruction through which responsibility is denied. Hard won and already insufficient forms of climate action are being actively undone. Policies have been weakened and public commitments quietly allowed to erode, even as the science has grown clearer and the costs more immediate. In recent weeks, the war in Iran has made this pattern harder to ignore, revealing how readily long term ecological consequences are treated as acceptable collateral when political interests take precedence. This is not so much denial as obstruction, a willingness to acknowledge climate change while continuing to block the responses it requires. Delay is recast as prudence and continued reliance on fossil fuels as economic realism. Living with this kind of backsliding takes a toll. Over time, it exhausts people, to the point where resignation can feel like the most realistic response.

It is precisely this normalization of discouragement that Laudato Si’ and Laudate Deum so forcefully resist. In these texts, Pope Francis repeatedly warned that one of the greatest dangers facing efforts toward ecological conversion is not outright rejection but the slow accommodation to inaction, the quiet acceptance of obstruction as inevitable. Care for the Earth, he insisted, is not an optional concern or a secondary moral issue. It is a fundamental responsibility that calls for perseverance in truth, particularly where political and economic powers seek to blunt or divert collective response.

Christian ecotheology gives theological depth to this call through a longstanding understanding of the world as fundamentally interconnected. What happens to the Earth happens to us, not metaphorically but materially, because we are part of the same web of life. Biblical traditions of covenant, Sabbath, and kinship deepen this vision; they remind us that the world is not inert matter to be managed from a distance but a living community to which we belong.

In recent decades, Christian theology has increasingly learned to articulate this interdependence through conversation with Indigenous traditions that have long understood life in relational terms. From this way of seeing follows a different understanding of power and responsibility. If the world is understood as a network of reciprocal relationships, in which breath is exchanged among plants, animals, and people and life is sustained through cycles of giving and receiving, power cannot be exercised primarily as control and extraction. Instead, power takes shape as responsibility for what has been received as a gift and must be cared for and passed on. As Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer describes it, this responsibility forms a “covenant of reciprocity,” a commitment to mutual care within a living community of human and more than human kin across generations.

What this relational vision asks of us is clarified in the language of ecological conversion, introduced in Laudato Si’. It begins with an honest recognition of the ways we are implicated in ecological harm and with the courage to question habits and systems that treat damage as normal or unavoidable. Conversion is not only about personal choices, though these matter deeply. It also concerns the shared work of reshaping institutions and policies so that harm to people and planet is no longer accepted as the cost of doing business.

Practiced over time, this kind of conversion cultivates hope. When people continue to show up for the places and communities they love, sustained attention itself begins to take on a hopeful quality. Hope, in this sense, is formed through staying engaged and refusing to let harm or neglect become normal.

The Buddhist eco philosopher Joanna Macy has described this posture as active hope. Active hope is something we practice rather than wait for. It unfolds when people choose to act together, even when outcomes are uncertain. Writer Rebecca Solnit extends this insight. In The Beginning Comes After the End, she traces how movements for justice often arise when familiar expectations about progress break down. In such moments, hope takes shape not as confidence or resolve alone, but as attentiveness to new possibilities that emerge once inherited certainties begin to unravel.

The theologian Jürgen Moltmann, shaped by the devastations and moral collapse of the Second World War, offers a theological articulation of hope that deepens this vision. He understands hope not as denial of suffering, but as a gift received precisely where the world appears broken beyond repair. Rooted in the Easter promise, this hope does not bypass the cross or hurry past loss. It emerges in the midst of woundedness, trusting that life is held open to a future not exhausted by what has already occurred. Christian hope, in this sense, does not turn away from the wounds of the present. It sustains attentiveness and responsibility by trusting that the future is not limited by what we can see or secure for ourselves.

Seen in this light, what is at stake is not a single strategy but a way of inhabiting the present. It is a stance that refuses both fatalism and quiet withdrawal, insisting that responsibility cannot be set aside simply because systems are powerful or change is slow. Over the past decade, Catholic ecological teaching has pressed against the normalization of delay, calling for public and concrete forms of engagement precisely where ecological harm is treated as inevitable and accountability is endlessly deferred.

Under Pope Leo, the Church continues to affirm care for our common home as an essential moral commitment. Speaking last autumn at the Castel Gandolfo climate conference marking the tenth anniversary of Laudato Si’, Leo insisted that “there is no room for indifference or resignation,” and echoed the conviction that “if you want to cultivate peace, care for creation.” That insistence has taken concrete form. Last month, the Vatican, together with Indigenous rights’ activists, launched a campaign encouraging Catholic institutions to divest from the mining industry, framing such decisions as solidarity with communities harmed by extractive practices.

Universities are among the institutional settings where such commitments can take lived form. At the University of St. Michael’s College, ecological responsibility is expressed through full divestment from fossil fuels and through participation in the Blue Community initiative, which recognizes water as a human right. While these decisions do not resolve the climate crisis on their own, they refuse to normalize harm or retreat into discouragement.

In a time marked by obstruction and uncertainty, these commitments matter. They embody care for our common home as sustained responsibility and hope practiced through persistence. This Earth Day, they invite us to remain accountable to the Earth and to one another.

Read other InsightOut posts.