A Mission to Map, Part II Catholic Geographic System’s executive director, Molly Burhans accounts a recent tip to Rome where she participated in the Vatican Youth Symposium to discuss solutions for addressing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the REIL Network, to focus on sustainable strategies for following the stewardship calling of Laudato Si’, and day with Esri Italia to talk about maps see how their work is helping earthquake response teams in Italy.
“Thomas Berry... was a gentle soul whose intimacy with nature and broad erudition enabled him to speak with a compelling voice about the immense story behind creation and this precious life on Earth, declaring “the Universe is primarily a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” .. He believed the only way to effectively function as individuals and as a species is to understand the history and functioning of our planet and of the wide universe itself, like sailors learning about their ship and the vast ocean on which it sails. ‘It takes a universe to make a child,’ he said, adding that he was ‘trying to establish a functional cosmology, not a theology.’ The amazing, mindboggling cosmological perspective, he felt, can resuscitate human meaning and direction. The most important spiritual qualities, for Berry, were amazement and enchantment. Awe is healing. A sense of wonder is the therapy for our disconnection from the natural world.” (Father Thomas Berry -- A Tribute, Shams Kairys, 2009). My most recent trip to the Vatican began with a long flight to Rome via Seattle and Paris. Every time I fly I am filled with awe. There are some authors who change your life and the way you view the world for-
ever. I include ecologist Richard T.T. Forman as one of the most influential authors in my life for helping ignite that very sense of healing awe, amazement and enchantment that Thomas Berry spoke of. I remember the first time I read Forman’s book Land Mosaics it transformed every flight thereafter. Each time I board a plane it is with an almost child-like excitement to look out the window and observe the subtle patterns in the landscape from a vantage point of 20K ft+. Working with modern satellite imagery, I get almost the same effect at my desk each day, but being in flight adds a element of slowness, a lack of control, you have no choice but to putter along through the sky and grasp all you can as urban-scapes dissolve to ticky-tacky suburbs filled with cul-de-sacs and closed communities, to rural homes dappling a country side to wild wild nature bursting forth with large swaths of deep green brush below the blue sky - always leaving me with a sense of yearning to be with it, to celebrate life in it, celebrate in the alleys among the never-quite hustle of cement jungles and stillness of secluded valleys of deep pine forests among the slow migrations
Hall of Maps in the Vatican Museums - I am constantly inspired by the ancient cartographers in Church.
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of moss and movement of merchants encircling the great world in varying time-space scales as it turns. At this time of year, as the leaves start to fall from trees, I find particular joy in observing evergreen / deciduous trees and their patterns across landscapes in parts of the Northern Hemisphere in relation to topography. An airplane ride is both fun and tragic when you can read landscapes - fun to read the earth like an open book of shifting habitats and stories of human activity, and tragic when you see the effects of centuries of these stories interacting against, rather than with each other, battling for domination with cement roadways, mammoth dams, straight features, juxtaposed, fighting, migratory ways and organic flows and bevels of once-saturated riverbeds parched from years of drought and deep wilderness sliced from the inside out, bisected and re-defined as broken home for its non-human inhabitants, made so to make way for humans with their own types of often broken homes. My recent trip to Rome was filled with awe. Filled with awe for my peers and their tireless efforts to make the world and their communities a bit brighter, awe meeting Pope Francis, awe in looking at the dusty landscapes of Rome where Cyprus trees speckle hillsides overrun with brilliant wildflowers and vines curling around houses and fences, reclaiming and embracing human-built spaces. The intertwining of built and natural environment, of thousands of years of history -- from the rise of Christianity to the fall of the Roman Empire, plagues, wars, and times of peace and prosperity are read in the landscape as a palimpsest of life and history in planning, ecology, architecture, and materials.
Hedgrows can help mitigate soil loss, patches of forest, lands to be read
Shaking Pope Francis’ hand, honored and grateful. A way to describe what my faith means to me is a compulsion to understand what love is more and live that more each day through Christ, with a safety net of infinite forgiveness for the days I don’t do so fully (which is most, if not all days -- I am definitely still a student!).
50 youth delegates from 30 countries present their solutions for achieving SDGs
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The past two weeks have been saturated with emotion as the United States concluded perhaps its most divisive election cycle in history, and almost that same week I had a chance to go to Rome and meet the Pope. While it seems like we have immense uncertainty looking forward and there is great fear for many, I have hope. I find comfort in the land -- in that geographic book we walk upon each day, which carries stories of resiliency and is a constant humble reminder of our own temporality and smallness yet importance collectively in the history of things -- “We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.” (Bishop Ken Untener of Saginaw). Global leaders and family restaurant owners, the wealthiest king and the poorest beggar are all simply a flash in the pan of evolution. Nevertheless, a flash that is infinitely loved and hopefully some incalculable expression of it moving upwards towards a universal goodness, some day. The meetings I participated in in Rome were held in the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, an institute that had Galileo Galilei as its first president. I presented among some truly outstanding peers, listened to stories of young women who had experienced human trafficking and were now changing the world through their words and work, and learned. I was inspired and re-invigorated by the experience. I have been relatively isolated from my age cohort since working on CGS, and it was really amazing to be back and with a group of twentysomethings doing such amazing work -- from running shelters for trafficked women to inventing ways to help people get healthcare in all corners of the world. When I arrived in Rome I was picked up by Claudio, from Esri Italia on a motor bicycle. He asked if I wanted a cab “or we could take the bike,” he said. I paused remembered a conversation at Canisius College, where I lead an international service trip and Lu (the minister in charge of them) briefing student leaders: “Don’t let students get drunk, don’t jump off of anything, and for the love of God - NEVER GET ON A MOTORBIKE!” ... The distant memory of Lu did not succeed at suppressing my inner itch for adventure. The motor bike trip into Rome was just the start of inperson meetings with the Esri Italia team, which turned out the be as agreeable a bunch as the U.S. employees. I have never met a company with employees that are as happy, interested in the world and kind as those from Esri -- they are clearly doing something right. Ground-cover at the Gregorian University
With Jeff Sachs, a panel moderator. I remember when I first encountered his work The End of Poverty in a course it helped influence me to focus on land as a leverage point for addressing poverty and the environment.
Listening to powerful testimonies of those who experienced human trafficking. “If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone.” Those of us working in environmentally degrading areas for restoration must realize populations vulnerable to climate change are vulnerable to human trafficking.
Riding on a bike with Claudio from Esri Italia. You know you are partnered with an awesome company not only when they are master map makers of the modern age, computer scientists and conservationists, and help with humanitarian relief around the world -- but when they show up at the airport on a motor bicycle.
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(Above) Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ was a French idealist philosopher and Jesuit priest who trained as a paleontologist and geologist and took part in the discovery of Peking Man. I studied St. Ignatius’ spiritual exercises and have a Jesuit Spiritual Director, I am deeply grateful for the Jesuit order and their witness. (Right) Grave of Fr. Thomas Barry in Vermont.
After the Symposium, I participated in a REIL Network meeting, with a focus on implementing Laudato Si’s stewardship call across religious and political boundaries. In attendance were leaders in forestry, climate finance, and alternative energy from around the world, a group of about 25 people in an intimate and casual setting. There was a strong Yale FES presence there, including Mary Evelyn Tucker (director of form on Religion and Ecology at Yale). Mary and I had exchanged emails quite a while ago and I am very grateful we had a chance to meet. She heads the Teilhard de Chardin Association, among other things. Meeting her was wonderful, as a great admirer of Teilhard’s work, and coming from a linage of admirers-- My dad found his work very important when he was considering walking away from science early in his career, and his mother, whom I never met, was very involved in groups focused on
Streets of Rome
Teilhard de Chardin’s work. She was a housewife, and as her seven kids aged she made more and more time for meetings with physicists, biologists, artists, scholars of Teilhard and others in the Catholic ecology movement, including Fr. Thomas Berry. It was such a large part of her life that this past summer, when I visited my dad in Vermont we made a pilgrimage to his grave site in the N.E. Kingdom. Mary gave me a book of Berry’s work that she had helped compile and edit. On the flight home I had a chance to read part of it and encountered a delightful piece where Berry describes himself as a “geologian,” in additon to “theologian.” -- exploring the logos, while also studying the earth we walk upon. In all these meetings I brought a view of georeligious dynamics to the to the table -- I believe that we must work towards understanding what little we can of the
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San Fransisco - a new scene.
spiritual infrastructure of our world geographically and including georeligious dynamics in dialogues about environmental programs and policy. If we do not include this, we are missing a vital component necessary for understanding how our world works. While climate change poses an existential threat to humanity, keeping the spirit of Laudato Si’ alive, repeated, and deeply ingrained in communities of faith through communications media, actionable geography-relevant materials (like maps with guided land-use and land/ facility maintenance suggestions), scientific, and NGO partnerships will be vital to ensuring the substance of Laudato Si’ has a lasting impact on the global community and the future of our planet. The adventure continues moving forward. I was in San Fransisco this past weekend talking with potential investors, who were regrettably focused on making this a for-profit enterprise rather than the hybrid that I proposed and will maintain for governance reasons. Our enterprise is built to serve and its corporate structure should reflect this. I also met with the co-chair of the Buckminster Fuller Institute -- an amazing character, his
Understanding georeligious dynamics is important and often ignored
Backside of St. Peter’s Basilica from inside Vatican City.
PhD delved into cosmology and Copernicus -- it seems worth a read. He is working with the Secretary General of the Commonwealth on Regenerative Development strategies. Commonwealth, overseen by the Queen of England, compromises 1/6 of the land on Earth and about 2.2 billion people. I am not quite sure how this land / jurisdiction fits together legally with other landholders and countries, but I’m interested to learn more. He is very interested in exploring the models I am developing for land management and I the same. He uses them to some extent in media and has done a bunch with the dymaxion map. The project with the Commonwealth, GoodLands, and looking to the future gives me some hope. Though these are times of great uncertainty, I am hopeful that we can begin to look at alternative geographies, much like the structure of the Catholic Church, across the world and begin to think about how governance relates to a deeper geographic understanding our existence as networks and meta-states across and within more traditional geopolitical boundaries.
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In the age of technology we have new ways to explore visually stunning presentations of information and deeply moving data narratives, such as with the art and science of cartography and use these in community-driven design sessions, that have the power to present the science we know to be relevant, and faith we believe to be true, combined with local values and understanding in ways that are actionable and resonate with communities on global and local scales. We need a change of heart. We need to increase tenderness towards each other and the environment, and the way we will get there is not built solely on greater analytical insights and new policy, but also moving aesthetic experiences that raise our minds, hearts, and souls towards the good and the transcendental. I have great hope that there is still a potentially brighter future than ever just around the corner, and I have a firm belief that maps are a vital part in figuring out how to get from, in the words of Blessed Peter Maurin, “the way things are, to the way they should be.”
“Hope has two beautiful daughters, anger and outrage. Anger at the way things are and courage to see that they do not remain as they are.” -St. Augustine
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“The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire.� - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ
goodlandproject.org Catholicgeo.org 207 N Beacon St Hartford, CT 06105 USA
Executive Director: Molly Burhans Email: burhansm@goodlandproject.org Phone: +01 716.982.5751
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