Pope Francis’ Affirmative Ecology for Pacific Islands Indigenous Community

Abstract

Pope Francis’ Encyclical Letter “Laudato Si’: Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality, On Care for Our Common Home” revives the Catholic Church social justice tradition to unite the concern for environmental degradation, with the attention to society, especially the poor. With a narrative of remarkable humaneness, Pope Francis’ ecology discourse focuses on environmental emergency and misuse of resources, social and economic consumerism, notions of responsibility and exclusion of marginal communities. Based on an analysis of Pope Francis’ encyclical letter, this article elaborates a framework for rethinking ecology in the context of the Pacific Islands Indigenous cultures who are suffering directly as a result of climate change. I suggest that Pope Francis’ affirmative ecology promotes an “integral and shared development,” the intimately interdependent relationship between humankind and nature, which echoes the Pacific Indigenous intersubjective dimensions of environment. Environmental care and attention rely both on a moral individual and collective responsibility, rather than regulatory adjustments that underestimate traditional cultural and social practices. For Pacific Indigenous communities, Pope Francis’ analysis is provocative, for it not only offers new hope for the future but also because it calls into question basic assumptions about global consumption and common ways of living that have negatively affected the environment of this region.