The Earth is sacred. Creation has its own intrinsic value. We have a responsibility to protect and to cherish the Earth’s ecological diversity, beauty and life-sustaining properties. Together, we must hold it in trust for future generations.
The environment is God’s gift to everyone, and in our use of it we have a responsibility towards the poor, towards future generations and towards humanity as a whole.
- Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, 48
The family needs a home, a fit environment in which to develop its proper relationships. For the human family, this home is the earth, the environment that God the Creator has given us to inhabit with creativity and responsibility. We need to care for the environment: it has been entrusted to men and women to be protected and cultivated with responsible freedom, with the good of all as a constant guiding criterion.
- Pope Benedict XVI, World Day of Peace 2008, 7
Example in action:
Development and Peace supports the efforts of its grassroots partners for ecological and social justice. One such partner in the Philippines is supporting the B’laan Indigenous people in their fight to regain the title to their ancestral lands, which also happens to house major deposits of gold and copper. Mining these resources would further endanger already protected species, affect watersheds and contaminate the water supply of farmers with arsenic. The international mining sector, in which Canada has an enormous stake, has a track record of human and worker rights violations, as well as environmental violations which cause great harm to the environment and local habitats. That is why Development and Peace has been advocating to hold Canadian mining companies accountable for their actions in the Global South since 2008.
