Environmental Hospitality

In 2015, Pope Francis published his second encyclical entitled Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home. The encyclical’s primary purpose was to address the widespread inequality, poverty and injustice that threatens to worsen as we begin to see the effects of global climate change. Pope Francis’s entreaties to care for the earth as our home, and for the those left vulnerable due to environmental crises, can be connected to a tradition of hospitality that has a long history in Christian theology. My research aims to answer the questions: What would an ethic of environmental hospitality look like? And is the rhetoric of hospitality useful when coming up with solutions to the ecological and cultural crises arising as a result of global climate change? In answer to the first question, there is some scholarship in environmental ethics that comes very close to advocating for hospitality when dealing with issues of biodiversity and habitat loss, climate refugees, resource scarcity, and other future ramifications of global warming. A recontextualization of God as host, nature as a home, and humanity as guest differs from the stewardship model of environmental ethics in that the misuse of nature is no longer simply a form of mismanagement, it is now an act of inhospitality, a breach of an ancient and fundamental relational bond, that of host and guest. Beyond rhetoric, hospitality can function as a practical avenue for action and change in humanity’s treatment of each other and of nature, moving toward systems that value care, restoration, and generosity. My hope is that this research adds definition and shape to the discourse of environmental hospitality.