Posts by Laudato Si

In 2020, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed the grey wolf from the Endangered Species List. The self-accolades accompanying the delisting noted that the recovery of grey wolf populations in the continental United States was a remarkable achievement that spanned half a century. Confined to northern Minnesota and nearby Isle Royale, Michigan, in the…

Often, when we see a pest, such as an unwanted species of wildlife, an insect, a slug or a snail, we feel no qualms about eliminating it, typically by using a chemical pesticide or poison. This is an anthropocentric approach; it reflects our assumption that God has made us lords of his creation to do…

Our weekly blog posts aim at providing practical steps that we each can take to defend our common home, as well as discuss ways in which we can change our way of thinking about science, about our relationship to the world around us, and about our understanding of our faith. Our hope is that, through…

In Are We the Pests We’re Getting Rid of?, we discussed the damage that pesticides do to the environment and to human health. Rather than using chemical pesticides, a wide range of safe organic alternatives are available, many of them with specific targets. In this post, we’ve listed some common alternatives to herbicides – that…

A common view of pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides is that, after we apply them, they’re effective for a certain length of time, sooner or later lose their effectiveness, and then somehow magically disappear without a trace. Although it is true that the effective shelf-life of these products is limited, their magical disappearance is not. Instead,…