Multiple online platforms and communities offer high-quality research that seeks to understand and address today’s environmental challenges. We have selected a few that may be of interest to Franciscan ecologists:

1. Springer Nature Sustainability Community: here.

2. Environment and Society Portal: here.

3. International Society for Environmental Ethics: here.

Here is a good example of a recent exchange that may be relevant to Franciscan ecology:

"But the “root cause,” as I see it, of these myriad proximate causes leading up to the current pandemic has a name—it’s called anthropocentrism, a “belief system of superiority and entitlement” upholding human supremacy (see Crist 2018, https://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6420/1242), a belief system by no means universal within human cultures but one that has recently come to dominate in the great majority of them. Were it not for our anthropocentrism—an attitude of caring very little how we treat nonhuman life, as long as it remains available for us to use—we might have long ago stopped reducing other beings to “natural resources,” or might never have performed this feat of moral abstraction in the first place, the move that allows us to so disparage and mistreat our fellow animals."

See the article and comment here.