Francis of Assisi did not write theology in the academic sense. He sang it. In the Canticle of the Creatures, composed near the end of his life while he was seriously ill and nearly blind, he calls the sun “brother,” the moon and stars “sister,” and even death a sibling. The poem is not decorative piety. It is a claim about the structure of reality. If God is Creator and Father, then the world is not a warehouse of objects arranged for human use. Every creature belongs to a wider community of life.

Francis did not stand outside creation as its manager. He lived inside it as a relative.

That movement, from ownership to kinship, is what makes Franciscan spirituality feel startlingly current eight centuries later. We have inherited a language about nature that treats it mostly as inventory: resources to extract, land to develop, animals to process, and landscapes to place behind economic growth. Francis offers another vocabulary, built on relationship rather than utility. In an age of climate anxiety and an economy that turns living things into disposable products, that vocabulary is not sentimental. It is theological resistance.

From Dominion to Extraction

Christian teaching has spent decades correcting the idea that “dominion” in Genesis means permission to dominate. In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis draws on the spirituality of his namesake to argue that ecological destruction and human suffering are inseparable. The encyclical calls for an “integral ecology” that respects environmental and human dimensions, because the ecological crisis is also a social crisis.

The pattern is visible in modern consumer habits. Lithium mining for phones,........

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