Workshop
Laudato Si’ Action Platform
On Sunday, November 14 the Laudato Si’ Action Platform will be launched. What is it all about? Who can participate? We took the opportunity of the interview with John Mundell to ask him these questions.
If you weren’t able to read our interview with John Mundell from a few weeks ago, we invite you to do so to learn more about this engineer who worked on the development of the Laudato Si’ Action Platform.
How did the Laudato Si’ Action Platform come about?
First of all we can ask ourselves: what does religion have to do with ecology? The answer given by John Mundell, an engineer and geologist who lives in Indianapolis (Indiana, United States), is rather clarifying. “You have to be converted to change your behavior. Oftentimes in Christianity, Islam, Judaism, we get stuck on how we think about God, or how we think about life. Very rarely do we focus on how we put that belief into practice and how we make it concrete and whether that is the yardstick for measuring what kind of Christian or Jew or Muslim that I am”.
The key is right here: religions generate behaviours, beliefs must be transformed into actions… that’s why they possess (or not) great potential as generators of change.
In 2015, Pope Francis published the Encyclical Laudato Si’ to urge care for the environment and integral ecology: the famous “ecological conversion”. Since then, numerous experts, scientists, and specialists from different fields (and beliefs) have been working side by side for integral ecology, in search of a new paradigm that generates sustainable and tangible results.
Laudato Sí’ Action Platform
“It is a platform that has lots of ideas that ordinary people can put into practice and help them formulate their own plan to undergo ecological conversion, to change their life for the good of the planet. It has a lot of resources, not only for families, but for parishes, churches, dioceses, for universities, to make concrete steps to change, so that the earth can go on, and we can tackle climate change and reduce our carbon footprint”, explains John.
The platform offers anyone (and any group of people) the tools to join a 7-year journey, during which we try to start from the way each of us lives our lives (including those who haven’t yet adopted ecological behaviours) in order to arrive, little by little, at ways of acting oriented to the care of the planet.
Who can join the LSAP?
“Everyone in the world, even people who don’t have a particular religious belief but believe in the care of creation, can enter this process, can submit their own plans”, highlights John.
Individuals, groups of people, institutions, churches, households, extended families… everyone can participate. “The idea is to try and set goals that can try to make specific changes. Part of this is to create a yearly plan where you write down your hopes and your goals and you actually publish it and try to inspire others who have plans”.
John and Julie, his wife, participate in the process of creating the platform together with many other people from different movements, cultures and origins, to make it a truly intercultural, plural and, consequently, usable tool anywhere in the world.
“I invite everyone to join me. This is where we can, as a global community, come and help motivate everyone around us. So, I look forward to it, and I look forward to the next seven years making an impact on the planet”, concludes John Mundell.
Click here to join and pledge your commitment!
And don’t forget to follow the LSAP on their social media:
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