Over the past year, the Center for Urban Resilience (CURes), a unique transdisciplinary body at Loyola Marymount University focused on the field of urban ecology, has engaged in research projects across California and Maryland, all of which have been rooted in the advancement of objectives like those found in the Laudato Si’ Action Platform (LSAP).
“Our center’s mission is to help to make healthy communities,” said Eric Strauss, executive director of CURes and President’s Professor of Biology. “That includes green infrastructure, that includes wildlife, and that includes the health of the people who live there, and that includes issues of homelessness … The cry of the earth and the cry of the poor — they’re interconnected.”
One of the ways in which these interrelated concerns are being addressed by CURes beyond the LMU campus is through the Healthy Trees Healthy Cities Healthy Baltimore initiative. Under the leadership of Managing Director Michele Romolini, CURes has worked alongside the Nature Conservancy to conduct interviews with residents of underserved communities throughout Baltimore, about their experiences in their neighborhoods and of green spaces in the city. That way, they can better understand how regreening efforts can best serve the local residents, rather than just being imposed upon them from above.
Said Romolini, “There’s this assumption that low-income communities of color don’t have connection to nature … but we wanted to raise up all of [their] stories.” In the process of seeking out those stories, the team at CURes and the Nature Conservancy found over and over that people had specific, striking experiences of nature — whether walking with their grandfather through the park on a sunny day or feeding the ducks on the way to work. The driving theme was that these were areas that once had green spaces, but which were lost as the result of years of neglect from city authorities.
The residents of these underserved, largely non-white communities felt that their neighborhoods were being abandoned, but that they had the potential to be beautiful spaces again, a sentiment clearly and artfully stated in “To the Jungles That Be,” a short film produced by the Nature Conservancy alongside Baltimore-based artist and poet Kondwani Fidel. “After a year of listening and meeting with urban forestry organizations around the city,” said Romolini, they realized the path forward was “working with communities to make sure their concerns are being centered in these efforts. Instead of worrying about the trees first, [think] about the communities where they’re going to go … I think we are challenged to listen, and to ask a question, sit down, and take notes, and start to think about how we can respond to people’s needs in a better way.”
Lily Maddox ‘23, a Baltimore resident who worked on the initiative as an undergraduate, added, “It’s been really cool to see how this project has grown to center true community partnership, and to learn about how different communities around me are engaging with nature, and what visions they have for the recent Tree Solutions Now Act.”
Healthy Trees Healthy Cities Healthy Baltimore is one of many projects that the Center for Urban Resilience has undertaken over the past couple of years — including surveys of coyote populations, hummingbird behavior, and tree cover throughout Los Angeles — but it is a clear example of how Laudato Si’ Action Platform can and should reach beyond campus, and beyond California.
Loyola Marymount University has signed on to the Laudato Si’ Action Platform (LSAP), a global initiative inspired by Pope Francis’ encyclical “On Care of Our Common Home (Laudato Si’)” that will guide our institutional journey to ecological renewal by 2030.
