Founded in 2021, the Gonzaga Center for Climate, Society, and the Environment provides resources and opportunities to students, faculty, community members, and leaders in the inland northwest to meet the unprecedented challenges facing humanity and the wider natural environment in the 21st century. Such a vision is central to our identity as a Jesuit institution of higher learning. As Pope Francis writes, “All Christian communities have an important role to play in ecological education.”
This guide was created as a central location for resources on climate, society, and the environment, including relevant published research by Gonzaga faculty, teaching resources, journals and other publications available through the library, and more. This guide is a living document: please email climatecenter@gonzaga.edu to make a suggestion.
The Climate Center is located on the first floor of Foley Library.
Gonzaga University recently became the first U.S. university to officially commit to the ambitious Laudato Si' Action Platform, which was inspired by Pope Francis's 2015 encyclical on climate change and sustainability, “Laudato Si’: On Care for our Common Home.” Read this transformative work here:
Laudato Si’: On Care of Our Common Home by Let us be protectors of creation, protectors of God's plan inscribed in nature, protectors of one another and of the environment. Pope Francis, Homily for the Inauguration of the Petrine Ministry, March 19, 2103In his second encyclical, Laudato Si, On the Care for Our Common Home, Pope Francis follows and expands on Catholic teaching on mankind's responsibility to care for God's creation, and protect and care for the most vulnerable. This letter builds on the teachings of previous popes including Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and Pope Saint John Paul II.Laudato Si published by Our Sunday Visitor includes reflection questions, making it perfect for individual or group study.The Church is likewise conscious of the responsibility which all of us have for our world, for the whole of creation, which we must love and protect. -- Pope Francis, Audience with Representatives of the Churches and Ecclesial Communities and of the Different Religions, March 20, 2013
Gonzaga University sits on the traditional lands of the Spokane People, or Sqeliz, who thrived in these riverlands for thousands of years along with other Plateau and Salish tribes before the onset of colonization, and who are still here to this day. Though my presence here as a non-Native white person is complicated, I'm grateful to be on these lands. I offer you the opportunity to reflect on the complexities of your own presence here.
- Nicole Gustavsen
