Molly Burhans’ belief in using land for environmental good dates back to her late teens when some of her friends occupied an abandoned home in Buffalo, New York. The struggling city in the “Rust Belt” of the United States of America had experienced decades of decline. Once thriving streets were haunted by abandoned mansions and empty warehouses. But where others saw urban blight Burhans, an environmentalist and cartographer, saw opportunity. She helped renovate the derelict home and experimented with guerrilla gardening, bringing neglected patches of earth back to life. “It not only restored the land but it also transformed the entire neighbourhood in a radically beautiful way,” she says. “That was my first experience of really seeing the power of property and the way we use and manage our land.” Burhans had recently co-founded her first company Gro-Op, a worker-owned indoor vertical farm that still operates in Buffalo, when another important revelation came during a visit to a Benedictine monastery in Pennsylvania. "If we don't figure out how to engage faith-based actors in climate solutions, in protecting and restoring ecosystems, we simply will not succeed in meeting our targets” Molly Burhans, Founder of GoodLands While taking in the views around the monastery, Burhans started thinking about how much property the Catholic Church owned and how it could be used to protect nature, restore fragile ecosystems and fight climate change. Though the Catholic Church has one of the world’s largest institutional networks of landholdings, it had not mapped its operational jurisdictions and in many places, lacked record keeping systems for its assets. So, in 2015, Burhans founded GoodLands, an organization devoted to helping faith-based communities digitally map and sustainably manage their landholdings. The Holy See granted Burhans permission to create the first ever comprehensive global digital map of the Catholic Church’s governing jurisdictions. The asset mapping in the United States of America, for example, uses sources such as public land records and geographic information systems (GIS) technology. Based on the detailed picture that is generated, GoodLands is able to come up with more sustainable land management practices for holdings. This mapping facilitates knowledge sharing amongst Catholic groups and promotes best practices. “GIS technologies and spatial technologies are as critical to the environment as imaging and scans are to medicine,” says Burhans. For her pioneering work, Burhans was named a Young Champion of the Earth in 2019, the United Nations’ most prestigious award for environmental action by young people.
- Published in
- Kenya
