What does the Church teach about caring for creation?
The short answer
The Church teaches that the created world is a gift entrusted to us, not a possession to use up however we please. We are meant to be careful stewards — caring for the earth, treating animals with kindness, and using its resources in a way that respects the Creator and leaves something good for those who come after us.
Full explanation
It starts with whose world this is. Scripture is clear that the earth and everything in it belong to God; we are gardeners in someone else's garden, not owners of our own. That single fact changes everything. A renter who trashes a borrowed house has done something wrong even if no law was broken — and the world is, in the deepest sense, borrowed. The Church calls our role stewardship: real authority to use and cultivate creation, held in trust, with the duty to hand it on intact.
This means there is a right way and a wrong way to relate to the natural world. The Genesis command to "have dominion" has too often been read as permission to strip-mine the planet, but that misreads it badly. In the same breath, humanity is placed in the garden to tend and protect it. Dominion in the Bible looks like a gardener, not a wrecking crew — drawing fruit from the land while keeping it healthy and alive. Wasting, poisoning, or exhausting creation for short-term gain is not the exercise of dominion; it is the betrayal of a trust.
The Church also extends real, if measured, care to animals and other living things. They are God's creatures, and we owe them kindness; cruelty to animals or treating them as mere machines is wrong. At the same time, the tradition keeps a clear order of values: caring for creation is never set above caring for people. It is not more important to protect a forest than to feed a child. The point is not to worship nature but to treat all of God's gifts — human and non-human — with the reverence a gift deserves.
Finally, creation care is tied to justice between people, including the people who do not exist yet. The goods of the earth were given for everyone, in every generation. When a few exhaust or spoil what was meant to sustain all, the poor suffer first and the unborn future inherits the wreckage. So caring for creation is not a separate "green" hobby bolted onto the faith — it flows straight out of the same Gospel that tells us to love our neighbor, including the neighbor downstream and the neighbor not yet born.
Why this matters
How we treat the world reveals whether we really believe it is a gift. A culture that sees nature only as raw material to be consumed will tend to see people that way too. Stewardship trains a different instinct — gratitude instead of greed, care instead of waste. For the believer, tending creation is a quiet act of worship: handling God's gifts with the reverence owed to the One who made them, and loving the neighbors, near and distant, who depend on a world kept whole.
Myth Common misunderstanding
Some assume the Church either ignores the environment as a worldly distraction, or else treats nature as sacred in a way that puts trees on the same level as people. Both miss the mark. The Church takes creation care seriously as a duty of justice and stewardship, while keeping the human person at the center of God's plan. We care for the earth because it is God's gift and because our neighbors depend on it — not because nature is divine.
Scripture connections
- Genesis 1:31 — God looks at all he has made and calls it very good; creation has worth because its Maker delights in it.
- Genesis 2:15 — humanity is placed in the garden to cultivate and keep it, defining dominion as care, not destruction.
- Psalms 24:1 — the earth and all it holds belong to the Lord; we are stewards, not absolute owners.
- Romans 8:19-21 — creation itself longs to share in the freedom and renewal God intends, hinting at its place in his plan.
Church teaching references
Reflect
Where do you treat some part of the world — your possessions, your habits of consumption, the natural places near you — as something to use up rather than a gift to care for and pass on?