I remember reading Laudato Si’ not as a Catholic encyclical, but as a manifesto smuggled into the open—one that spoke of climate not as weather but as wound, economy not as growth but as theft. Pope Francis called for “ecological conversion,” but that phrase has always struck me as misnamed. Because it is more than personal transformation. It is political defiance. In a world where profit is the god and people are just data points on a quarterly spreadsheet, to care for the Earth is to rebel.
To embrace an ecological worldview is to say: enough. Enough to the myth of endless extraction. Enough to governments that poison rivers for lithium contracts. Enough to corporations that bulldoze entire forests to grow sugarcane for European fuel. Zimbabwe knows this story well. From Chisumbanje’s ethanol project displacing thousands of villagers to Chinese-run mines in Hwange polluting the air and leaving whole communities coughing in silence, our environment is not suffering from neglect. It is being targeted.
To undergo ecological conversion is not merely to recycle or plant trees. It is to reorient the soul and demand a politics that respects limits, listens to the land, and refuses to commodify life itself. In Laudato Si’, Francis writes that we cannot adequately combat environmental degradation unless we attend to human and social degradation. This is not poetic parallelism. It is diagnosis. When the soil is poisoned, the people are too. When the trees fall, the vulnerable fall with them. The suffering of the Earth is the suffering of the poor. They breathe the smoke. They drink the contaminated water. They live downstream.
In Chipinge, villagers continue to watch their sacred land consumed by multinational agro-giants whose allegiance lies not with the people, but with export quotas. Their ancestral graves bulldozed. Their crops choked by chemicals. Their lives, collateral damage in the name of economic development. And what is development if it severs people from the very soil that bore them?
This is where liberation theology becomes crucial. It insists that salvation cannot be abstract. That justice must come not after death, but during life. That Christ is not neutral, but on the side of the oppressed. It speaks not of personal piety alone but of structural sin—the kind of sin that clears forests for shopping malls, builds dams that flood entire communities, and turns wetlands into high-rise estates. Zimbabwe’s wetlands have been under assault for years. Just last year, Harare City Council quietly approved construction on a wetland that recharges Lake Chivero, our main water source. The public protested. The developers built anyway.
Ecological conversion is not sentimental nostalgia for a green past. It is an insistence on a just present. It means naming the system for what it is—a machine that consumes everything in its path and leaves behind deserts and desperation. Our politics is allergic to limits. Leaders campaign on the promise of more: more roads, more industry, more export earnings. But at what cost? Roads that cut through protected areas. Industries that dump their waste in rivers. Foreign investment that leaves only craters and contracts.
This machine tells us that the Earth is raw material. That a tree is only valuable once it is timber. That a river is only useful once dammed. That land is only productive once cleared and privatized. But an ecological worldview says otherwise. It says the tree has worth standing. That the river flows with memory. That land is not a commodity but a covenant.
The politics of ecological conversion calls us to stop applauding destruction disguised as progress. It demands we ask why subsistence farmers are being criminalized while multinational corporations get tax holidays. It demands we speak up when entire communities are relocated so that a foreign company can extract granite for European kitchen countertops. Look at Mutoko. Decades of mining. Billions in exports. And the roads are still dust and the schools still crumbling.
In embracing an ecological worldview, one inherently stands against the logic of neoliberalism which prioritizes markets over life. It rejects the IMF policies that pressure governments to privatize communal lands. It challenges the silence around environmental racism, where poor Black communities—whether in Marange or Mbare—live next to dumpsites, breathe in toxins, and are told it’s just the price of progress. It is no coincidence that the most ecologically devastated spaces are also the most economically disenfranchised.
In Laudato Si’, Francis writes of the intimate connection between the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor. But in Zimbabwe, those cries are often met with tear gas. When villagers in Dinde protested a Chinese coal project last year, they were arrested. Their only crime was defending the land that feeds them. This is not an isolated case. It is a pattern.
Ecological conversion as political resistance also means resisting the colonization of the mind. For too long, our environmental thinking has been outsourced to international NGOs and technocrats who arrive with buzzwords and leave with reports. Our ancestors understood the soil. They honored the rain. They respected the seasons. But now, tradition is dismissed as backward and indigenous knowledge systems are sidelined in favor of imported solutions that fail to grasp the soul of the land.
To reclaim our future, we must reclaim our cosmology. One that sees rivers not just as drainage but as veins. One that sees trees not just as biomass but as witnesses. One that sees the Earth not as property but as parent.
The political implications are clear. We need environmental governance that centers community voice, not just elite consensus. Policies that prioritize ecological restoration over extractive contracts. Budget allocations that treat waste management and clean water not as luxuries, but as rights. Leadership that understands sustainability not as a UN slogan but as intergenerational solidarity.
To care for the Earth is to unmask the empire. It is to ask why environmental impact assessments are routinely ignored. Why forests are sold off without consulting the people who live in them. Why young Zimbabweans are growing up with asthma and without clean drinking water, all while politicians promise megaprojects no one asked for.
Ecological conversion is resistance because it tells the truth in a world built on lies. It refuses to let GDP growth metrics obscure the devastation on the ground. It tells the coal lobby no. It tells the timber barons no. It tells the extractive state no.
And it does so not out of pessimism, but out of love. Love for the soil. Love for the future. Love for the people who know that liberation must include the land, or it is no liberation at all.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kumbirai Thierry Nhamo is an independent social justice activist, writer, researcher, and social commentator. He is also a poet, a blogger (Zealous Thierry), and is currently studying Fabrication Engineering at a polytechnic in Zimbabwe.
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