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At first, Molly Burhans thought she’d be a ballet dancer.
It had been her dream through middle school, her focus in high school, and her major in college—until a foot injury caused her to drop out and move back home to Buffalo, New York.
Although it was a setback, it helped her to become perhaps the most renowned and highly respected Catholic environmentalist in this world. She is almost certain to be the most well-known cartographer. The EarthCare Award by the Sierra Club to Burhans, then 32 years old, was presented in 2021. It had been previously presented to David Attenborough or the John Muir Trust. The United Nations named Burhans the Young Champion of the Earth in 2019. Burhans was elected to Ashoka Fellowship 2018 for her innovative use technology to aid the Catholic Church in responding to climate change. She has been a participant in the Vatican Youth Symposium and the Vatican Arts and Technology Council. She has been invited speakers at Harvard University, Yale University, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and Yale University. Her life has been the subject of many stories. Boston Globe, America magazine, Forbes, and the New Yorker. She is planning a TED Talk.
When she was 18 and back in Buffalo, she squatted in an old, abandoned mansion with a group of fellow Freegans—a commune-style community loosely organized around not spending money and living off what other people throw away. The Freegans became urban guerilla gardeners, and the seeds of Burhans’ future were sown: She started to see how to make land work for good.
Debra, her mother in Buffalo, taught data analytics, cybersecurity and computer science at Canisius College. William Burhans, her father, was a Roswell park cancer institute senior cancer scientist (he died from prostate cancer in 2019). Molly Burhans learned to program and build computer graphics from her mother, which was a hint of her future profession.
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She attended Canisius, an Catholic college, and Parochial School. However, her family was not particularly religious. As Burhans studied philosophy, theology, and physics and read about Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement, she experienced one of what she calls her “two conversions.”
“I thought all these people who believed in God were nuts!” says Burhans. “But I began to think, ‘What if science could cure every disease and we could live forever?’ Why would we want eternal life if it was anything but love? And God is love.”
Burhans began having long discussions with a Jesuit spiritual mentor and working through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, a collection of meditations and prayers to deepen one’s relationship with God.
She wondered if she was crazy. “I went to the doctor. I said, ‘I believe in God,’ and thought I might have had a concussion or something,” she admits. The doctor asked her, “Do you believe you are God?” When she said no, he pronounced her healthy.
She traveled to Guatemala to work for six months with several NGOs, where she met “real saints, not television ‘Christians.’ They were mothers, supporting villages that had been decimated by genocide. They were doctors, bringing their expertise to help people without resources,” she says. They played a vital role in the healing work of these workers by caring for the land and using it sustainably.
Burhans wondered whether she was being called as a nun. She returned home to continue her undergraduate studies and volunteer at a local convent. The convent’s sprawling grounds of forest and grass lawns made her imagine other ways to use that land that might benefit the community, such as growing food and managing the woodlands responsibly.
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“I thought, if I’m going to be a nun, I need to study sustainable land management and design and bring that to the order,” says Burhans. She imagined herself as a regenerative steward of land, perhaps a nun park ranger or nun farmer.
Her second conversion was an eco-friendly one. She did extensive research on how the Catholic Church used its land and found that it was the largest non-governmental landholder on the globe. No one is really sure how many acres it has, she says, but some estimates say it is more than 177 million acres—more than France and Spain put together.
Burhans argued that if climate change was to be addressed with intelligent and effective stewardship, then the Catholic Church must get involved. She saw a new path for herself, combining her faith and professional passions.
She enrolled in a master’s program in ecological design at the Conway School in Massachusetts, where she worked with ArcMap, a software that organizes information geographically, layering data onto maps in ways that help visualize connections and relationships. She created a school project that examined the habitat conditions of urban corridors in order to attract butterflies and bees.
Her ability to work so inventively with the complex program impressed the faculty—and the software manufacturer, Esri, which provided her an essential program license and other support as she began to move toward the work she increasingly felt called to do.
Burhans believed that there would be a Catholic network for nature conservation, since the largest global networks of education and health care were Catholic. If it was, Burhans wanted to be part of it. She saw possibilities for how the church could make use of data sharing and visual storytelling.
Her passion for her faith is inextricably linked to her passion for environmentalism. For her, the church is morally bound to care passionately for the Earth.
“I asked my little network of Jesuit and nun friends and my renegade laypeople interested in environmentalism: ‘Who in the church is doing this work? I’m sure since we have the largest network of aid in the world that we must have the largest network of conservation,’ ” says Burhans. “And the answer was, ‘No, we don’t.’ Wow! What a gap!”
She was uniquely placed to fill this void. GoodLands was her non-profit organization that mapped the global landholdings for the Catholic Church. This data would be used to aid in strategic planning and decision-making.
Burhans saw the advantages of making this happen. “[The church owns] more land than pretty much anyone, the planet is in dire straits, and in the next century we will see migration across borders,” she says. “A transnational property owner can help with peacekeeping and supporting refugees in a way that no nation alone could do. We can help with biodiversity preservation, with all these environmental factors that are so determinative of human health and multiply our Christian vision.”
The church first needed to know its assets, where they were located, and what challenges and geographic constraints it faced. It needed a map.
Burhans found out by working locally that it was possible to trace land ownership and use even for one parish. Many records were not accessible or digitized, and many were out of date.
Burhans, a 2016 speaker at a Catholic Relief Services conference, spoke about how digital data, including mapped information, could support and plan sustainable efforts. On her way home, she stopped in Rome, and the then 26-year-old bravely began emailing officials at the Vatican, hoping someone might point her toward where to find more comprehensive digital records of the church’s holdings.
“I had this sense at 26 that someone should get their hands around this,” she says. “I had no powerful network. I was in Buffalo, working with nuns at a soup pantry. I knew this idea was way too big for me.”
Transnational property owners can support refugees and peacekeeping in a way no country alone could.
Remarkably, the Vatican’s Office of the Secretariat of State agreed to meet with her. Burhans asked for the cartography department—there wasn’t one—and where church maps were kept. Two priests pointed at ancient painted frescoes. And then, there was the Atlas HierarchicusPublished in 1901, with hand-drawn boundaries that are now largely inaccurate.
She’d been thinking there’d be a room like NASA has with giant monitors and dashboards of continually updated digital information. It was shocking to discover that the Vatican was not yet fully digitized, and that some of its data was not easily accessible in an age where a few clicks can access the vast libraries of the world.
“They couldn’t make a global map because there wasn’t a global church,” says Burhans. “But even governments don’t know what they have. The church is not alone in this.”
Her focus shifted from analysing data to looking for data.
Adding to the complexity, there’s a wide variety of land usage among church properties: monasteries, rectories, convents, agricultural lands, strips of urban real estate, and surprisingly eccentric holdings such as an “entire commercial district in one of Germany’s largest cities,” an “entire mountain in the Middle East,” and “oil wells in Los Angeles,” according to Burhans. “The network is mind-boggling when you dig into it. There’s this diversity of investment, and tracking it can go awry.”
Pope Francis—with whom Burhans met briefly in 2018—expressed interest in establishing at least a pilot Vatican cartography effort with Burhans at the helm. GoodLands presented a detailed proposal in the fall for how such an undertaking would be accomplished. The Vatican is still considering the proposal.
We probably fought the most over religion and land.
Meanwhile, individual Catholic relief groups, orders, and dioceses have brought projects to Burhans—many of which she undertook pro bono. Five of the eight people on her current staff are volunteers.
“There are bishops all over the world, religious orders all over the world, asking for our work,” Burhans says. “I’ve worked with half the Ivy Leagues and am scraping by financially, but my poverty is a microphone. I can proudly claim that poverty is my strength. We don’t sell board seats. We won’t work for funders with ties to real-estate agendas. We never had a dime of unrestricted funding, ever.”
She’s had offers of funding that were linked to GoodLands turning over data, and she’s turned them down. “I am not an anticorruption activist—that’s work for investigative journalists and Catholics who care about their church. But I will not sell the church. The integrity of our data must be pristine,” she says. Burhans is focusing right now on creating a model that will allow GoodLands generate enough income on certain projects to keep the doors open, and allow her to hire staff.
Some data may be shared publicly. The following website contains information: Website of GoodLandsThere are more than 100 interactive maps available. They allow you to explore topics like which dioceses have most carbon footprints and which regions have the greatest priest shortages.
She does this work with an awareness of how colonization, politics, and corruption helped shape and influence the scope and nature of the church’s landholdings—and how palpable the current sense of shame around those issues can be for both church officials and parishioners.
The work of communicating what any large organization owns can run the risk of exposing information that has comfortably slumbered for decades—even centuries. “It’s not our job to trace colonization or corruption,” says Burhans. “There may be some shame in knowing what we have, but we must face it intelligently and respectfully if we are to make things better.”
Take Los Angeles’ oil wells. “Oil is obviously a huge environmental issue,” says Burhans. “But before we start blaming, we need to recognize that those oil wells are not owned by a massive corporation, and they enable kids to get a good education. Instead of saying, ‘You guys are terrible!’ we need to meet in the middle and all get better together, discussing things like, ‘How can we help this company divest its holdings and become greener?’ ”
Burhans realizes that most historical conflict was about land and/or religious issues. So, it is no surprise that entering this arena will cause anxiety. Land activists around the world receive death threats—Burhans included—and there are security issues to confront when accessing and analyzing information that some people may not wish to be made visible. “Land and religion are the two things we probably fought most about,” she says. “But these are also the two things that have been the most powerful, transformative levers of change.”
There are important uses for map data that reach beyond Burhans’ environmental focus. The New Yorker reported on GoodLands’ mapping of abuse cases involving about 450 Catholic priests, tracing them geographically and depicting layers of visual data including accusations, convictions, and sentences. These maps show that cases decreased in dioceses with formal policies protecting minors.
Burhans suggests that mapping data about Catholic education and health could also be used to help the church track usage, identify future requirements, and allocate resources where they are most needed.
Burhans recognizes that one-off projects in specific dioceses and regions can be meaningful and useful, but she also sees the possibility of global visions of where the church is located on the planet and how it might play an important role in addressing climate change as well as maximising the productive potential of its land.
“We are brought here to be excellent and show big love—that’s what being Catholic is about,” says Burhans. “We are brought here to respect the science of Gregor Mendel and others. We are brought here to not regress in fear—but to take the best science, the best technology, the best understanding of the world and create novel collaborations and move forward with integrity. I have so much hope that if we can make our land work for good, we will not only solve the climate crisis but also fix and revolutionize our relation to God’s creation.”
Her spiritual and ecological conversions were synergistic, each sparking and deepening another. Burhans is still pondering whether she should become a nun, and how her spiritual and vocational lives might interconnect. Although it’s not ballet, it’s a type of dance.
This article also appears in the April 2022 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 87, No. 4, pages 10-14). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Ashoka Foundation
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