Devout

When Molly Burhans first started trying to map the Catholic Church’s global property holdings so the land could be put to work fighting climate change, the idea seemed so obvious to her that she was sure someone else must be doing it already.

Burhans, a cartographer, was then an ecological-design grad student who had recently been introduced to geographic information system (GIS) mapping. But she was also a devout Catholic who liked spending time with nuns. It was on a visit to a monastery with a vast, underutilized lawn that she started thinking about how much land the church owns, and what an impact that land could make on the climate if managed responsibly.