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 that seemed like a setback, it placed her on a path to becoming possibly the most awarded and well-known Catholic environmentalist in the world at this moment. She is almost certainly the most well-known cartographer. In 2021 the Sierra Club honored the then 32-year-old with its EarthCare Award, previously awarded to the likes of David Attenborough and the John Muir Trust. In 2019 Burhans was named Young Champion of the Earth by the United Nations. In 2018 she was elected to the Ashoka Fellowship for her innovations in applying new technology to help the Catholic Church respond to climate change. She has participated in the Vatican Youth Symposium, the Vatican Arts and Technology Council, and the United Nations Youth Assembly. She has been an invited speaker at Harvard University, Yale University, and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Stories have been written about her in the 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.

In Buffalo her mother, Debra, taught data analytics, cybersecurity, and computer science at Canisius College. Her father, William, was a senior cancer scientist at Roswell Park Cancer Institute (he died of prostate cancer in 2019). Molly Burhans grew up teaching herself software programs and building computer graphics, a foreshadowing of her future profession.

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