The title comes from the opening line of the Canticle of the Creatures of Francis of Assisi, praise be to you, my Lord, and the choice signals the argument. Creation in this document is not raw material awaiting use but a shared home with its own standing.
Two features distinguish it from its predecessors. The first is the addressee. Papal encyclicals are normally directed to bishops, clergy and the faithful. This one is addressed to every person living on this planet, which is a deliberate widening and was noticed as such. The second is the method. The text works through a long descriptive section on pollution, waste, water, biodiversity, urban decay and inequality before it reaches theology, and in that section it accepts the scientific consensus that a very solid consensus indicates a disturbing warming of the climatic system driven largely by human activity.
From there the argument turns. What it calls the technocratic paradigm, the habit of approaching every problem as an object to be mastered by technique, is presented as the root of both the environmental crisis and the treatment of the poor as surplus. Against it the encyclical proposes an integral ecology, in which environmental, economic, social and cultural questions cannot be separated, and a claim that runs through the whole text: there are not two crises, one environmental and one social, but one complex crisis which is both.