10/10/2026
Find your voice!
Speak up with love for the wellbeing of family, neighborhood, community, and the planet.
Share these tips with family and friends.
- Build nature time into your routine and your family's. Take a 10-minute nature break, eat lunch outside, talk and walk. Love yourself and your loved ones. According to research, just two hours a week in nature have a positive effect on health and psychological wellbeing—and the benefit holds regardless of age, income, or chronic illness.
- Speak up for parks and trees to be placed so that ALL neighbors benefit. Green space is critical for health and wellbeing. Yet, access to green space isn't equal. Lower-income neighborhoods consistently have less tree canopy, hotter temperatures, more pollution, and worse health outcomes.
- Weave love of creation and neighbor into your worshipping community's practices through liturgy, fellowship, education, and contemplation. See to it that creation justice is not just an occasional program or a single campaign or the purview of one committee but a dimension of the congregation's shared life.
- Write letters, sign petitions, make calls. Who pays for pollution? Not the polluters! Challenge government to shift the cost back to where it belongs. As citizens and people of faith, follow Jesus' story of the persistent widow (Luke 18:1-8), who stuck to her mission and finally convinced the unjust judge. Keep at it!
- Put your money to work for justice. When you buy organic, more farmers can grow healthy, safe food. Eunice and Larry Park at Larry's Veggies are local farmers who provide weekly vegetables and fruits by subscription. You can pick them up at one of Tucson's Heirloom Farmer's Markets. Do you know other Community Sponsored Agriculture offerings? Tell us! Fair trade purchases provide living wages and fight poverty. When you bank with a community bank or credit union, you invest locally and are likely not funding fossil fuel projects.
- Persist in the "little things" you do to help the planet—recycle, compost plant, thrift, ride share, consume less, use alternatives to plastic—and talk about what you are doing and why. People pay attention to the practices and words of others they know. You make a difference.
- Turn your private frustration into public pressure. When something proposed is harmful, raise your voice to connect the dots for people and officials of how the results are injurious. Encourage others to listen and act. Go after change. Be proactive for their sake. Love for the next generation is the number one reason why people care about climate change. Keep in mind your children, grands, greats, and future generations as you make choices for your lifestyle and for how you spend your energy addressing the environmental and justice issues of today.
- Sing out like the canary in the coal mine. In the face of fast-tracked, huge data centers, join the community demanding transparency, truth, time, and guardrails. Learn about the inherent creation justice issues, and raise your voice along with your neighbors'.
- Join with others and use your power—your voice, your actions, your advocacy—to love Earth. The gifts of God—sun and wind—are free and renewable. Using them rather than continuing with fossil fuels will save our planet. A crucial benefit from the switch is less incentive to go to war over limited fossil resources.
These tips were condensed from the October UM Creation Justice Tips. Learn more at the UM Creation Justice Movement site. Photo: Jelle Taman (Unsplash)
