Climate Justice

Some twenty years ago, in a nondescript conference room with high ceilings and Berber carpet, I witnessed an Alaska Native Elder cry while discussing climate change. This Elder and her community have been living on the land—and existing off of it—for eons. She described changes many of us would...

Interviewed by Roger Santodomingo, UU World Executive Editor. The idea hovering over the book When Time is Short: Finding our Way in the Anthropocene (Beacon Press, 2022) is that climate change threatens human extinction....

When the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report told us that greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2025 in order to limit global warming, I called my best friend and told her it’s time to get serious about the fact we are living during “the end.” As we discussed...

Hope is a precious commodity these days, when so many things deserve holy outrage. I am not cynical; there is a sliver of hope in me. Maybe it’s more than a sliver—hope always seems to grow when I actually pay attention to it. My hope comes not from environmental science and activism but from...

What does faithful parenting look like, under today’s apocalyptic climate threat, when hope can feel elusive? We want to raise children accountable to the large but finite population of lifeforms sharing our planet. We need to “skill up” our children as voters, scientists, organizers, and...

Oh, Earth, for your lush body broken, for your living waters sullied, for your sheltering trees scorched, for your wild creatures pursued. For you, in my distress, I call out....

The Unitarian Universalist Society in Coralville, Iowa, has long been deeply committed to climate justice, but after years of thoughtful deliberation, members realized that their much-loved church in downtown Iowa City ultimately wasn’t allowing them to fully live their values of a fully green...

With deep roots in systemic racism and inequality, climate change is a public health crisis that exacerbates existing health inequities. Climate disruption disproportionately affects communities of color, children, older populations, low-income communities, pregnant people, immigrant groups,...

Nathan Hultman is founder and director of the Center for Global Sustainability at the University of Maryland, held senior posts in the Obama administration, and was the Senior Advisor of Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry....

Like many folks, I lost work when the pandemic hit, and I turned to my community’s food pantry. The food they delivered was surprising in both quality and quantity. But I grew up on freezer food and microwave meals, and though I am Mexican-American, I had no idea what to do with a bag of dried...

Mother Earth quakes and so do we When a pipeline is built the Earth screams And with agony so do we The trauma is within our bodies within the wind But I’ve found my hope, you see, in community Sometimes I have no words to describe when hope still lingers in the air, on a bright morning when we...

The Rev. Fletcher Harper, executive director of GreenFaith, an interfaith environmental coalition, speaks with the urgency of a man shouting as the house burns. Politicians, governments, corporations—all are moving too slowly on climate change and need to hear the alarm. Who better, he says, to...

Rattler is an Oglala Lakota Tribal member who spent three years in federal prison for charges related to protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline, and he wants you to know one thing: he would go back to prison in a heartbeat. “It was worth it because it was the right thing to do,” said Rattler, a...

Unitarian Universalists have a history of putting their money where their values are. So perhaps it’s not surprising that support for ethical investment practices among UUs is overwhelming. The UU Common Endowment Fund (UUCEF) manages about $265 million in UU assets, of which about half are...