Begin to Shift

March 20, 2015

Climate Justice Month starts Sunday, the day we — and everyone who has joined the new Commit2Respond initiative — start thinking in new ways about changing everything.

Our current crisis requires transformation. It’s less about changing a few individual behaviors and more about imagining radical new ways of living.

Our current paradigm assumes the expendability of some people and species in service to the dominant culture. In it, we willingly forgo human health and even human and nonhuman life on this planet as long as we can live in comfort and convenience today. In this paradigm, we willingly sacrifice the people on the margins of society — generally people of color, immigrants, and people who live with great financial instability — to maintain the industrial growth economy. This economic system assumes ecosystems, communities, cultures, and nonhuman beings are all externalities that are expendable in the pursuit of maximizing profit.

At the start of Climate Justice Month, Unitarian Universalists will begin to think deeply together about altering social norms and creating climate justice. Climate justice is a global struggle to dismantle the paradigm that disadvantages certain people because of their identities and approaches Earth as supply source and sewer rather than a system of interdependent life, a single, beloved community. Climate justice pays deep attention to those most affected by climate change to find transformative solutions grounded in profound connections with Earth and each other.

We will begin to shift the way we understand and approach the world.

The month before us offers the opportunity to begin, continue, and support the necessary work of transformation.

• Week One: Celebrating and Rejoicing in Our Natural World
• Week Two: Grieving and Reckoning with the Loss We Are Confronting
• Week Three: Reconnecting with Earth in All Her Glory
• Week Four: Committing to a New Way

Sign up to receive daily Climate Justice Month messages. Each day will offer a spiritual reflection on the topic of the week. And each week will focus on an element of the Earth to ground that reflection.

• Week One: Water
• Week Two: Fire
• Week Three: Air
• Week Four: Earth

Our hope for you, and for us all, is that we lean into the process, allowing the reflections to become catalysts for the days and the weeks and the month. And our hope for you, and for us all, is that we connect with Earth and our desire for greater life, deeper life, more sustainable and healthy and even exciting life — and that we can enter this new stage in faith, together.