Climate Action Isn’t About Saving the Planet—It’s About Tending What’s Already in Your Hands
Day 11 of taking ecospiritual action reminds me that repair is spiritual practice, not environmental heroism
I’m watering plants at the end of the season that won’t survive the first deep frost.
Most people would tear them out by now. Replace them with seasonal mums or pansies. Make the window box look fresh and intentional for fall.
Instead, I keep watering what’s still alive. These plants are changing with temperature, clearly struggling, but they’re not dead yet. So I continue to care for and celebrate them instead of ripping them out for short-lived seasonal replacements.
I know they won’t make it through winter. But until the frost takes them, I’m not the one who ends their growing.
That’s repair. That’s tending what’s in my hands.
The Plants That Taught Me About Climate Action
I had some indoor plants that weren’t doing well recently. They needed severe pruning, cut back to almost nothing remaining.
Rather than toss these living beings into the trash or leave them outside to be eaten, I tried something different. I repotted them together in one container. Plants struggling together, with extra attention toward the sun and limited watering, might help each other.
I cannot say it will work. This might be a futile effort. They might all die anyway.
But this is my attempt to do what I can for life, and for my relationship with the living world. It may seem like a small action. Small actions all add up.
This is what climate action actually looks like. Not grand gestures, carbon offset purchases, or feeling guilty about your existence.
Tending what’s already in your hands. Caring for what’s still alive. Trying one more thing before giving up. We do what we can within our power to act.
What Repair Actually Means
As an ordained Wild Guide and university chaplain, I’m learning that repair connects directly to spiritual practice.
We want to fix things to reuse them if they still have a lot of life left, so to speak. If I can extend an item’s life by repairing it, I help keep more waste out of landfills while practicing the spiritual discipline of working with what I have and not wasting.
We don’t want to do this for unnecessary reasons or to seem cheap. But if something can still work for us, then let’s let that happen a little longer and reduce our consumption.
There’s a relationship between fixing broken things and spiritual restoration. Both require noticing what’s struggling. Both require choosing to tend rather than discard. Both resist the culture of constant replacement.
The spiritual practice isn’t about perfection. It’s about attention to what we already have. Care for what’s in our hands right now.
My Daily Low-Impact Practices
I try to drive as little as possible. This helps the environment and allows me to spend time focusing on things that are needed.
In this way, I never go out to get one thing at a single store. I gather my needs together so that when I have to drive, I can do multiple stops and tasks in a batch. This helps the environment and also better manages the time it takes to run errands.
This isn’t a sacrifice. This is efficiency. This is recognizing I don’t need to consume as much as culture tells me I do.
I regularly read food labels and try not to purchase products with artificial or chemical ingredients, or those that are harmful to the environment. As a vegetarian, simply not eating meat helps all sorts of reductions in carbon dioxide due to reduced animal farming and the chemicals and transport, not to mention horror and death, that it otherwise involves.
These are permanent shifts. Not perfect. Not heroic. Just choices I’ve made about what I’ll tend and what I won’t.
Why Contemplative Walking Depends on Climate Action
Here’s something I don’t often say directly: contemplative walking is easiest to do when the nature in which we commonly walk is healthy.
Even in a cityscape, contemplative walking is best done without trash, pollution, or an abused relationship with the natural world. When I walk through areas where land has been extracted from and discarded, where litter covers paths, or where air quality makes breathing difficult, the practice becomes harder.
Not impossible. But harder.
This is why climate action matters for spiritual practice. Not because we’re “saving the planet” in some abstract way. Because we want to walk in places that allow presence. Because contemplative connection with land requires land that’s cared for.
Small repairs matter. Picking up trash matters. Reducing harm matters. Not as moral superiority, but as practical support for the spiritual practices that sustain us.
Individual vs. Systemic Action
People ask me how I hold the tension between individual actions like fixing a faucet and systemic change like climate justice movements.
Individual actions are all we can actually control. Namely, our own.
We may want to spread these practices. We may want to inspire others or give them ideas for what they can do in their own lives. But we cannot necessarily force them. We can only control ourselves and hope our example may inspire.
This doesn’t mean systemic change doesn’t matter. It does. Massively. We need policy shifts, corporate accountability, infrastructure transformation, justice for communities most impacted by climate crisis.
But I cannot personally create those systemic changes through my individual will. What I can do is practice care for what’s in my hands and connect with collective movements working toward larger change.
Both matter. The tension between them is real. However, paralysis helps neither.
The Planned Obsolescence Problem
Many items cannot easily be fixed. Planned obsolescence often makes repairs more costly than purchasing a new and more efficient model of the item in question.
This is real. This is frustrating. This is part of an extraction culture designed to keep us consuming.
So what do we do? We fix what we can. We research repairable options before buying. We support right-to-repair movements. We refuse the culture of constant replacement where possible.
When we cannot fix something, when replacement truly is necessary, we don’t spiral into guilt. We acknowledge the systems we’re living within. We do what we can. We move forward.
Climate action without inducing paralysis or guilt means focusing on the immediate. Those items are right at our own hands and within our own control. If we get paralyzed, we cannot even care for our own personal climate actions.
Your Practice Today
Here’s what I’m inviting: fix one small thing today.
Not to save the planet. To practice care for what’s already in your hands.
Water the plants that are still alive instead of replacing them. Repair something with life left in it. Batch your errands. Read food labels. Turn off the lights. Bring a reusable bag or cup. Fix a dripping faucet. Eat one plant-based meal.
These aren’t about perfection or guilt. They’re about practicing care in tangible ways.
Start with what you can control. Your own choices. Your own hands. Your own relationship with things and beings right in front of you.
Small actions, done collectively, matter. Not because they “solve” the climate crisis. Because they connect us to ways of being that value care over consumption. Repair over replacement. Tending over discarding.
Tomorrow, we share why we care. But today, just tend to what’s in your hands. Fix one small thing. Practice care.
The plants in my window box are still alive. So I keep watering them.
That’s climate action. That’s spiritual practice. That’s what we can actually do.
I’m developing a 13-Day EcoSpirituality Challenge and sharing what I’m learning here. Tomorrow: sharing why we care. If you’d like to practice along, consider subscribing for reflections on EcoSpirituality, sacred walking, and climate action as spiritual practice.
What did you fix or tend today? I’d love to hear in the comments below.