Photo courtesy of Haley Walk, shared with permission

My climate story started when I was seven or eight. We had a huge snowfall—feet of snow. Our neighbor’s white dog got lost in it, and playing outside with my family was the best thing I knew (never fear, we found the dog hiding under our other neighbor’s basement fridge). Over the next decade, snow became less frequent. Sometimes just a dusting. I was sad about it long before I understood why I should be.

In sixth grade, I read a National Geographic article about how forests pull carbon out of the atmosphere, and another, around the same time, about the potential of algae-based biofuels. We’re making progress. When I’m older, I won’t have to worry about this. The adults are taking care of it (reader, the adults were not taking care of it). I would have to figure that out on my own, in pieces, over the next twenty years.

The first piece arrived when I was eighteen. In 2019, my family and I left the LDS Church. Information had come out that challenged the historical and doctrinal foundations of what we’d been taught, and we, together, walked away from it. I had just finished my associate’s degree at Tacoma Community College, where I’d had my first experience of being told that my questions were good, my curiosity was welcome, and my reading list was mine to build. I felt connected to my education and to my environment in ways I had never felt within a single tradition.

But I kept thinking about the people I had not left behind. Extended family. Past friends. Communities I’d grown up inside of and the values I knew they held and the actions I knew they took, the gardening, the canning, the don’t-throw-that-out-it’s-still-good frugality, that had nothing to do with how I was being taught to talk about climate change in my undergrad seminars at Western Washington University, where I had transferred to study marine biology.

Two kinds of language. Both shaping what was and wasn’t sayable in the conversations I was having about caring for the world.

The second came in the summer of 2021, when I walked to a shift at JCPenney in all black. It was 102 degrees in Bellingham, a number that should not exist on a Pacific Northwest weather forecast in the last week of June. I was twenty, in my last year of the marine biology degree, and for the first time, not as a fact I’d read but as a temperature I could feel, I understood that something was wrong.

I tried to talk about it. I had two kinds of conversations that week. With my classmates and friends in the program, I got validation: yes, this is awful, yes, this is climate change, yes, we should be terrified. With family members still in or just outside the LDS Church, I got something more complicated. They weren’t climate deniers. They just didn’t talk about it. God loves us. He will take care of us. We need not worry about the world dying. He would not let that happen. “Experts” have been saying the same for years. I had heard those words my whole life. I had also heard from the same mouths: Do unto others as you would have done unto you. Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach him to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. God helps those who help themselves.

I realized that climate change is not only a scientific problem, but also a story problem, rooted in learned values that influence how we notice, trust, and respond to the world around us. The conversations from that summer didn’t end. I kept having them, in different forms, throughout my academic and professional life.

I had originally gone to WWU because I wanted to study sharks. During my junior and senior years, I realized I cared more about the systems they lived in. After graduation, I got promoted from shoe desk lead to operations supervisor at a retail chain, where I watched usable product be liquidated while managerial leadership told me, “It is what it is.” 9 months in, I was losing my mind and escaped north, where I worked as a fisheries observer on commercial trawling and long-line vessels in Alaska. There, I collected real-time data to manage fisheries — one of the first times I saw firsthand how science could directly shape policy.

Haley Walk

Across my time in both science and industry, I kept finding the same gap. Information existed. Action didn’t follow. People defended the way it’s always been done against any experiment with how we could do this better.

I inevitably hit a wall observing, and in fall 2024, I started a master’s in Marine and Environmental Affairs at the University of Washington. I shifted my focus from studying the science of the climate problem to the gap between knowing and acting on it. The community-based toolkit I am proposing aims to empower you with simple, scripture-inspired actions that foster hope and a sense of agency in climate care.

Informed by my crash-out of March 2025, driven by everything from a dramatic breakup to the ever-present dishes in the kitchen sink, my capacity was failing, and the election was the last straw. I was burnt out, and it took medication for my anxious disposition and another working stretch in Alaska, this time in Bristol Bay, thinking of nothing but salmon and when to take my next nap, before I could come back to climate action work at all. That moment of exhaustion is what clarified the project for me.

If guilt and overwhelm were enough to change behavior, we would have already solved much of what plagues humanity. The behavioral research on this is clear: lasting change happens within communities, through repetition over time, as new behaviors become part of what feels normal.² Small actions, like pausing and reflecting, can build confidence and foster climate care, making change feel achievable. This is, in some sense, also what my master’s program and Teaching Assistant position in the Biology program were teaching me. In my first course, SMEA 500, Anne Beaudreau gave us a phrase I have not stopped thinking about: slow down, dig deep, breathe in your belonging. I kept coming back to it.

What I have learned at UW, beyond any specific subject matter, is the inherent value of being wrong. There is only more to know. How silly to be afraid of not knowing when there are so many ways of knowing to discover. Things will change. My understanding will grow. My appreciation will deepen. That is, strangely, often the only thing I am certain of. It’s a peaceful comfort to embrace the inevitable.

I built Keeping Our Garden: Climate Care & Community Toolkit over the last year. I built it for faith-adjacent communities because that is where the most foundational part of myself comes from. I chose Christian scripture not because the work belongs to Christianity, but because the language of stewardship, Sabbath, and creation care reaches people for whom an IPCC report will not.³ Consisting of seven modules — Creation, Enough, Sabbath, Waste, Diet, Community, Hope — they each pair a scripture passage with a climate science concept, a guided reflection, action steps, and a small-group activity. It’s designed for groups of six to ten people meeting once a month for about an hour. Closer to a book club than a curriculum.

The behavioral cornerstone of the framework is what I call the pause, a deliberate moment of attention inserted between impulse and action. Impulse fuels demand. Demand fuels emissions. The pause is where that chain can be interrupted, not through willpower or guilt, but through a repeatable practice rooted in scripture and supported by behavioral science.⁴ I practice it myself as often as I can. I researched for 48 hours before buying the laptop I’m writing this on. For larger purchases, I sometimes end up waiting two birthdays. Most of the time, my impulse passes. The point is not to perform sustainability. It is to practice attention in repeatable ways.

This spring, I piloted the toolkit at an adult Sunday School class in the Seattle area with about thirty-five participants. I delivered Module 1 in a one-hour session and ran anonymous pre- and post-surveys. Of the fourteen people who returned complete surveys, ten correctly identified methane as having a stronger short-term warming impact than CO₂ ( the central scientific claim of the session).⁵ Eight named a specific climate-positive action they intended to try afterward. The numbers are small. The pilot was always meant as a feasibility signal, not a test of effect. The data is not the part I think about.

What I think about is the woman who told me, after the session, about her parents’ Depression-era habits. The lower-waste, lower-consumption practices her family had passed down for three generations, long before any of them were thinking about emissions. I think about the participant who wrote on her survey, “Creation care is definitely part of my faith practice, but you did deepen my understanding. The Micah verse is one of my favorites.” I think about the man who already understood much of the climate science I presented, who wrote, “The pause and ponder — what a good reminder.”

What I came to believe over the course of that hour is that the room did not need me to introduce climate action. Many of them were already doing it. What the room actually needed was sometimes a new vocabulary for practices already in place, sometimes a single new tool (the pause), and sometimes just a witness. Just when I thought I knew enough to write a whole 50-page toolkit to guide community climate action, the community that took the time to hear my first 1-hr pilot of the instrument taught me yet another facet of the connection between one’s lived experience, language of understanding, and participation in climate action.

Telling my climate story, the snow, the heat wave, the church, the retail floor, the burnout, the bus I am still working on catching, is what taught me what I was actually doing and why. It is how I came to understand my own practices as practices rather than as a list of requirements I felt I was constantly failing to meet. The story is what gave me permission to keep going imperfectly.

This is the gift I want to give other people. Not my story. Theirs. The vocabulary to name what they are already doing. The framework to keep doing it. The community to do it with.
If you have read this far, here are three ways to use the toolkit, in increasing order of commitment.

Start here. Try the pause. Forty-eight hours before any non-essential purchase. No app, no equipment, no group needed. Notice what happens to the impulse when you give it time.

Try this. Read Module 1 and share it with one person. Module 1 (Creation) is the one I piloted, grounded in Genesis 2:15 — humans charged to till and keep the garden. Share it with a small-group leader you know, a parent, a neighbor, anyone in a community where this language might land.

Go deeper. Run the full arc. Recruit four to ten people willing to work through all seven modules over seven months, one meeting per month, about an hour each. The facilitator’s guide is in the toolkit; no special training needed. If you do this, I would love to know (please), you can email me at haleyjean0424@gmail.com.

The toolkit’s structure is also portable. If scripture isn’t yours, the underlying architecture, values frame, paired science, formation rather than perfection, and the pause, can be adapted for any tight community. Parenting groups. Sports teams. Professional networks. Strip what doesn’t fit. Use what does.

My hope for this toolkit is that it inspires and empowers, growing into spaces where it can create change and connection within and between communities. I hope a few people who already care, but don’t know what to do with that caring, pick it up and find some words for it. I hope a handful of small groups try it and let me know what worked for them. I hope it grows beyond my own facilitation, that someone who leads a Bible study, a book club, or a parents’ group runs it without needing permission from anyone but themselves.

My hope for myself is quieter. I appreciate this life so much more than I did before I started studying it. That appreciation for this planet and its people is what gives me hope to continue the dreadful, amazing work that is climate science.

And my hope for us is that more people start telling their own climate stories. Out loud, in their communities, in the languages they grew up knowing, because the Earth is a gift, not a conquest. Because hope creates action, and action creates hope. Because every fraction of a degree of warming avoided matters, and because we get to decide the trajectory of our own understanding.

Tell me yours, if you’d like.

About the author.

Haley Walk (she/her) is a master’s student in the University of Washington’s School of Marine and Environmental Affairs and completed this capstone project for the Graduate Certificate in Climate Science. Her broader interests span environmental policy, fisheries management, eDNA and other conservation tools, and science-to-policy translation. For this capstone, she developed Keeping Our Garden: Climate Care & Community Toolkit — a seven-module formation framework that pairs scripture with climate science for small faith-community groups — and piloted it through a one-hour workshop in Spring 2026. Before her master’s, she worked as a fisheries observer in Alaska; this summer, she returns to those same waters. In September, she travels to Kenya to witness the great migration. In the meantime, she is looking for a job.
hwalk@uw.edu