Live Simply: March 2026

Live Simply March 2026

🌿 A Carbon Fast for Lent 🌿

Lent is well underway. Many of us will already have chosen how to mark Lent this year—perhaps by giving up chocolate, alcohol, or another familiar comfort. Others may still be searching for something meaningful, something that stretches us a little further. And some of us might already have stumbled in our Lenten promises and are looking for a fresh start.

This year, The Carbon Stewards offer a creative and a very relevant invitation:-A Carbon Fast for Lent.

A Carbon Fast draws us closer to God by caring for His creation, while also making a tangible difference to our precious Earth. Lent has always been a time of fasting, reflection, and recentering our lives on God. A Carbon Fast helps us examine our environmental footprint and ask whether any excess in our lives distracts us from our relationship with Him.

🌍 Why Care for Creation This Lent?

The Carbon Stewards.org remind us starkly: “Our natural world is in crisis.” Humanity is consuming resources 1.8 times faster than the Earth can regenerate. In 2025, Earth Overshoot Day fell on 24 July, meaning that in just seven months we had used up all the renewable resources the planet could produce for the year. For the remaining five months, we lived on resources borrowed from future generations.

To sustain our current lifestyle yearround, we would need 1.8 Earths—but we only have one.

Sir David Attenborough once wrote in Life on Earth:-

“No species has ever had such wholesale control over everything on earth… In our hands now lies not only our own future, but that of all other living creatures with whom we share the earth.”

His words feel even more urgent today.

🌱 The Carbon Fast: A Weekly Journey

Each week of Lent focuses on a different theme, inviting us to learn, reflect, and act:

Week	Theme
1	Delight in and responsibility for nature
2	Consumerism and shopping
3	Money and investments
4	Food waste and meat/dairy consumption
5	Transport and driving
6	Energy, electricity, and gas
7	Social media

Every week we are invited to do one practical challenge—something simple, achievable, and spiritually grounded.

Examples from Week 1

• Spend 30 minutes outdoors each day to walk, sit, observe, or pray

• Visit a local green space—park, woodland, nature reserve, or wetland

• Get your hands in the soil: plant seeds, tend a garden, or nurture a houseplant

• Taking on a bigger challenge by volunteering with a conservation group

o Local opportunities include:- The Conservation Volunteers in Dinnington or Kiveton Community Woodland. Activities include tree planting, fence removal, and habitat creationContact: southyorkshire@tcv.org.uk or 07825 342189

These practices help us reconnect with God’s creation and remember those who suffer most from environmental damage.

✉️ Join the Carbon Fast Journey

Sign up to receive a weekly email filled with:

• Helpful facts,

• Practical suggestions,

• Prayers and reflections.

All designed to guide you through Lent with purpose and hope.

Learn more and sign up at:climatestewards.org/resources/carbon-fast-for-lent/

We Thank You Lord adapted from a poem by the Poor Clares of San Damiano, San Salvador

We thank You, Lord, for the perfection with which You

created our mother earth. For filling her with beauty,

goodness and generosity. For looking at her with love,

so that everything you created was very good.

We thank You, Lord, for the trees, plants and flowers

that speak to us through Your silence, for the song of

the birds that sing a beautiful melody

to their Creator, for the air that gently caresses us.

We thank You for the Universe that in constant

movement renews, recreates and transforms itself,

raising our being to You.

We thank You Lord for so many men and women who

now and throughout history have loved, guarded and cared

for our common home, raising their voices as brave

prophets, denouncing the injustice, misappropriation

and exploitation of our sacred natural resources,

accepting persecution and even martyrdom.

We ask for your help Lord that we will become

people who respect our mother earth, who contemplate her

and feel as one with her, who work for good and who

go throughout the world as messengers of peace praising You.

Amen