Courses on religion and the environment must confront racism and white privilege in order to remain relevant for the diverse students who increasingly fill higher education classrooms. Recognizing that traditional approaches for understanding environmentalism can isolate students of color by failing to recognize their own communities and experiences, I offer two assignments -- Ecological Footprint Journals and a community-based research project -- that empower students to think of environmentalism in new, more relevant ways. This approach has benefitted my students by displacing the dominance of Eurocentric thinking in my curriculum and creating a class culture that values diverse perspectives. It has also profoundly shaped my research trajectory, by helping me identify raced and classed biases that are embedded in my field, and leading me to develop a research project that complements my teaching by challenging some of those hidden assumptions.