Ten Resolutions for a Team Green Revolution?

I am a gardening fanatic. Can it be an enjoyable community activity in a team environment similar to our childhood of fun and games?

There is nothing about flowers, fruit trees, vegetable transplants and herbs that do not interest me. Perhaps, I am a one of a kind individual, but I beg to differ. From the very beginning, there were gardens and natural beauty that continuously help us to cross barriers of sorrow, oppression and destitution to walk new pathways of hope, love and peace.

In the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary, gardening is the job or activity of working in a garden, growing and taking care of the plants, and keeping it attractive.

Following that path includes a natural curiosity and tendency to read literature growing up which was mandated by school education and library boards and included books by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

According to Emerson in Nature, "Nature in its ministry to man, is not only the material but is also the process and the result. All the parts incessantly work into each other's hands for the profit of man. The wind sows the seed; the sun evaporates the sea; the wind blows the vapor to the field; the ice, on the other side of the planet; condenses rain on this; the rain feeds the plant; the plant feeds the animal; and thus the endless circulations of the divine charity nourish man."

Emerson's love of beauty has some Nature supporters such as public officials and environmentalists worried. Will there be any or enough green space, land and natural resources for the next generation to enjoy? With the urban sprawl that seems to be taking over available rural areas and valleys and in competition at times for valuable interior landscape, are we so selfish that we all seemingly don't want to share, protect and keep it in its original setting and place?

More questions. How will we live, balance our need for energy and conserve in this post-modern world with all of its conveniences? Conserving is a necessary component and even our political and spiritual leaders both conservative and liberal including President Obama sees energy answers as a future solution to the "waste-less" questions.

Author Skip McDonald of The Garden of My Heart has spiritual answers to domestic questions. "As we understand our heart more, lean to guard it, prepare the soil and control pests we produce much fruit, fruit from God's Word budding in the garden of our hearts."

Community gardening is both spiritual and therapeutic for some growers and is now the craze in both urban and rural areas. The Community Gardening Leaders' Manual of the Urban Gardening Program, the University of Georgia Cooperative Extension, Fulton and DeKalb counties has these tips to use community gardening to help with your individual and neighborhood "green" efforts to reduce, reuse and recycling efforts.

Ten of the 27 tips for elements in the book that build a group and will help members achieve mutual goals include: humor, starting on time, short meetings, fun, compromising, similar backgrounds, common goals, enthusiasm, cooperation and lastly, assigning a leadership role on a temporary basis (rotating facilitator).

Are you ready for a green revolution?

Then get on your mark; get set, ready then go. The words of scientist and farmer George Washington Carver may prove to be prophetically correct in your personal garden of hope. " How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because some day in life you will have been all of these."

Della Spearman is a grad school student and fellow at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta. An ordained minister and Master Gardener, she writes on various issues including political, education and some pop philosophy concerns.