Written by Signe Berg, 07/13/2024

A person without community is like a plant without soil. Soil is one of five basic components essential to growing plants and trees. The other elements that we and they cannot live without are water, air, sun, and space. Humans are a little more complex than that, but we also share those other four basic needs. But what about soil? Are we keeping our soil alive and producing?

Community for people is like soil for plants in the sense that it’s what we root ourselves in. For this article’s purpose, a community is simply a group of people that are connected somehow. They all share something in common. It can be a shared trait, belief, culture, activity, or just a shared space. But just as different plants prefer or need different kinds of soils, different people prefer and need different forms of community. One person’s communities may look very different than another’s. They might be fluid, they might not exist much in-person, someone might not even need a lot of interaction with others. As with plants, when someone grows up in a community they often have very deep and strong roots that have grown over time. When someone moves from one community to another, the roots need to regrow, just like when you transplant a tree or plant.

As discussed in the prior article, like plant life and living soil, people also are interdependent. And we need to become consciously even more so – moving from competition to collaboration if we are committed to change the current climate trajectory to one of regenerative living. Just as we thrive when we are a part of a strong, supportive community. Greener Way Associates promotes and demonstrates best practices for sustainable gardening, and will soon demonstrate how gardens themselves can be especially important to strengthening neighborhoods to become interdependent communities from the ground up.