community gardens

Minute for Mission: Earth Day 2022

It’s been more than 50 years since the first Earth Day (1970). Spurred by concerns from that time period about oil spills, polluting factories, and dangerous chemicals being used regularly (described in Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”), thousands of college students and concerned citizens came together in mass rallies, across political lines. Later that year, the United States Environmental Protection Agency was formed, and federal environmental laws soon followed: the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act. By 1990, Earth Day began to be celebrated globally. The first United Nations Earth Summit was held in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro.

Hive of hardworking honeybees poisoned in Florida church’s mission garden

It’s been only a few months since Covenant Presbyterian Church in Fort Myers, Florida, worked with a professional beekeeper to relocate a couple of well-established bee colonies from an old rotten tree on the property. The bees were successfully moved to side-by-side hives in the church’s Together We Grow Mission Garden.

PC(USA) delegation concludes onsite visit to Sierra Leone and Liberia

For two weeks, a delegation from the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) visited 10 villages in the countries of Sierra Leone and Liberia. The villages are participants in the West Africa Initiative (WAI), a partnership of Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, Presbyterian Hunger Program and Self-Development of People.