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Welcome to he Healthy
Ecosystems / Healthy Communities Website!
 The The Healthy Ecosystems-Healthy
Communities project is designed to help citizens appraise their local
natural resources. The knowledge gained is then used to develop short-
and long-term plans and activities to protect, sustain, or restore
their resources for the future. A measurement or appraisal of your
community’s natural resources is a way to “balance”
your environmental checkbook. Loss of resources or reduced quality or
quantity of those resources, affects every aspect of your community's
health.
The
HEHC Vision. . .
Our vision for the Healthy Ecosystems-Healthy Communities Project is
citizen-lead planning and actions to sustain environmental quality and
community health. |
A measurement
or appraisal of your community’s natural resources is a way to
“balance” your checkbook of resources or supplies. For
example, if a community had poor quality drinking water or no water
supplies for new businesses or farms to irrigate with, how would that
affect economic growth and community expansion?
The PRIDE program is currently
working with three pilot communities in a public engagement process of
appraising the health of their local resources and identifying local
solutions that are right for their community’s
environment, health, economy, quality of life, culture, and history.
This website will share the tools and resources developed for this work
for any community to use. So please, take a look around and check back
often. We will be adding new information regularly.
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| What is the relationship between your community and its
ecosystem?
The health of a
community and its local ecosystem is dependent on the intricate
relationship between the people that live there and how they interact
with their surroundings–the land, water, plants, animals, and
natural resources. By definition, the word “resource” means
reserve, supply, or store; so the health of a community is dependent on
the health of these natural “supplies.”
Water, incredibly rich
soils, lush grasslands and a wealth of wildlife enticed settlers to
Kansas over 150 years ago and supported our state’s agricultural
economy and heritage. However, as with any limited store of supplies,
using them in a way that sustains the quantity and the quality is
necessary to ensure that these resources will be there for us and for
our children in the future. But how do we know what’s left of the
“reserves, supplies, or stores” that our community was
built upon? How do we measure the health of our community’s
natural resources?
The Healthy Communities
/ Healthy Ecosystems Project is here to help!
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