Healthy Communities
Using Environmental Indicators To Measure Community Sustainability - can provide a glimpse of some economic, social and environmental factors that affect our quality of life.
Teachers and students can learn where to access information on their communities, identify patterns and trends and evaluate the data they collect.
BACKGROUND
Your students can explore how they feel about their communities, what makes a community a nice place to live and work and play, and to examine what makes their community successful and healthy. Students can consider some of the following questions:
Are our Communities thriving?
What makes a "healthy community"; will it be successful over 50-100 years?
How can we "sustain" our communities over time?
What do we want our communities to be like as we become older?
Do we need to practice sustainable development in order to
keep our community growing in a healthy way?
What is Community Sustainability?
"Sustainability" is based on the idea that nature has limits. We can describe these limits as carrying capacity, the conditions an area (ecosystem) needs to support a population without being degraded. It is a balanced, integrated way to look at the environmental consequences of human population size, human health, natural resource use and pollution and how our communities function.
In communities around the world, people are increasingly concerned about how their towns and cities will be affected by economic, social and environmental changes. A fundamental requirement to understand community sustainability is ecological literacy: an understanding of the interrelated scientific processes that shape our environment. Equally important are knowledge and understanding of the economic, political and social issues that affect our quality of life.
What are "Indicators"?
To measure sustainability we can use "Indicators". These are small pieces of information that, taken together, can help us see the big picture. A set of indicators can include a wide range of information. You can measure some things directly by surveying your community resources and you can obtain data on Indicator measurements using official sources (eg government data), or you can make physical measurements like collecting stream monitoring data.
Link to our Indicators Page
To view a list of the "Indicators" where you can find data, click here.
How to obtain a Community Sustainability curriculum guide.
The indicators presented here are a good starting point for exploring the environmental, economic and social health of your own community. They are borrowed from the Izaak Walton League of America's Curriculum Guide: "Monitoring Sustainability In Your Community".
To obtain a free copy of the IZWL guide contact through this email link: Deb Avalone-King or call Deb at (207) 287-7028
