Environmental Asset Building

Louisiana’s abundant natural resources are threatened by decades of pollution, over-consumption, contamination, and depletion. SMHA is committed to educating and moving homeowners, farmers and fishers to join with larger communities to use their power to advocate policies and activities that minimize and end hazards to health and threats to our economy.

Our Environmental Asset Building initiative is also a dance of relationships and connectedness within and between Southern Mutual’s Building Rural Communities and Life Quality programs. Clean air and water, healthy soil, and healthful, nutritious foods are basic to human wellness. SMHA finds that most people do not fully realize the relationship of these assets to their day-to-day lives. Rural people often face:

• Fallout from policies that permit companies to locate and operate in less populated areas; i.e. carbon black plants, injection wells, land fills.
• Sugarcane burning.
• Crop dusting and spraying.
• Abandoned buildings and industrial sites.
• Dumping of all manner of refuse on vacant lots, country roads.
• Neglect of timely dredging of isolated canals and ditches by parish and state agencies.
• Refuse from abandoned oil/gas development.
• Development of oil/gas and pipelines as well as storage facilities.
• Location of wastewater treatment plants for municipalities.
• Noncompliance of drinking water sources.
• Inadequate sewage disposal facilities.

In its Environmental Asset Building initiative:

SMHA documents threats to relevant local environmental assets that will impact families, communities, farms, marshes.

Southern Mutual provides information that shows relationships between prosperous rural communities and stewardship of environmental assets.

SMHA created the Citizens Environmental Center where community leaders can obtain technical assistance on complex environmental issues that arise in their communities, homes, farms, marshes. The center also provides technical assistance to and partners with grassroots groups working for the just management of the state’s air, land and water.

SMHA provides documentation to homeowners showing that their homes are located on land that has been certified as environmentally safe by the Citizens Environmental Center.

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