When I moved back here 15 years ago, Lexingtonians were battling with bumper stickers. Builders and developers had “Growth is Good” stickers on their bumpers. Preservationists had “Growth Destroys Bluegrass Forever” on theirs.
It was a pointless debate. Growth is inevitable. The question is how best to handle it.
Fortunately, discussions about growth and development are now less heated and simplistic and more productive. Both sides realize that Lexington’s future depends on steady, well-planned growth that encourages compatible economic development but doesn’t spoil the Bluegrass’ unique beauty and quality of life.
I gained some valuable insights into these issues recently by joining 28 other local people in a program called Citizens Planning Academy. We met two hours each Wednesday morning for six weeks to hear experts speak about all aspects of local growth and planning from a variety of viewpoints.
The program was organized by the land-use advocacy group Fayette Alliance and co-sponsored by the Home Builders Association of Lexington, the Fayette Farm Bureau, the American Society of Landscape Architects and The Plantory, a shared workspace for social entrepreneurs.
While Lexington has made mistakes over the years, it has been trying longer and harder than most cities to manage growth. The city’s first comprehensive plan was adopted in 1931. My house was then at the eastern edge of the city limits. Now, many people refer to it as being “downtown.”
The 1931 plan referred to Union Station, the long-ago-demolished train depot, as the most important building in town. Ironically, it is now the site of the recently renovated Helix parking garage and the office where people take automobile driving tests and get their licenses.
In 1958 — 15 years before city-county merger — Lexington became the first city in America to set an urban growth boundary to limit suburban sprawl and protect rural land. Over the years, the Urban Services Area has been expanded from 22 percent of the county to about 30 percent.
From the 1950s to the early 2000s, Lexington experienced rapid, automobile-centric growth as residential subdivisions and shopping centers were built on former farmland. In recent years, there has been more focus on urban infill and redevelopment as everyone realized Fayette County’s farmland and open space is precious, finite and a vital to Lexington’s economy, image and quality of life.
Unlike most areas of Kentucky, Lexington is likely to see continued population growth, from a current 302,000 people to about 376,000 by 2030. How are we planning for that growth? Here are a couple of trends to watch:
Future growth will likely be more dense, more urban and less dependent on automobiles.
“We’re planning for a different type of population,” said Chris King, director of Lexington’s Division of Planning.
Many aging baby boomers and young people want to be able to walk or bike to work, shopping and entertainment. That means different styles of new neighborhoods and retrofitting older neighborhoods to make them less isolated.
Residential development and revitalization of in-town neighborhoods has been a key piece of the renaissance of downtown Lexington as a mixed-use area. That trend is likely to continue, King said.
That’s good, because it makes more efficient use of land. But increasing density is sure to spark conflict with some existing neighborhoods.
Another big factor in Lexington’s future growth will be outdoor water quality. Many developments in recent decades were built with inadequate infrastructure, which led to storm-water runoff problems and pollution of local streams. The city must spend millions of dollars to remedy past sins and prevent new ones under a consent decree with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
That means that sewer capacity will limit future growth much more severely in the past. But the consent decree also has prompted city officials to get creative with natural solutions for storm-water management and filtering: permeable pavement, stream-bank restoration and systems for capturing and reusing rainwater.
The exciting Town Branch Commons proposal could be another piece of “green” infrastructure, creating both a linear park through downtown and helping to manage storm-water runoff.
The Fayette Alliance plans another Citizens Planning Academy next year, but dates have not been set. Watch FayetteAlliance.com for more information about how to apply.
Morgan County’s strategic plan for rebuilding from a March 2012 tornado includes encouraging super energy-efficient construction of new homes and commercial buildings to lower operating costs. Habitat for Humanity has already built several such homes in Morgan and neighboring Rowan counties. This one was under construction in January. Photo by Tom Eblen
Each time I have visited West Liberty since the devastating tornado, people have expressed determination to rebuild. But they didn’t just want to put things back the way they were; they wanted to use the disaster to reposition their community for the future.
The Morgan County seat had been hurting for years before the twister, which killed six people on March 2, 2012. West Liberty was like so many other small towns that have struggled to adapt to the loss of cash crops and factories.
Last week, after more than a year of study and work, West Liberty leaders unveiled a new strategic plan for their community. It is a creative, forward-looking plan designed to attract national attention and support. If successful, it could serve as a model for struggling small towns throughout Kentucky and across America. (Click here to download a copy of the plan.)
“I’m very excited about it,” said Hank Allen, CEO of Commercial Bank in West Liberty and president of the Morgan County Chamber of Commerce. “There is such a will to rebuild, to not only get back to where we were but to be better than we were.”
One key aspect of the plan follows the lead of Greensburg, Kansas, which was wiped out by a 2007 tornado and attracted national attention by rebuilding using the latest energy-efficient technology.
West Liberty’s energy-efficient reconstruction plans include replacement houses with “passive” design and construction, which can cut energy costs as much as 70 percent over conventional construction. Habitat for Humanity has already built several such homes in the area.
The downtown business district also would be rebuilt using energy-efficient construction, including a geothermal loop that many buildings could share to lower their heating and cooling costs.
Allen says he thinks that will be one of the biggest factors in recreating a viable downtown. Rent was cheap in the old buildings the tornado blew away. But reconstruction will be expensive, pushing rents beyond what many mom-and-pop businesses can afford.
Commercial Bank is kicking off the geothermal loop as part of its headquarters reconstruction. Allen said designs are almost complete for a new bank building that should be certified LEED Gold. The pre-tornado bank building cost about $4,000 to $5,000 a month to heat and cool, but Allen estimates the new one will cost about $1,500 a month.
The bank building will include about 1,800 square feet of incubator space on its first floor to help small local businesses get back on their feet, Allen said.
The strategic plan also calls for encouraging downtown to be rebuilt with mixed-use structures housing businesses, offices, restaurants and apartments. That would create a more lively downtown with lower rents because of more efficient use of space.
Plans also call for installing free wireless service downtown to attract businesses and people in a region where wi-fi availability is now limited.
The strategic plan’s economic development initiatives have a big focus on eco-tourism, built around Morgan County’s natural beauty and local assets such as the Licking River, Cave Run and Paintsville lakes, and nearby destinations such as the Red River Gorge.
There would be encouragement for entrepreneurs to start businesses focusing on kayaking, rock climbing, hiking, canoeing, fishing and hunting. Plans also call for developing walking and biking trails along the Licking River through West Liberty.
Other economic development ideas in the plan also focus on existing strengths, such as trying to use the local ambulance service and hospital to develop new methods for rural health-care delivery.
The strategic plan grew out of a partnership among the city, Morgan County, local businesses, Morehead State University’s Innovation and Commercialization Center and the nonprofit Regional Technology and Innovation Center.
Midwest Clean Energy Enterprise LLC of Lexington was a consultant on the process. Jonathan Miller, a clean-energy advocate and former state treasurer, has been retained to help raise money nationally for the effort by promoting it as a model for small-town revitalization.
The Morgan County Community Fund, an affiliate of the Blue Grass Community Foundation, has been set up to help collect and distribute donations for the rebuilding effort.
These efforts got a big jump-start in February, when Gov. Steve Beshear and U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers announced a package of about $30 million in federal, state and private money for various rebuilding projects.
“That really opened people’s eyes to what is possible,” Allen said of the financial package. “As a community, we must think really, really large. But we have a long way to go.”
In their new book, “The Embattled Wilderness,” Erik Reece and James Krupa write this: “To look out over the forest’s steep ridges — slopes that novelist James Still called ‘a river of earth’ — is to understand that Robinson Forest is simultaneously one of the most biologically diverse landscapes in North America and one of the most threatened.” Photos by Tom Eblen
JACKSON — As we hike uphill through beech and yellow poplar trees, a wild turkey flies out of the woods and across the trail in front of us. A few hundred yards higher, Erik Reece stops suddenly and points at a scarlet tanager foraging among the oaks.
At the crest of the ridge, we climb an old fire tower and are rewarded with a spectacular view of Robinson Forest. On this clear, spring morning, the forest looks like a rolling “river of earth,” as James Still described the natural landscape of Eastern Kentucky in his classic 1940 novel, River of Earth.
The green waves roll out in every direction until they suddenly stop at Robinson Forest’s boundary. Beyond the boundary are huge, gray scars from surface mining and the flattened, denuded remnants of “reclaimed” coal-mine land, now struggling to support foreign grasses and scrubby trees.
Krupa is a UK biology professor who over decades of study has explored every ridge and valley of the main 10,000-acre block of the 14,786-acre forest, which contains some of the state’s cleanest streams.
“It is one of the last and largest examples of the oldest, most biologically diverse ecosystem in North America — the mixed mesophytic,” the authors write in their introduction.
“Unfortunately, industrial development has churned under the mountains surrounding these 14,000 acres, turning Robinson Forest into an island of biological diversity surrounded by an ever-expanding desert,” they write, adding that there is every reason to believe that coal and timber interests want to plunder this land, too.
Reece and Krupa are both fine writers. In this small, engaging book, they alternate chapters, explaining the natural and human history of this unique corner of Breathitt, Perry and Knott counties and making a case to preserve it.
Krupa describes the geological history of Robinson Forest and the surrounding Cumberland Plateau, which was formed before there were dinosaurs, mammals or even flowering plants. These mountains were once covered by a shallow inland sea and then swamps. Dead ferns and trees sank to the bottom for thousands of years, forming peat and eventually bituminous coal.
Krupa also discusses his research into the ecological diversity of the current forest. Who knew lichens and wood rats could be so fascinating?
Reece’s chapters describe the forest’s human history, from settlement to the early 20th century, when Cincinnati business partners F.W. Mobray and E.O. Robinson bought the forest and cut virtually all of its timber.
In 1923, Robinson gave the wasted land to the University of Kentucky for research to “tend to the betterment of the people of the mountain region of Kentucky.” Under UK’s stewardship, most of the land has regenerated over the past 90 years into a second-growth version of the biologically diverse, native forest.
But coal operators, who wield considerable clout, have periodically pressured UK to allow mining in the forest. Reece said he and Krupa decided to write this book after the UK Board of Trustees’ controversial 2007 decision to clear-cut 800 acres of the main forest.
Although the forest recovered from clear-cutting a century ago, critics doubt that can happen again because of the extensive surface mining on surrounding land and the planting of invasive species as part of mine “reclamation.”
Reece said he and Krupa hope their book will prompt UK officials to rethink their management strategy for Robinson Forest and embrace a broader ecological research mission. A part of such a mission could be helping Kentucky adapt to climate change.
Specifically, the authors urge broader input into decision-making about the forest. Currently, Robinson Forest is managed by UK’s Forestry Department. Also, they want UK to separate research and revenue goals, so that there is not periodic temptation to log or mine Robinson Forest to make money for the university.
Reece is up for tenure this year, and he acknowledges this book won’t be popular in some corners of the university. But he thinks Robinson Forest is worth fighting to preserve.
He said the book was inspired by The Unforeseen Wilderness, which UK commissioned Berry to write in 1971. It advocated for preservation of the Red River Gorge at a time when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers wanted to destroy it with a flood-control dam.
“We want to give readers a sense of why Robinson Forest is worth saving,” Reece said. “If you can convince people to love something, they won’t destroy it.”
Click on each thumbnail to see larger photo and read caption:
Excerpts from the final chapter of The Embattled Wilderness
“Robinson Forest is many things: it is one of the most important eco-systems in Appalachia, it is a laboratory for crucial research and teaching, and it is a gift held in trust for future generations of Kentuckians. But it is also a model for how we must proceed in our habitation of the natural world. In fact, Robinson Forest represents a model for an entirely new definition of “economy,” whereby our American systems of exchange, both of wealth and energy, are brought in line with the most important and inescapable economy of nature.”
“What we as 21st century Americans must finally come to understand is that the economy of consumption operates in direct opposition to, and at the peril of, the economy of nature. … Kentucky should look to Robinson Forest as a model for a sustainable, post-coal economy. We must replace the industrial logic of the strip mine with the much more ancient wisdom of the forest.”
“To abandon wilderness places like Robinson Forest would be to abandon ourselves. To ignore the natural laws of its watersheds for the logic of our own industrial imagination would be to abandon our better selves — to abandon a sustainable future for the sake of short-term avarice and indulgence. But to preserve the world will mean learning the lessons of Robinson Forest, and in doing so learning to preserve that embattled wilderness.”
Wendell Berry, right, joined conference attendees on a tour Saturday of the farm at St. Catharine College in Washington County. Photo by Tom Eblen
SPRINGFIELD — Wendell Berry is a true conservative. He believes in conservation, the idea that God gave us the Earth to sustain our lives and the responsibility to care for it so it can sustain the lives of future generations.
Four decades ago, the writer and farmer was alarmed by the methods and economics of modern farming and mining, which were (and still are) destroying land, water and rural communities. So he wrote his 1977 book, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, which has become an international classic.
That book and Berry’s subsequent work did much to spark the sustainable agriculture and local food movements, just as Rachel Carson’sSilent Spring in 1962 helped spark the environmental movement.
So it was no surprise that 300 people from 35 states and several foreign countries came to Louisville and Springfield last weekend for a sold-out conference revisiting the book. Well-known speakers discussed both progress and challenges, and they pondered this question: What will it take to resettle America?
The conference was organized by the Berry Center in Henry County, which is run by Mary Berry Smith to promote the philosophy of her father, as well as her uncle and late grandfather, both farmers, lawyers and conservationists named John Berry.
On Saturday, the conference was at St. Catharine College in Springfield, where the Berry Center has just begun a partnership to create undergraduate degree programs in ecological agriculture. The Catholic college campus includes an 800-acre farm the Dominican Sisters of Peace have operated since 1822.
The conference included an on-stage interview of Berry by veteran journalist Bill Moyers, who will use it on one of his Public Broadcasting System programs. Other speakers included Bill McKibben, the best-selling author and climate change activist; Wes Jackson, a MacArthur “genius” award winner and founder of The Land Institute, a leading sustainable agriculture organization; and Vandana Shiva, a renowned author, scientist and environmentalist in India.
In his interview with Moyers, Berry blamed many of today’s ecological problems on industrialization, unbridled capitalism and political systems that favor wealthy corporations, which make big political contributions to reap far bigger returns in taxpayer subsidies and lax regulation.
“There’s no justification for the permanent destruction of the world,” Berry said. “It’s not economically defensible. It’s not defensible in any terms.”
Berry, 78, lamented that the three and a half decades since his book’s publication have been marked by further environmental degradation, from strip mining and soil erosion to water pollution and accelerating climate change.
“It’s mighty hard right now to think of anything that’s precious that is not in danger,” he said.
Berry noted that black willows no longer grow beside his Henry County farm on the banks of the Kentucky River, 13 miles from where it empties into the Ohio River, but still flourish just upriver on the Ohio. There seems to be something in the Kentucky River’s water they can no longer tolerate.
“If the willows can’t continue to live there, how can I be sure that I can continue to live there?” he asked.
Berry, a lifelong Baptist, said the unholy alliance between corporate capitalism and many conservative Christians is “a feat which should astonish us all.”
“A great mistake of Christianity is speaking of the Holy Land as only one place,” he said. “There are no sacred and unsacred places; only sacred and desecrated places.”
But Berry noted that many faith communities are beginning to heed the Bible’s call to environmental stewardship and justice. That gives him hope, as does the growing popularity of organic food, local farmers markets and the sustainable agriculture movement.
“I don’t like to talk about the future, because it doesn’t exist and nobody knows anything about it,” Berry said. “The problems are big, but there are no big solutions.”
Berry said he thinks “resettling America” will require enough people living on and being able to earn a living from the land to take care of it. That will take individual initiative, better government policies and the political will to deal with urgent global threats such as climate change. Can it succeed?
“We don’t have a right to ask whether we’re going to succeed or not,” Berry said. “We only have a right to ask what’s the right thing to do and do it.”
Journalist Bill Moyers, left, and writer Wendell Berry autograph books after Moyers filmed an interview with Berry. It was part of a two-day conference revisiting Berry’s landmark 1977 book, “The Unsettling of America.” Photo by Tom Eblen
You can feel it in the air: Winter’s last gasp is starting to give way to warm sunshine. The Bluegrass countryside is returning to life, raising spirits after months of cold and gray.
Spring reminds us how closely we are tied to nature, despite all of our technology and hubris. Earth doesn’t care about our political ideologies, and it has become less forgiving of our greed and foolishness.
If you are interested in what is happening to the planet, and what can be done about it, mark your calendar for the first week of April. That is when Kentucky hosts a series of lectures and conferences that look at our environmental challenges from different perspectives.
Charles Mann, an award-winning science writer for Atlantic Monthly, Science and Wired magazines, will speak at 7 p.m. on April 2. Mann is author of two best-selling books, 1491 and 1493, which look at what North America was like before Columbus landed and how European settlement began to change it.
The lecture, in Worsham Theatre at the University of Kentucky Student Center, is free and open to the public, but tickets are required. They can be picked up at the Student Center ticket office, room 253, and room 200B of the Kentucky Tobacco Research Development Center, 1401 University Drive.
Mann’s lecture sets the stage for an academic conference April 3-4 about the growing problem of invasive species and how climate change is affecting their spread. Kentucky is increasingly plagued by invasive species, such as bush honeysuckle and Asian carp, that do costly ecological damage.
UK’s Climate Change Group presents a public forum at 7 p.m. on April 4, with three guest speakers discussing global warming from different perspectives. The forum in the UK Student Center ballroom is free and open to the public.
The first speaker is Katherine Hayhoe, a climate scientist, evangelical Christian and author of the book, A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions. She will talk about the faith-based imperative for addressing climate change.
“The reality is that climate change is about thermometers and trend lines, not Republicans or Democrats,” she wrote in a 2010 essay for The Washington Post. “It’s about what has been happening on our planet since the Industrial Revolution, not whether the earth is 6,000 or 4 billion years old. It’s about fundamental science that’s been around for hundreds of years, not specious theories that haven’t a prayer of being proven.”
The second speaker is retired Brig. Gen. Steve M. Anderson, a self-described conservative who will talk about the national security implications of climate change and his belief that the military must develop renewable sources of energy.
The program’s final speaker is Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina and president of the Energy and Enterprise Initiative at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. His talk is called, “Free Enterprise Approaches to Energy Security and Climate Change.”
Inglis served six terms in the U.S. House and had a 93 percent rating from the American Conservative Union until Tea Partiers challenged him in the 2010 primary. The main issues were that he believes the scientific consensus that man’s actions are contributing to climate change, and he backed a market-based plan to reduce carbon emissions.
After being defeated, Inglis had this to say about the GOP and its Tea Party faction: “It’s a dangerous strategy to build conservatism on information and policies that are not credible.”
A final conference, which has attracted the most well-known national figures, is sponsored by The Berry Center in New Castle, revisiting Kentucky writer Wendell Berry’s influential 1975 book, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture.
Tickets are sold out for this conference, which is April 5 at Louisville’s Brown Hotel and April 6 at St. Catharine College near Springfield, but there is a waiting list in case of cancellations. More information: Berrycenter.org.
The Unsetting of America was a collection of essays in which Berry criticized modern industrial agriculture’s damage to land and water, as well as rural communities and economies. This conference will discuss possible remedies. Participants include Berry, journalist Bill Moyers and environmental writers Bill McKibben and Michael Pollan.
As rites of spring go, these discussions could be a good start.
Alex Brooks left Lexington for two years of graduate school in England, where he studied book conservation. He has returned and started what may be Kentucky’s only company that conserves old books for individuals and libraries. Photo by Tom Eblen
Work is more rewarding when you find a way to turn your passion into a business opportunity. Kentuckians Alex Brooks and Debra Koerner are doing just that, at different points in their lives and with technology from different centuries.
Brooks, 31, grew up in Louisville and discovered creative writing in high school. He made his first book for poems he wrote. As a Gaines Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Kentucky, he earned a bachelor’s degree in creative writing.
While at UK, Brooks discovered the King Library Press and learned letterpress printing, which led to him creating block-print art. He also worked in UK Special Collections, which interested him in book conservation.
After college, Brooks acquired some antique printing equipment and operated Press 817, a one-man company that produced everything from wedding invitations to his own block prints. His career took another turn when he won a Fulbright Scholarship to study in England. While there, he earned a master’s degree in book conservation at West Dean College.
Brooks returned to Lexington in October and started Alex Brooks Conservation to restore and conserve old books, from rare library specimens to family Bibles.
“The idea in my work is to keep as much of the original as possible,” Brooks said as he showed me a leather-bound volume from the 1830s about horse care that he is repairing for the Keeneland Library.
What he doesn’t try to do is make old books look new, by bleaching pages or replacing old bindings that still have a lot of original fabric. That might make them look good for a few years, but their historical value would be diminished.
“I’m not trying to make a book look like it was never damaged in the first place,” he said, “but to prevent it from further damage and make it usable.”
There is a lot of need for book conservation in Kentucky, yet there are few conservators.
“That’s one of the reasons I chose to move back to Lexington,” Brooks said. “I know the need is out there, but I’m not sure that the finances for that need will be out there.”
Brooks charges about $300 to refurbish a family Bible. Other work is $30 an hour, plus materials. (For more information, email Brooks at alexbrooks@gmail.com.)
In addition to doing work for institutions and collectors, Brooks hopes to build a client base from industries such as Thoroughbred horses and bourbon that realize heritage is important to their brands.
Brooks will be sharing his skills at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, where he will teach bookbinding classes March 2 and 16. Learn more at Carnegiecenterlex.org.
Debra Koerner has started a mid-career television production company to make a health and wellness series for Public Broadcasting called “Journey Into Wellbeing.” Photo provided
Koerner, 45, had written a book about success, been executive director of a spa organization and started a wellness education company. But she had always dreamed of a television career.
“That got me to thinking: if I was going to have a TV show, what am I most passionate about?” she said. “Where can I make a difference?”
Koerner describes herself as a “pudgy insomniac” and former stressed-out working mother. So she decided to borrow from her own experiences to show viewers how they could use local resources to make themselves healthier and happier.
She started a production company and created a self-funded pilot episode of Journey into Wellbeing. The show is planned as a state-by-state series, focusing on creative local wellness initiatives and resources. She gives viewers tips for healthy eating, exercise, natural health care and sustainable living.
The pilot episode focused on Kentucky and will air Tuesday on KET2 and 10 more times through March 21 on Kentucky Educational Television.
In the pilot episode, shot in October, Koerner interviews several Kentucky health experts and travels around the state. She visits an organic farm in Oldham County and Frontier Nursing University in Leslie County. She consults with a doctor and a fitness expert from Lexington and gets advice from a Louisville chef about how to prepare healthier versions of two Kentucky favorites, the hot Brown and corn pudding.
“Every state has great health initiatives, but they are not getting the focus they deserve,” Koerner said. “I also hope my story impresses (viewers) to attempt something they’ve been thinking about and wanting to do. It can happen.”
A group of Louisville high school students in Frankfort to attend the I Love Mountains Day events toured the Capitol Education Center roof, which has solar panels, a wind turbine and a roof garden. Below, an interactive exhibit inside shows how much less power LED and compact florescent lights use than traditional incandescent bulbs. Photos by Tom Eblen
FRANKFORT — Each year, I notice more young people attending I Love Mountains Day. The rally against mountaintop-removal coal mining is organized by the citizens group Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, and it has been a Valentine’s tradition since 2006.
The young people join hundreds of their elders from across Kentucky in marching to the Capitol steps to hear speakers that have included writer Wendell Berry and actress Ashley Judd. This year’s main speaker was writer Silas House.
Before the speeches, many marchers visit legislators and urge them to curb the coal industry’s worst environmental abuses, to no avail.
But this year, there was something new for the young people to see: the Capitol Education Center, which had its grand opening Feb. 8. The center was the brainchild of First Lady Jane Beshear, and it is located in a formerly vacant building beside the Capitol that once housed heating and cooling equipment.
Beshear thought the 60,000 students and teachers who visit the Capitol each year needed a place to rest and eat their lunch. Then, the former teacher realized that this recycled building could play a role in teaching students about one of the most important issues facing Kentucky’s future: environmental sustainability.
The building got a “green” renovation that included recycled materials and energy-efficient technology. Solar panels and a wind turbine that feed into the utility grid were installed on the roof. Rain water is recycled to water a roof garden that will provide food for the Governor’s mansion kitchen.
The Kentucky Environmental Education Council coordinated a dozen universities and state agencies in developing interactive multimedia exhibits for the building. They teach students about Kentucky history, civics and geography — but mainly about energy efficiency and alternative energy sources.
The project was funded with $1.1 million from the Finance Cabinet and a $250,000 donation from Duke Energy. General Electric donated appliances for a commercial kitchen that Beshear hopes to use for demonstrations of healthy cooking and eating. (For more information, go to: Cec.ky.gov.)
In an interview, Beshear said these issues are “so important for the future. The more we as a state get into energy efficiency and alternative sources, the better off we’ll be.”
This education center is outstanding, and the First Lady’s vision for it is inspired. But it was hard to ignore the irony when I took a tour on I Love Mountains Day.
That event was created eight years ago to push for the so-called “stream saver” bill, which would ban coal companies from burying streams with mining debris. KFTC says the practice has obliterated more than 2,000 miles of Appalachian waterways.
But thanks to the coal industry’s enormous clout in Frankfort, the proposed legislation has gone nowhere. Most elected state officials proudly call themselves “friends of coal”. That friendship, which comes with lots of campaign cash, has always meant that public health, mine safety and environmental stewardship take a back seat to coal company profits.
Kentucky’s coal industry is in decline because of depleted reserves, cheap natural gas and the Environmental Protection Agency’s newfound willingness to do its job. But, like the National Rifle Association, the coal industry has always fought every attempt at common-sense regulation. Anyone who threatens the industry’s freedom to mine with impunity is branded as an enemy of coal.
There was an added emphasis for this year’s I Love Mountains Day: House Bill 170, which would require utilities to use increasing amounts of renewable energy and put more emphasis on energy-efficiency programs.
In short, this bill, sponsored by Democrats Kelly Flood of Lexington and Mary Lou Marzian of Louisville, would put into law some of the good ideas showcased at the new Capitol Education Center.
Change is hard, and progress can be slow. But I can’t help but be encouraged when I attend I Love Mountains Day or see something like the Capitol Education Center. Politicians will always be captive to power and money, I suppose, but it is good to see other Kentuckians working for a better future.
Few legislators have the courage to attend I Love Mountains Day, and the coal industry would go after any governor who dared show his face there.
But it is perhaps worth pointing out what Gov. Steve Beshear was doing shortly before the crowd arrived for I Love Mountains Day. He was in the Capitol rotunda with former Wildcat basketball star Derek Anderson, calling for legislation to create a statewide public smoking ban.
If you had told me 20 years ago that a Kentucky governor would do such a thing, I would have said you were crazy.
I went to the annual “I Love Mountains” march and rally at the State Capitol today to gather material for my Sunday column — and to take photos. Here are a few of them:
Kentucky author Silas House, center, led the annual “I Love Mountains Day” march down Capitol Avenue to the State Capitol. The event was sponsored by Kentuckians for the Commonwealth in opposition to mountaintop-removal and other destructive forms of coal mining. Several hundred people attended. Many marchers this year were advocating for two pieces of proposed legislation: one would limit coal mine waste dumped into streams; the other would require more use of renewable energy by utilities in Kentucky.
Many children brought homemade signs.
Eric Sutherland of Lexington, center, was among those cheering the rally’s speakers.
Writer Silas House, on the steps of the State Capitol, urged citizens to “clean this house” of politicians who do the bidding of the coal industry at the expense of Appalachia’s people and communities.
Kentucky author Wendell Berry, right, shares a laugh with disabled coal miner Carl Shoupe of Harlan County, who spoke at the rally.
Ella Corder, a student at Meece Middle School in Somerset, waited for applause to die down so she could read the essay that won her a contest sponsored by Kentuckians for the Commonwealth.
Kentucky writers Bobbie Ann Mason, left, and Ed McClanahan were among hundreds who participated.
Daniel Mullins, 10, of Berea, makes his feelings known.
Greg Dike, right, executive director of the Morehead Area Habitat for Humanity group, helps build an interior wall for a house near Morehead with a group of volunteers from Lexington on Jan. 19. Photos by Tom Eblen
MOREHEAD — When Greg Dike became the director — and only employee — of Habitat for Humanity’s Rowan County unit more than two years ago, he thought he knew the mission. Then that mission got a whole lot bigger.
A cluster of tornados tore through Eastern Kentucky last March 2, killing 22 people. Eight died in neighboring Morgan and Menifee counties and dozens more were left homeless.
“When the tornadoes came, we decided to expand our service area,” said Dike, 61, whose previous careers included electrical engineer, United Methodist minister and emergency room nurse.
Dike figured that Habitat could provide valuable help in storm recovery for a couple of reasons. Habitat, an ecumenical Christian ministry, builds houses that low-income working people can afford to buy, in part through their own labors. Plus, the three-county Morehead Area unit of Habitat specializes in super energy-efficient housing.
Morehead Area Habitat’s most common house has 1,100 square feet of living space on one floor and costs about $45,000 to build. Through smart design and lots of insulation — including a foundation insulated below the frost line — each house has an average heating and cooling cost of only about $12 a month. A poorly insulated house or mobile home often has a monthly utility bill of $200 or more.
So far, in addition to its regular work in Rowan County, Habitat has built one house each in Morgan and Menifee counties for storm victims, Dike said. Six more are under construction in Morgan and two more in Menifee, with seven additional houses planned in those counties.
Judge Executives Tim Conley in Morgan County and James Trimble in Menifee County have been very supportive, and have helped Habitat identify building sites.
“They see Habitat as a way to get people into quality housing,” Dike said.
Because some people who lost their homes in the storms were elderly, disabled or otherwise unable to take on even a small mortgage, as typical Habitat clients do, the Kentucky Housing Corp. and other organizations and foundations have provided several hundred thousand dollars in grants to build homes. The state Habitat organization also has been very helpful, Dike said.
Materials for each house cost about $35,000, so the total price is kept low largely through volunteer labor. While Habitat is always happy to receive cash donations, Dike said, his biggest need is regular construction volunteers.
Dike is working with Diane James of Lexington, a longtime Habitat volunteer and former construction manager, to recruit and organize groups of regular volunteers from Central Kentucky, which is only an hour or two away by car.
The ideal volunteers are men or women who can gather several friends together and commit to one or two work days a month, ideally on the same house so they can become familiar with it.
“I think there are a lot of people out there with skills,” Dike said. “We’re not looking for award-winning carpenters; just people with some skills and common sense.”
Dike and James hopes to hear from churches, businesses or just groups of friends who think they could commit to a series of work days over the next few months. Those interested in volunteering can email James at buildwestliberty@gmail.com or call Dike at (606) 776-0022.
“It’s an easy trip, and we get a lot of work done in a day,” James said. “Most people have really enjoyed it.”
That’s certainly what I found earlier this month, when I accompanied James, Dike and a group of volunteers from several Lexington Disciples of Christ churches who were framing interior walls on a Habitat house near Morehead.
“I just love doing it,” said Bettye Burns, a retiree who volunteered through her church for a women-only Habitat build in the early 1990s and has been doing it ever since.
“It’s fun, and I’ve learned so much,” Burns said. “I credit Diane for me not getting empty-nest syndrome when my kids grew up. I was so busy helping her build houses, I didn’t have time for that.”
Steve Seithers, who began volunteering through his church in 1992, said he enjoys the fellowship and sense of accomplishment he gets from Habitat work. “Plus, it helps make a difference in people’s lives,” Seithers said. “This is something I can do, so I’m doing it.”
Richardsville Elementary generates more energy than it uses, which resulted in the Tennessee Valley Authority sending the school district a check for $37,227. Photo by Tom Eblen
The numbers are in, and America’s most energy-efficient school building has performed even better than expected.
I wrote about Richardsville Elementary near Bowling Green in August 2010 as it was nearing completion. The 77,466-square-foot school was designed to be “net-zero,” meaning it would generate as much energy each year as it used.
Warren County has been a national leader in energy-efficient schools, with each new building outperforming the last. This rural, 550-student school was to be the star — the nation’s most energy-efficient school.
Most of the school’s energy savings come from advanced design and materials, which are not much more expensive than conventional construction. But the key to net-zero was a $2.7 million solar-panel system to generate electricity. On cloudy days, the school can draw power from the Tennessee Valley Authority grid. On sunny days, the excess power generated feeds into TVA’s system.
Plans called for the solar-panel system to pay for itself within 14 years. But the payback will be quicker because performance has exceeded expectations, said the architect, Kenny Stanfield of Sherman Carter Barnhart in Louisville.
In the first full year of operation, the school generated 10 percent more electricity than it used, and TVA sent the school district a check for $37,227.
“So not only does the school not have a utility bill, but it’s a positive revenue stream,” Stanfield said.
Unfortunately, other state utilities don’t pay cash, only offering credits, for excess power generation.
That is likely to change as utility economics make it more attractive to buy electricity from small producers than build costly power plants.
Since Richardsville opened, Sherman Carter Barnhart has built four more Kentucky schools that are “net-zero ready,” meaning all they need is solar-panel generation systems. Two are in Warren County; the others are in Meade and Anderson counties. Two more are being designed, for Bardstown and Taylorsville.
Solar-panel prices continue to fall every year, making school power generation more attractive. Stanfield said they now cost about half what they did when the Richardsville project was bid.
Fayette County’s first venture into this arena is Locust Trace AgriScience Farm. Architect Susan Hill of Lexington firm Tate Hill Jacobs says April-October data showed the school’s solar systems generated more power than the school used, but the key test will be how it performs during the cloudy, winter months.
Fayette County Public Schools recently announced long-term construction plans. Energy-efficient technology will be a big part of those new buildings, spokeswoman Lisa Deffendall said, but it is too early to know specifics. The district also has an aggressive program to improve energy-efficiency at existing schools.
Forester Tom Kimmerer inspects a tree at Veterans Park that was damaged despite a tree guard on its trunk. He calls the guards “mower magnets” because they often give mowing crews a false sense that they can mow right up to a tree without damaging it. Photos by Tom Eblen
Lexington’s urban forest is in serious decline, forester Tom Kimmerer says. Culprits include insects, disease and climate change. But, mostly, we are to blame.
“Our basic philosophy has been plant ‘em and kill ‘em,” he said. “We spend a lot of money planting trees, then we kill them through neglect and abuse.”
Kimmerer has a doctorate in forestry and biology. The former University of Kentucky faculty member now does consulting work on woody biomass for renewable energy projects.
After watching Lexington’s treescape decline over the past decade, Kimmerer decided to donate a lot of his free time this year to figuring out why. After much study, he produced a succinct report (download at Kimmerer.com) that identifies problems and offers simple and affordable solutions.
The report notes that 85 percent of the trees planted in Lexington parks and along roads have been heavily damaged by poor planting or maintenance. City government employs good arborists, Kimmerer said, but there is no unified urban forest management plan, system or structure.
After Kimmerer sent a copy of his report to Mayor Jim Gray last month, city officials responded quickly to make changes.
“I think what he did was terrific; it gives you an ah-ha moment,” said Jerry Hancock, director of Parks & Recreation. “We’re hopeful we can immediately and greatly reduce the amount of damage being done.”
But this is not just a government problem. Kimmerer said homeowners, developers and commercial property managers often know little about planting and caring for trees. (Among the exceptions, he said, is Hamburg Pavilion shopping center, which is doing an excellent job.)
Kimmerer said urban and suburban Lexington should have about 50 percent tree canopy cover. But it is now only about 20 percent after a decade that included two major ice storms and several droughts.
Insects and disease have killed pin oaks and are now killing ash trees. Both will soon disappear, just as once-plentiful elms and chestnuts did early in the last century.
Within many of our lifetimes, a rapidly warming climate will cause once-plentiful species — including sugar maple and yellow poplar, the state tree — to disappear from Kentucky.
“We need to be planting a mix of what does well now and what we expect to do well in a warmer, more drought-prone city, ” Kimmerer said. He added that a healthy urban tree canopy is not just about beauty; it significantly reduces the effects of hotter summers.
We can control Lexington’s biggest tree problems at little cost, Kimmerer said. On a beautiful frosty morning last week, he took me around town to see examples. We went to parks, neighborhoods, shopping centers and road medians. The issues were similar:
■ Trees planted in poor or compacted soil. This was especially true in road medians and shopping centers, but also in subdivisions built after the 1960s. That was when developers started doing a lot of grading with heavy equipment, which buries rich topsoil and compacts the ground.
■ Expensive trees planted, then not watered regularly. Kimmerer also pointed out “mulch volcanoes” around tree trunks. A little mulch is good; too much is deadly.
■ The biggest problem is mower damage to young tree trunks, which splits bark and dramatically shortens tree life. Plastic tree guards don’t help much. “I call them mower magnets,” Kimmerer said.
Tree damage was especially apparent in parks. Mowing contractors’ low-bid work gives them incentive to mow as quickly as possible with big equipment, and damage often goes unnoticed. More contractor supervision and accountability would help, Kimmerer said, but so would changing our mowing philosophy.
As with streams, trees stay healthier without close mowing. Wide, shallow mulch circles can help keep mowing machines away. But so can simply allowing a little tall grass around tree trunks, especially in places where trees are planted close together.
With tight city budgets, Lexington must raise the level of citizen awareness and engagement on tree issues, Kimmerer said. Neighborhood groups and interested individuals could be trained to care for trees in their own yards, as well as to spot and report problems in their neighborhoods and on public land.
“We need an urban forest management plan,” said Susan Bush, director of Lexington’s Division of Environmental Policy, adding that work on one has begun. “That’s at the root of some of the issues we’re dealing with.”
Bush also liked the idea of more citizen involvement, and she has already begun work on it. One effort will come next year with a citywide survey of street trees.
“I think he has some good ideas,” Bush said of Kimmerer. “I’m glad he was willing to help us.”
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It is a common fantasy: Quit the rat race. Get back to nature. Embrace adventure.
Few people ever do it, at least not for long. Even Henry David Thoreau, the 19th-century writer and icon for this fantasy, moved back to civilization after a couple of years on Walden Pond.
But Kentuckians Anna and Harlan Hubbard did it for more than four decades, until their deaths in 1986 and 1988. They floated down rivers on a shantyboat, then lived in a riverbank cabin, both built with their own hands.
The newest telling of the Hubbards’ story is a charming documentary,Wonder: The Lives of Anna & Harlan Hubbard, by Louisville filmmaker Morgan Atkinson. The film (Annaandharlan.com) premiered last week in Louisville. Atkinson is looking for a non-profit group to sponsor a Lexington showing, and he hopes to have the film shown on KET.
Atkinson’s previous work has includeed documentaries about other American originals: Thomas Merton, the Nelson County monk and writer; and John Howard Griffin, a white man who turned his skin dark and traveled the Deep South in 1959 to write the best-selling book, Black Like Me.
Atkinson never met the Hubbards, but he read about them. “One night, I had this very vivid dream about Harlan Hubbard,” he said. “I woke up thinking, that’s odd.”
He started reading more, and, before he knew it, he was making this film.
It tells the Hubbards’ story through old photos and film, re-enacted scenes and narration by actor Will Oldham, who reads from Harlan’s journals, and writer Wendell Berry, who reads from his 1989 book, Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work.
“They were enormously gifted people,” Berry said in an interview. “What made them unique was they were determined to live according to the requirements of their gifts, and that’s what they did.”
Harlan, who was born in 1900, grew up in Northern Kentucky and New York City.
He liked to paint, write, play music and explore nature. He earned money as a day laborer, having little interest in the modern world or its definitions of success.
He met Anna Eikenhout, two years his junior, at the Cincinnati Public Library, where she was a librarian. After several years, they began a courtship by playing music together — he the violin and viola, she the cello and piano. They married in 1944 and chose adventure over conformity.
They lived in a shack on the Ohio riverbank while Hubbard built a shantyboat. They lived on that boat for nearly eight years, five of which they spent drifting down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, fishing, hunting and stopping for months at a time to grow vegetables.
When they ran out of river in Louisiana, they headed back to Kentucky and settled at Payne Hollow in Trimble County, which had been the first long stop on their river odyssey. Harlan bought seven acres, built a cabin and planted a garden. Anna cooked, kept house and had family in Michigan send down her Steinway grand piano.
The Hubbards read to each other after meals — in French and German, as well as English. In the evenings, they played music together. Harlan had studied art in New York and Cincinnati, and he earned what little money they needed by selling his prolific output of paintings and drawings of scenes along the river.
“It’s hard to tell how long work by Harlan will be turning up, because he gave away pictures and traded them for sacks of corn or sold them for $5,” said Berry, who has used Harlan’s paintings on the covers of several of his books.
Harlan wrote three books about their life and adventures, and they attracted a steady stream of visitors to the cabin. Among them was Berry, who said he happened upon it by accident in 1963 while canoeing with a friend. Over the years, Berry and the Hubbards became close friends.
Other visitors included Louisville’s Bingham family, wealthy former owners of The Courier-Journal. Eleanor Bingham Miller, who as a child visited the Hubbards on family boat outings, was a major funder of the documentary, along with the Rivers Institute at Hanover College, across the river from Payne Hollow in Indiana.
“I think a lot of people subscribe to the Hubbards’ values,” Berry said. “There are some very serious flaws in modern life and the life of the industrial world. I think people were attracted by that. They were attracted by curiosity, too.”
Few people really would or even could live as the Hubbards did. But Atkinson thinks there is a lot to learn from them, and he tried to bring out those lessons in his film.
“I would hope that people would be inspired to be open to adventure in their own lives, whatever that may be,” he said. “To be aware of the wonder of the natural world. And just appreciate what a person or a couple can do. It’s being unafraid of what convention might make of what you’re doing.”
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Spindletop’s double staircase when the mansion was new in the late 1930s. Photo Provided
Pansy Yount wanted only the best for herself and her daughter. So when Texas oilman Frank Yount’s widow decided in 1935 to buy a Kentucky horse farm and build a mansion, the result was jaw-dropping.
This month, Spindletop Hall celebrates the 75th anniversary of its completion and the 50th anniversary of its conversion into a country club for University of Kentucky faculty, staff, alumni and friends.
The Club at Spindletop Hall is hosting three anniversary events: a Texas barbecue on Oct. 19, a gala dinner dance on Oct. 20 and a horse and carriage brunch on Oct. 21. (Some tickets are available to the public; call (859) 255-2777 for more information.)
The 1,050-member club hopes to use the celebration to attract a couple hundred new members and raise money to continue restoring the mansion and improving the club.
“She’s a beautiful lady, but there are some things we need to address for the future,” club manager Gerald Marvel said of Spindletop Hall.
Among those attending the events will be Kathryn Haider of suburban Chicago, who has her own name for Spindletop: Grandma’s house. In a telephone interview, Haider recalled idyllic summers spent at Spindletop: fishing, riding ponies and spending time with her grandmother.
“She was an absolutely wonderful woman,” Haider recalled. “I just adored her. She was a great mentor to me.”
Spindletop is named for the salt dome near Beaumont, Texas, that became a fabulously rich oilfield after Anthony Lucas drilled the first “gusher” in 1901. Initial reserves played out within a few years. But Miles Franklin Yount, a mechanically inclined Arkansas farm boy who moved to Texas to seek his fortune, thought there was more oil to be had if only he could drill deep enough. In 1925, he did.
Yount died in 1933. When his Yount-Lee Oil Co. was sold in 1935, his widow and teenage daughter, Mildred, received a fortune that today would be worth about $208 million. Pansy Yount decided to move to Lexington and indulge her passion for American Standardbred horses.
She bought Shoshone Stud and several surrounding parcels off Ironworks Pike north of Lexington and renamed it Spindletop. As the centerpiece of the 1,066-acre farm, she built a 45,000-square-foot mansion that cost the equivalent of about $17 million today.
Durability was a priority: a massive foundation and steel beams supported the brick-and-stone building, which even had “fireproof” concrete decking in the attic and roof.
“It’s almost built like a bomb shelter,” said David Graham, a recent club president.
Yount imported craftsmen from Europe to carve woodwork, mold plaster and paint art on the walls. In the entrance hall, there were enormous curved staircases. The huge Gothic library had a hammerbeam roof and a mantel salvaged from an English castle. Yount built a music room for her talented daughter, whose instrument collection included a concert harp and two Stradivarius violins.
The music room also housed the console for a Kimball reproducing organ, which could be played manually or with paper rolls of “recorded” music. It sent music throughout the mansion, which was literally designed around it. The club has begun restoring the organ.
Pansy Yount was a strong-willed woman who could be both demanding and generous. Lexingtonians were shocked in October 1942 when she donated Frank’s Duesenberg, one of the most expensive automobiles of the time, to a World War II scrap drive.
Haider recalled the time her grandmother went Christmas shopping at Woolworth’s on Lexington’s Main Street. She was especially well treated by the sales ladies, so she invited them all out for dinner at Spindletop.
“Grandma treated them just like royalty,” she said.
Yount was too independent and egalitarian to get along with some of the wealthy elite of Beaumont and Lexington. Although she had little formal education, she developed excellent taste and a voracious appetite for books.
“She was extremely independent, and a very savvy business woman,” Haider said. “She thought out everything she did. If some people didn’t like it, she didn’t care.”
In 1949, Young married her farm manager, horse trainer William Capers “Cape” Grant. They divorced a decade later, and she had decided to move back to Texas.
When Yount decided to sell Spindletop, she called Lexington friend Fred Wachs, then publisher of the Herald and Leader, for advice. He suggested she donate it to the university. UK President Frank Dickey flew to Texas and negotiated the sale of the farm and mansion for the gift price of $850,000, payable over 10 years.
Yount died in 1962, the year UK converted her mansion and 50 surrounding acres into a private club with a dining room, tennis courts, swimming pools and other amenities. Over the years, other land has been used for offices and facilities for UK agriculture and energy research.
UK owns the mansion, which is operated by the club. They both contribute to maintenance and improvements. Haider said she is pleased with the interest they are now showing in preserving Spindletop Hall.
“Everyone is so devoted to the place,” she said. “That home is truly a gift to Kentucky.”
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Botanist Julian Campbell poses by a stand of native cane he helped replant in 1999 along Cane Run Creek in northern Fayette County. Photos by Tom Eblen
Fayette County has Cane Run Creek and Canebrake Drive. Bourbon County has Cane Ridge Road, which leads to the historic Cane Ridge Meeting House. Adair County has the community of Cane Valley.
You can find dozens of places across Kentucky named for native cane, but almost no actual cane, otherwise known asarundinaria gigantea. Julian Campbell, a botanist and an authority on Kentucky’s natural landscape, is among the people trying to change that.
Scientists think that replanting cane and other native plants, especially along creek banks, could go a long way toward improving Central Kentucky’s streamwater quality, preventing soil erosion and limiting damage by some invasive species.
But Campbell has a simpler explanation when people see him poking around streams and ask what he is doing.
“I say I’m trying to put the cane back in Cane-tucky,” he said, affecting a pretty good Kentucky accent for an Englishman.
When the first white explorers came to Kentucky in the mid-1700s, cane was abundant, growing as high as 20 feet in dense forests called canebrakes. Cane was then fairly common in river bottomland across the South. But what surprised explorers about the Inner Bluegrass region around Lexington was that cane also flourished in grassy upland savannahs dotted with centuries-old burr oak, blue ash and other giant hardwood trees.
“Here is great plenty of fine cane, on which the cattle feed and grow fat,” traveler John Filson wrote in his 1784 book, The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke. “There are many cane brakes so thick and tall that it is difficult to pass through them.”
Cane flourished here because of the phosphorus-rich limestone soil. Campbell estimates that as much of 10 percent of Central Kentucky was once covered in cane. Buffalo herds ate and took shelter in it. Native peoples used it to make everything from baskets to arrow shafts.
But cane has been disappearing for two centuries: settlers cleared it, livestock ate it, construction crews dug it up and plant species from Europe and Asia choked it out.
“It’s about 99 percent gone,” Campbell said. “There’s about a dozen parcels scattered around Fayette County, little patches here and there.”
Three good places to see native cane are at The Arboretum on Alumni Drive and along the Legacy and Town Branch trails.
Cane and other native plants have been attracting more attention since 2006, when Lexington reached an agreement with federal regulators to spend as much as $300 million to stop chronic water pollution caused by poorly designed development.
While much of that money will be spent on better storm sewers, a big part of the solution could be restoring stream banks with native vegetation that can act as a natural filter for water runoff and a barrier to soil erosion.
“Cane is a great potential native restoration plant, but it’s got some drawbacks,” Campbell said. It is difficult to propagate and transplant, often taking years to get established. Once established, the plant can seem to have a mind of its own.
Cane’s underground root system pays little attention to property boundaries, fences and even sidewalks. But it is easily controlled by mowing, not to mention livestock and wildlife, which find cane to be a tasty treat.
“The key is to make sure you don’t put it right next to somebody’s back yard if they like things neat and orderly,” said Ken Cooke, a trustee of Friends of Wolf Run, which has been working for three years to restore native vegetation around the meandering creek and its tributaries, which run throughout South Lexington.
Campbell and Cooke have native cane in their back yards, but the plant has boundaries to keep it in check. They enjoy the bamboolike stalks and bushy leaves that remain green almost all year.
On a mid-August morning, I followed Campbell through dense undergrowth along Cane Run Creek near the Legacy Trail. We were looking for a stand of cane he helped replant in 1999. It has spread as much as 100 feet in some directions, doing battle with invasive plants such as bush honeysuckle, which creates bare, easily erodible ground beneath it.
“There may be a big role for cane in the future, but it’s going to take awhile to figure all of it out,” Campbell said. “There are so many things we still don’t understand about soil ecology.”
Mikhail Proctor assisted McKayla Gardner in a vaulting move on Diesel, a Thoroughbred/Clydesdale cross, in the indoor equestrian arena at Adventure Center of the Bluegrass in Woodford County. Photo by Tom Eblen
VERSAILLES — For an organization with a 575-acre campus that serves about 12,000 people a year with a wide variety of activities, Life Adventure Center of the Bluegrass is not very well known.
“We call ourselves the best-kept secret in Central Kentucky, and that is probably true,” said Byron Marlowe, one of the program directors. “I grew up in Nicholasville and had never heard of it before I came to work here.”
The non-profit center traces its roots to the Cleveland Home, a Versailles orphanage started in the late 1800s, and Life Adventure Camp, created in Estill County in 1975 to instill confidence and self-esteem in at-risk youth.
The center now has a broad mission statement: It “engages, educates, and empowers our community to build respect, responsibility, and self-esteem through teamwork, communication, and environmental stewardship using hands-on learning in a natural setting.”
The center has started several programs aligned with that mission, and it is trying to raise its public profile, Marlowe said. The center has a new Web site (Lifeadventurecenter.org), is about to hire a new executive director and is expanding its programs.
The center will host its first adventure race, the Bluegrass Challenge, on Aug. 25. Teams of two or three people will race by hiking, canoeing and mountain biking to complete a series of objectives between 9 a.m. and noon. The competition will have male, female, co-ed and family divisions. The entry fee is $50 a person.
“I designed this as the ultimate race I would like to race in,” said staff member Chris McEachron, an avid adventure racer. Each team will get a map and 14 checkpoints to reach and accomplish problem-solving tasks. “We could have 200 teams and none of them could have the same experience.”
For the third year, Life Adventure Center will host what it calls Kentucky’s largest corn maze — 16 miles of paths cut through a six-acre cornfield, where maze designers have used global-positioning satellite technology to create a giant mural visible from the air.
The maze will be open Sept. 14 through Oct. 21. Admission includes hayrides, concerts, a pumpkin patch for little kids, a ropes course and other activities. (More information: Kycornmaze.com)
The center rents its facilities to companies and other groups for retreats, plus conducts activity sessions for school groups, military families and married couples in a series of “Play Date With Your Mate” weekends.
The corn maze and adventure race will help raise money for the center, which benefits from an endowment that covers more than half of programming costs. Other costs are covered by participant fees, grants, rentals and donations.
That allows the organization to offer educational programs to the public at affordable prices, plus provide scholarships for young people who otherwise couldn’t afford these experiences, Marlowe said.
When I visited Life Adventure Center earlier this month, the Carroll County High School girls’ volleyball team was spending an afternoon of team-building on one of the camp’s most popular facilities: a treetop challenge course of cables, a climbing wall and zip lines. Last year, 90 groups with 2,000 people used the challenge course.
Another popular program is equestrian instruction, which includes horseback riding and vaulting for children and adults in indoor and outdoor riding arenas, plus dozens of acres of meadows.
Vaulting — basically gymnastics on horseback — is an old European sport that has gained popularity here since the 2010 Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games, said Kara Musgrave, the equestrian program director.
Other school groups come for environmental education classes, which include wildlife and wildflower areas and a teaching garden.
“Some of the inner-city kids have never been in the woods before,” Marlowe said. “This really captures their imagination.”
There are primitive campsites and cabins, 15 miles of hiking trails, an outdoor picnic pavilion and a new assembly building for year-round indoor activities. The building is one of the first in Woodford County to be designed and built according to high environmentally-friendly LEED standards, Marlowe said.
While the center wants to continue reaching out to all segments of the Central Kentucky community, character-building for children will remain a primary focus.
“A portion of what we do is for the kids who need it and can’t afford it, the at-risk groups,” Marlowe said. “But all kids are at risk for something. All kids have influences that could turn them in a bad direction.”
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Woody Guthrie would have been 100 years old on July 14. Because the folksinger died of a neurological disease in 1967, at age 55, many people now know little about him besides his most famous song, This Land is Your Land.
It is a wonderful song that would make a good National Anthem. It is less bombastic than the unsingable Star Spangled Banner, more aspirational than America The Beautiful and less presumptuous than God Bless America.
In fact, Guthrie wrote This Land is Your Land in 1940 because he got sick of hearing Irving Berlin’s God Bless America on the radio. He disliked the song because he thought God had already blessed America with beauty and abundance, and it was every citizen’s responsibility to care for and share it.
Guthrie originally called his song God Blessed America, and the chorus ended with the words, “God blessed America for me.” After writing the song, though, Guthrie set it aside for five years. When it was finally performed, Guthrie had changed the title and had rewritten the chorus to end, “This land was made for you and me.”
As referenced in the song, Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was a rambler who roamed America — from California to the New York Island, from the redwood forest to the gulf stream waters — collecting folk tunes and writing more than 3,000 songs.
Guthrie had three wives and eight children, including folksinger Arlo Guthrie. He was mentor to other folksingers, including a young Bob Dylan, who said of Guthrie’s songs: “They had the infinite sweep of humanity in them.”
The Oklahoman became a well-known troubadour during the Great Depression, spending a lot of time with people who had been thrown into poverty by the Dust Bowl and economic collapse.
A 1939 song romanticized the gangster Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd as a modern Robin Hood. It includes these lyrics, which still ring true:
Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered
I’ve seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.
Alarmed by how unrestrained capitalism had failed so many Americans, Guthrie also feared the right-wing power then rising in fascist Spain and Nazi Germany. His guitar displayed the slogan, “This machine kills fascists.”
Like many people during the Great Depression, Guthrie held strong leftist sympathies. He wrote a folksy column, called Woody Sez, for communist labor newspapers, but lacked the interest or discipline for ideological politics.
When attacked by conservatives, Guthrie replied with a joke: “I ain’t a communist necessarily, but I been in the red all my life.” In reality, he was more of a populist troublemaker who wrote what he saw and enjoyed tweaking the rich and powerful.
Guthrie also was something of a patriot, capitalist and person of faith. He served in World War II. He wrote some of his most memorable songs — Pastures of Plenty, Roll on Columbia, Grand Coulee Dam — during a month-long government job promoting the construction of hydroelectric dams in the Pacific Northwest. He said Jesus Christ was one of the two men he most admired. (The other was humorist Will Rogers.)
It is always easier to dismiss someone because of who or what he is than to listen to what he has to say, especially when his message is uncomfortable.
Guthrie got a close-up view of how the American dream became a nightmare for many people during the Great Depression. That view shaped his vision of this nation and its promise for true greatness. His lyrics seem appropriate again today, as the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and the middle class shrinks.
While extolling America’s natural beauty, This Land is Your Land is really about how inclusiveness and the promise of shared prosperity are what make the United States special. This land is not just for the rich, but for everyone. It wasn’t just made for me, but for you, too.
The little-sung last verse — the one we were not taught in elementary school — is especially poignant as we mark the 100th anniversary of Woody Guthrie’s birth:
In the squares of the city / In the shadow of the steeple
Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-WVa. Photo by Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press.
Americans heard something on the U.S. Senate floor last Wednesday that they haven’t heard for nearly three years: a coal-state senator and longtime supporter of the coal industry speak eloquent truth to power.
Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s 16-minute speech was remarkable for its wisdom and candor. It echoed a similar address in 2009 by another West Virginia Democrat and longtime coal-industry champion, the late Sen. Robert Byrd.
They both sounded like old friends trying to warn an alcoholic that his behavior had become unacceptably destructive, both to himself and to others.
The occasion for Rockefeller’s speech was a resolution before the Senate to disapprove of new Environmental Protection Agency rules reducing coal-fired power plants’ emissions of mercury and other toxic pollution.
The resolution was sponsored by Sen. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican and climate-change denier, and endorsed by coal industry lapdogs including Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader from Kentucky.
“Coal has played an important part in our past and can play an important role in our future, but it will only happen if we face reality,” Rockefeller began. (To watch the video, go to Youtu.be/ErN9v3e7zro)
“The reality is that many who run the coal industry today would rather attack false enemies and deny real problems than find solutions,” he said. “Scare tactics are a cynical waste of time, money and, worst of all, coal miners’ hopes.”
Rockefeller then outlined some inconvenient truths that coal industry leaders gloss over when they attack environmental-protection laws and government regulation.
“First, our coal reserves are finite and many coal-fired power plants are aging,” he said. “The cheap, easy coal seams are diminishing, and production is falling — especially in the Central Appalachian Basin in Southern West Virginia. Production is shifting to lower-cost areas like the Illinois and Powder River Basins.
“Second, natural gas use is on the rise. Power companies are switching to natural gas because of lower prices, cheaper construction costs, lower emissions and vast, steady supplies,” he said.
“Third, the shift to a lower-carbon economy is not going away, and it’s a disservice to coal miners and their families to pretend that it is,” Rockefeller said. “Coal company operators deny that we need to do anything to address climate change despite the established scientific consensus and mounting national desire for a cleaner, healthier environment.”
Rockefeller, who was West Virginia’s governor from 1977 to 1985 and has been a senator ever since, said that in 2010, he proposed a two-year suspension of EPA carbon rules to try to help the coal industry adapt. Instead, the industry has fought all attempts at compromise. “This foolish action wastes time and money that could have been invested in the future of coal,” he said.
Rockefeller said the EPA’s actions are in the best interest of his state’s citizens.
“The annual health benefits of the rule are enormous,” he said. “EPA has relied on thousands of studies that established the serious and long-term impact of these pollutants on premature deaths, heart attacks, hospitalizations, pregnant women, babies and children.”
If coal is to have a future, it must solve its environmental challenges rather than keep trying to avoid them, Rockefeller said.
“It’s not too late for the coal industry to step up and lead by embracing the realities of today and creating a sustainable future,” he said. “Discard the scare tactics. Stop denying science. Listen to what markets are saying about greenhouse gases and other environmental concerns, to what West Virginians are saying about their water and air, their health, and the cost of caring for seniors and children who are most susceptible to pollution.
“And unless this industry aggressively leans into the future, coal miners will lose the most,” he said. “We have the chance here to not just grudgingly accept the future, but to boldly embrace it.”
I’m sure Rockefeller’s speech angered the coal barons, just as Byrd’s speech did in December 2009. Coal industry leaders don’t seem interested in listening to reason, even from politicians who have supported them for decades. They’re probably already raising money to try to defeat Rockefeller in his next election. After all, there’s no shortage of politicians willing to take the coal industry’s money and do its bidding, in Kentucky and in West Virginia.
If Rockefeller’s words have any impact, it is likely to be with the coal industry’s declining work force, and with coal-state citizens who are getting fed up with poisonous air, polluted water and higher incidences of sickness and disease. Coal will never have a bright future as long as its leaders cling to a dirty past.
Sherry and Geoff Maddock keep chickens on a one-tenth-acre “farm” beside their home on East Fourth Street. It will be part of the Tour de Coop on Sunday, May 27, sponsored by CLUCK, the Cooperative of Lexington Urban Chicken Keepers. Photos by Tom Eblen
Debra Hensley and Melissa Watt’s newest back-yard pets are named Latifa, Penny, Amelia, Nellie and Pee Wee. In addition to companionship, they provide something the couple’s three dogs and cat never could or will: fresh eggs for breakfast.
The five Barred Plymouth Rock hens took up residence on Transylvania Park in August after Watt designed a movable coop and hired a friend to build it. The hens started laying just before Thanksgiving, and each now produces an egg almost every day. Neighbors like the hens, too, especially when they get free eggs.
“They’re surprisingly easy to care for,” said Hensley, an insurance agent and former Urban County Council member. “They’re very peaceful. They come running to you in a little flock when you come home. It’s a real stress-reliever for me.”
The Hensley-Watt coop and a dozen others in Lexington will be open for tours Sunday afternoon. The second annual Tour de Coops is sponsored by CLUCK — the Cooperative of Lexington Urban Chicken Keepers.
Anita Courtney, a public health nutritionist, and Miki Wright, a graphic designer, started CLUCK in 2010 to create a network of local chicken keepers. The organization now has about 30 active members and provides fellowship, idea-sharing and educational resources.
Back-yard chickens are a fast-growing hobby nationwide. “We attribute a lot of the popularity to the local food movement,” Courtney said. “Nothing is more local than chickens in your back yard.”
Many cities have repealed laws from the early 20th century that banned back-yard chickens. Unless forbidden by neighborhood deed restrictions, chickens are allowed in Lexington back yards, provided they are properly sheltered and stay off other people’s property.
Chicks can be bought for a just few dollars each, and the cost of keeping them is, well, chicken feed. Coops can be made cheaply — if you are handy and good at repurposing salvaged materials. Or you can get fancy and spend as much as you want.
The biggest issue Lexington chicken-keepers say they face is protecting their birds from predators, especially raccoons and hawks.
“I have no farming background and I’m not an animal person,” said Courtney, who has had chickens in her Bell Court back yard for more than two years. “If I can do it, anybody can. It’s so darn much fun!”
Another stop on the Tour de Coops is Fourth Street Farm, a 1⁄10 acre lot beside Sherry and Geoff Maddock’s 1870s home in the East End neighborhood.
After the house next door burned, the Maddocks bought the lot and began a quest to see how much agriculture they could commit to in a small space. The lot and their small back yard now have raised vegetable beds, 15 fruit trees, blackberry and raspberry bushes, bee hives and seven laying hens.
In addition to helping feed themselves and son Isaac, 8, the Maddocks see their farm as an extension of their passion for community engagement. She works for the Blue Grass Community Foundation. He works for Blessed Earth, a Lexington-based group that works to inspire Christians to become better stewards of the environment.
“As people walk by and we have conversations, we’ll send them home with bags of things,” Sherry Maddock said, adding that she hopes to inspire others in the neighborhood to grow, buy and eat healthy food. “I see this as a part of the local economy in the future.”
Montessori Middle School of Kentucky, another stop on the Tour de Coops, has incorporated chickens and other agricultural pursuits into the curriculum at its 13-acre campus on Stone Road.
Marilynn Spitz, the school’s math and science teacher, started the poultry program two years ago when the 55-student campus opened. Eggs are sold to the students’ parents.
“It’s really fun to watch them all grow up,” Anna Ison, 14, said of the school’s 24 chickens, most of which the students raised from eggs.
“They say having a dog is a lot of responsibility, but having chickens is more. You have to make sure they have all the things they need and keep them safe.”
If you go
Tour de Coops
When: Noon-5 p.m. May 27
Where: A list of tour locations is available at Clucklex.org, Alfalfa restaurant and Good Foods Market and Café. Tour is self-guided and starts anywhere.
Cost: $5 adults, free for kids free. Buy a tour bracelet at your first stop.
After the tour: Chat about chickens and question experts at Pints for Peeps at West Sixth Street Brewery, 501 W. Sixth St.
Debra Hensley, an insurance agent and former Urban County Council member, strokes Latifa, one of the five chickens she and Melissa Watt keep in the backyard of their home on Transylvania Park. “We don’t plan on eating them, so we don’t mind naming them,” Hensley said. Each chicken produces about an egg a day.
One of five chickens Debra Hensley and Melissa Watt keep in a backyard coop at their Transylvania Park home.
Debra Hensley and Melissa Watt had a friend build this portable coop that Watt designed to house the five chickens they keep in their backyard.
One of the five chickens Debra Hensley and Melissa Watt keep in their backyard sits in a laying box inside their coop.
Anna Ison, left, Frances Werner-Wilson, and Emma Gearon, right, students at Montessori Middle School of Kentucky, look in on young chickens in a coop on the school’s 13-acre campus on Stone Road.
Wendell Berry at his home near Port Royal, Ky., December 2011. Photo by Tom Eblen
I spent a beautiful Sunday afternoon in December talking with Wendell Berry at the kitchen table of his Henry County farmhouse. He told me he was hard at work on an essay. “I’m in need of a lecture,” he said.
America was in need of a lecture, too. On Monday, Berry gave it.
The National Endowment for the Humanities chose the Kentucky farmer, poet, essayist, novelist, activist and philosopher to give the 2012 Jefferson Lecture at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. It is the federal government’s highest honor for scholarly contributions to the humanities.
Berry’s selection had not been announced when we met, so he was vague about what he was up to. But I had the sense he was up to something big. As I listened last week to the recording of our interview, Berry’s answers to my questions were filled with themes and phrases that found their way into his lecture essay.
Berry, 77, delivered a searing indictment of corporate domination and the industrial economy, saying it has abused the land and people and threatens our survival. You can — and should — watch the video of Berry’s lecture and read the full text of his essay, titled “It All Turns on Affection.” Both are online (click here).
Among Berry’s touchstones in the essay are E.M. Forster’s 1910 novel Howard’s End, an early exploration of the effects of industrialization on society, and the story of his own tobacco-farming grandfather’s struggle against the monopolistic power of James B. Duke’s American Tobacco Co.
Ironically, Berry said, Duke is remembered now as a philanthropist, the benefactor of Duke University in North Carolina. “If you can appropriate for little or nothing the work and hope of enough small farmers, then you may dispense the grand charity of ‘philanthropy,’” he said.
Quoting his former teacher, the late writer Wallace Stegner, Berry said Americans have always tended to fall into two camps: boomers and stickers. “The boomer is motivated by greed, the desire for money, property and therefore power,” Berry said. “Stickers on the contrary are motivated by affection, by such love for a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it.”
Boomer ideals dominate America’s economy and culture now, he said. Almost everything has been reduced to statistics. Like corporate ownership, as compared to individual ownership, big numbers distance us from the consequences of our actions.
“Now the two great aims of industrialism — replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth in the hands of a small plutocracy — seem close to fulfillment,” Berry said. “At the same time the failures of industrialism have become too great and too dangerous to deny.”
Even the term economy has lost its original meaning, which had to do with household management and husbandry, he said. Most economists now “never ask, in their professional oblivion, why we are willing to do permanent ecological and cultural damage ‘to strengthen the economy.’”
Corporate industrialism, he said, “has failed to sustain the health and stability of human society. Among its characteristic signs are destroyed communities, neighborhoods, families, small businesses and small farms. It has failed just as conspicuously and more dangerously to conserve the wealth and health of nature.”
Industrialism’s effects are often defended as the “price of progress” or “creative destruction,” Berry noted.
“But land abuse cannot brighten the human prospect,” he said. “There is in fact no distinction between the fate of the land and the fate of the people. When one is abused, the other suffers. The penalties may come quickly to a farmer who destroys perennial cover on a sloping field. They will come sooner or later to a land-destroying civilization such as ours.”
Who is to blame? “We are all implicated,” Berry said. “By economic proxies thoughtlessly given, by thoughtless consumption of goods ignorantly purchased, now we are all boomers.”
How can it be changed? By having more respect for our fellow humans and the land, Berry said. By focusing on long-term sustainability — things like local food, soil conservation and renewable energy. And by rediscovering the importance of affection.
“Knowledge without affection leads us astray every time,” he said. “Affection leads, by way of good work, to authentic hope. … And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind and conserving economy. … We should, as our culture has warned us over and over again, give our affection to things that are true, just and beautiful. When we give affection to things that are destructive, we are wrong.”
Since Berry began making these arguments in his 1977 book The Unsettling of America, critics have dismissed him as unrealistic, nostalgic, even anachronistic. But more people are listening. Indeed, this seems to be Wendell Berry’s time.
As “local food” and “buy local” movements have sprung up everywhere in recent years, Berry’s books have attracted an international following. His lectures are packed, often by young people.
Can America change before it is too late? It can, Berry told me, if sustainability becomes a bigger part of the public conversation. “The only way to do that,” he said, “is to make as much sense as you possibly can.”
UK President Eli Capilouto at Richardsville Elementary School in Warren County last month. Photo by Joe Imel/Bowling Green Daily News
When I interviewed Eli Capilouto recently about his first eight months as president of the University of Kentucky, he described a visit to an elementary school in Bowling Green as “my best day in Kentucky.”
The Alabama native went to Richardsville Elementary after receiving a handwritten invitation from second-grader Emma McGuffey. Capilouto said he was impressed by the students and teachers, and by the building where they learn.
That building, which opened in August 2010, was the nation’s first school designed to generate more energy than it uses. Thanks to innovative design and materials, it requires 75 percent less energy than a typical school.
Power consumption also is kept down by geothermal heating and cooling, plus elimination of power-hungry appliances such as deep fryers in the cafeteria kitchen. (That change prompted dieticians to develop healthier school lunches.)
The overall construction cost was about the same as a typical school, except for the addition of solar panels that generate power for the school and local utility grid.
Capilouto said the students gave him a tour of the building and proudly explained the science behind it. “I came back on a high after that visit,” he said. “I’ve never seen a building teach so effectively.”
His ambitious plans for UK include a lot of construction. He wants to renovate or replace many aging academic buildings, renovate 6,000 beds of dormitory space and add 3,000 more beds.
UK has a contract with Memphis-based Education Realty Trust to build and operate a 600-bed dorm. The deal is planned as the first step toward privatizing all student housing as a way to raise construction capital.
I asked Capilouto whether Richardsville Elementary had inspired him to attempt similar energy-efficiency with UK’s new buildings. “We have the same architect,” he replied, referring to the Lexington firm Sherman Carter Barnhart, which is designing the new dormitory.
The dorm will have geothermal systems and will meet Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards. But initial plans indicate much more could be done to reduce energy consumption and long-term operating costs.
If Capilouto wants to embrace what he saw at Richardsville, much more must be done with this and future buildings. And that process must start soon, before UK negotiates terms of its long-term relationship with Education Realty Trust.
Thanks to projects such as Richardsville Elementary, Kentucky has become the national leader in energy-efficient school construction. Other examples have been built in Warren, Fayette and Kenton counties, and many more are planned.
Berea College has made strides in this area. UK has made a start with the new Davis Marksbury Building. There is plenty of Kentucky expertise on which to draw, including some on UK’s campus.
But people who have been involved with energy-efficient school projects say it is not a process to be entered into lightly. It requires new ways of thinking at each step — from how a building is planned, designed and financed to how it is managed and used after completion.
Highly energy-efficient buildings cost a little more on the front end, although that money is recovered quickly through lower operating costs. Still, it’s a different mind-set.
“There must be a change in culture at all levels,” said architect Mark Ryles, who was a key player in energy-efficient school construction as facilities director for the Kentucky Department of Education. “It will take real leadership and collaboration to make it happen.”
Ryles said the most successful projects have been built in counties where the school board and superintendents were committed to the process and put students’ needs first. The key is to figure out a vision and goals for construction, then shape the business model to accomplish them.
As Capilouto saw at Richardsville, energy efficiency is about much more than cost savings. “The educational benefit is fabulous,” Ryles said. “We now have third-graders going around talking about geothermal.”
If Capilouto and the Board of Trustees were to decide to rebuild UK’s campus as the “greenest” in the nation, it would make a bold statement, create a unique learning laboratory and save a lot of green for Kentucky taxpayers.
It also could make UK more attractive to Emma McGuffey and her fellow college students of the future. They will expect their university’s campus to be at least as advanced as what they had in elementary school.
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About this blog
Tom Eblen is a columnist for the Lexington Herald-Leader who writes about life, people and issues in Lexington and Kentucky. A Lexington native, Eblen was the Herald-Leader's managing editor from 1998 to 2008. He previously was a reporter and editor for the Atlanta Journal- Constitution and The Associated Press. Some columns contain his opinions and observations.
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