The Bluegrass and Beyond

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.

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.

“We hope more people will go to Robinson Forest, but a lot of Kentuckians won’t, so we wanted them to experience it vicariously,” said Reece, co-author with James J. Krupa of the new book,The Embattled Wilderness: The Natural and Human History of Robinson Forest and the Fight for Its Future (University of Georgia Press, $24.95).

Reece will sign copies of the book from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Friday at The Morris Book Shop, 882 E. High St.

Erik Reece on Lewis Fork creek in Robinson Forest.

Reece is a UK English professor best known for his award-winning 2006 book, Lost Mountain: Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalachia. Like Lost Mountain, this book has a forward by renowned Kentucky author Wendell Berry.

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

Kentucky’s new “religious freedom” law sure looks like an attempt by conservative Christians to justify discrimination against gay people and get around local “fairness” ordinances.

That is why many people were puzzled when Jim Gray, Lexington’s first openly gay mayor, was the most muted voice in the choir of opponents who urged Gov. Steve Beshear to veto the bill.

Beshear did issue a veto, but the General Assembly overturned it by a wide margin last week.

Beshear’s veto came at the urging of dozens of organizations and individuals — liberal churches, gay rights groups, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Kentucky League of Cities, the Kentucky Association of Counties and Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer, who said the bill would “take us backwards as a city and Commonwealth, hurting our strategic position in an increasingly global economy.”

Gray, however, issued a tepid statement that stopped short of urging a veto. He has declined to elaborate publicly.

“The legislation’s stated goal is to encourage religious freedom. That’s a worthy goal,” his statement said. “However, many citizens are concerned the bill may unintentionally open the door to discrimination. Last Thursday, I talked to the governor, shared these concerns and urged him to consider these issues carefully.”

Gray took a beating in social media from some gay people and their supporters, but gay rights leaders were more circumspect. Lexington Fairness chairman Roy Harrison, in an interview Friday, avoided any criticism of Gray.

“We are really happy that he brought more discussion to the bill,” Harrison said. “Everyone has their own political calculus.”

The General Assembly’s political calculus was clear. Most opponents of the bill were lawmakers from progressive urban districts. Legislators from more conservative rural, small-town and suburban districts voted for it.

In a conservative district, there is nothing more dangerous in the next election than having an opponent claim you voted against “religious freedom.” Rural Democrats, especially, are feeling the heat.

Gray is seeking re-election to a second term as mayor next year, so he may have wanted to avoid alienating conservatives. But few people expect Gray to get serious opposition. Former Police Chief Anthany Beatty floated a trial balloon about running, but it hasn’t gotten much lift.

Gray seems to be widely popular in Lexington, even among former critics. As mayor, he has had significant accomplishments and has made few missteps.

Besides, voters knew Gray was gay when they elected him to council in 2006 with enough votes to make him vice mayor. His sexual orientation wasn’t really an issue when he unseated incumbent Mayor Jim Newberry in 2010. Since then, Gray hasn’t tried to be “the gay mayor” — just “the mayor.”

Gray’s political calculation may have been that everyone, including the governor, knew where he stood on this subject, so he had little to gain by being vocal on a statewide controversy where he had no real influence.

Gray did come out strong a year ago on a Lexington controversy, when Hands on Originals cited religious objections in refusing to print T-shirts for a gay pride festival, sparking an ongoing investigation by the city’s Human Rights Commission.

A more important political calculation may have been that Gray didn’t want to anger the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Bob Damon, D-Nicholasville, an influential member of the Central Kentucky delegation. Rep. Sannie Overly of Paris may have unseated Damron as chair of the House Democratic caucus this year, but the way this bill sailed through the General Assembly showed Damron still has plenty of clout.

For all the huffing and puffing on both sides, nobody seems to really know what this legislation will do. The stated intent is to make it easier for Kentuckians to ignore state laws or regulations that conflict with their “sincerely held” religious beliefs unless there is a “compelling governmental interest.”

Bill supporters such as The Family Foundation, which could be more accurately called the Foundation for Families Just Like Ours, insists it is not a vehicle for discriminating against gay people. But a spokesman also has argued that the Hands on Originals case wasn’t really discrimination.

The law’s uncertainties and unintended consequences were a big reason Beshear said he vetoed it. “As written, the bill will undoubtedly lead to costly litigation,” he said.

Don’t forget the hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars that have been wasted on defending clearly unconstitutional attempts by some local governments to post the Ten Commandments in public buildings.

Harrison, the Lexington Fairness chairman, said gay rights and civil liberties groups will be watching to see if this new law is used to try to justify discrimination. If so, they will aggressively challenge it.

Rep. Kelly Flood, D-Lexington, a Unitarian Universalist minister and opponent of the new law, mused that one unintended consequence of it could be to advance gay rights.

Unitarians support gay marriage. Could not they use this law to challenge Kentucky’s 2004 constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and civil unions as an infringement of their “sincerely held” religious beliefs? Might the state then be forced to show a “compelling governmental interest” for banning gay marriage?

One thing is for sure: this bad law will keep the culture warriors battling for years to come.

Lexington didn’t finish in the money in Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Mayors Challenge, which gave $9 million to five cities to help them work on big ideas to improve urban life in America.

But Mayor Jim Gray isn’t too disappointed. More than 300 cities applied, and Lexington finished in the top 20, despite having little track record of applying for major foundation grants.

Gray said he and his staff learned a lot about how to do that. They also raised Lexington’s national profile in ways that could pay off in the future with the philanthropic arm of New York’s billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, and similar foundations that fund city initiatives.

“I think there will be other bites at the apple,” Gray said in an interview last week. “We have an opportunity to leverage the visibility we got in making top 20.

“This process was a test case for how Lexington can dial up marketing to private foundations,” he added. “We have plenty of room to grow in this model. But what the Bloomberg Challenge showed is that we have the ability to compete.”

Bloomberg officials announced the five winning cities March 12. Providence, R.I., won the $5 million first prize, while Philadelphia, Houston, Chicago and Santa Monica, Calif., were each awarded $1 million.

Lexington applied for funding to speed up creation of CitizenLex.org, an online portal and system within government to collect citizens’ ideas for improving city life, gather the right people in and out of government around them, and track their accomplishments.

The idea for CitizenLex came from the Bloomberg competition process itself. Gray asked citizens to submit ideas for what Lexington should propose to Bloomberg, and he got more than 420 written submissions. So many of the ideas were good, the mayor said, that he wanted to figure out a way to make many of them happen rather than focusing on just one.

Gray and Lexington have yet to receive any detailed feedback from Bloomberg officials about how its application compared to those of the winners.

Many of the winning proposals were more concrete than Lexington’s. But, aside from Providence, none of the winning ideas struck me as being that revolutionary. Except for Santa Monica, all of the winning cities were much bigger than Lexington. Many were cities that, unlike Lexington, have been losing population and experiencing economic decline.

Providence’s idea is a high-tech plan to improve vocabulary and language skills among young low-income children. Research has shown that children from families receiving welfare have smaller vocabularies than their more-affluent peers, contributing to diminished academic performance and job opportunities.

Houston proposed a single-container recycling system, which Lexington already has. Chicago wants to better use city data to track trends. Philadelphia proposed a streamlined system for allowing local companies to bid for city contracts. Santa Monica, the smallest and wealthiest winning city, proposed a project to measure citizens’ overall well-being.

Lexington made a good impression on Bloomberg officials, Gray said, especially because of its high level of citizen engagement in the competition. That could bode well for future grants. The world of megabucks philanthropies devoted to city issues is small, he added, and they pay close attention to what each other are doing.

Gray still plans to push forward on CitizenLex, as funding is available. City officials also are working on pilot projects for many of the good ideas citizens submitted, such as bike trails and LED street lights.

Lexington has applied for a grant for CitizenLex from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The foundation has donated millions to Lexington over the years, because the Herald-Leader was once owned by Knight Newspapers. Grant winners are to be announced in July.

“We’re on their radar now,” Gray said. “People know about Lexington.”

Losing Michael Speaks

Few University of Kentucky deans have had more impact on Lexington in a short time than Michael Speaks, dean of the College of Design for the past five years. He announced last week he is leaving to take a similar post at Syracuse University.

Speaks, a brilliant and ambitious man, had his share of admirers and detractors within the university. Beyond campus, he played a big role in making good architecture and design a topic of conversation among average Lexingtonians.

The Mississippi native arrived here as the CentrePointe controversy erupted. His contacts helped attract international talent to improve CentrePointe’s design and develop world-class plans for the proposed Arena, Arts and Entertainment District and Town Branch Commons.

Speaks will be missed. Whomever succeeds him must keep the conversation going.

Craig Whitney spent much of his long career with The New York Times as a reporter in Europe, where he got the same question over and over.

“People would often ask me in a baffled way, ‘What is it about you Americans and guns?’ especially after things like Columbine happened,” he said. “I would give the best answer I could, but then I realized I didn’t really know myself.”

After retiring as an assistant managing editor in 2009, Whitney decided to find out. The result of his research was the book, Living With Guns: A Liberal’s Case for the Second Amendment (Public Affairs Books, $28.99). It was published last November, a month before the school massacre in Newtown, Conn.

Whitney will be in Lexington this week to talk about his findings, some of which surprised him. His book offers a path to finding sensible middle ground in the gun-control debate, balancing Second Amendment rights with public safety.

Whitney’s lecture is at 7 p.m. March 28 in the University of Kentucky’s Taylor Education Building, 597 South Upper Street. It is sponsored by UK’s College of Communication and Information, the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues and the Bluegrass Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

In an interview last week, Whitney said he began his research by looking at Colonial history to find out what the nation’s founders intended when they wrote the Constitution’s Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Many gun-control advocates argue that the Second Amendment is an anachronism, or that it was never meant to guarantee the right of individual gun ownership outside military service. But the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected that argument twice recently, in 5-4 rulings in 2008 and 2010 that struck down handgun bans in Washington, D.C., and Chicago.

“I found myself surprisingly agreeing with the conservative justices,” Whitney said. “That it is an individual right, not tied to militia service, and that the Second Amendment recognized a common-law right the colonists had had from the very beginning.”

Whitney said gun-control advocates must accept the Second Amendment, as well as the reality that gun ownership is a deeply ingrained aspect of American culture that isn’t going away. His book notes that more than 60 million Americans own more than 300 million firearms.

By the same token, gun-rights advocates should quit stoking fear that the federal government will somehow find a way to confiscate the weapons of law-abiding citizens. That would be clearly unconstitutional, Whitney said, and such paranoia stymies much-needed public safety measures like universal background checks.

The National Rifle Association has promoted gun-seizure fears since the 1970s. Whitney noted that it has been an effective fundraising strategy for the NRA and has dramatically increased gun sales.

Whitney doesn’t own guns, although he carried one while serving in the Navy in Vietnam. Legal gun ownership is difficult where he lives in New York City. But he is an NRA member.

“I joke in the book that I would never have believed half the things that the media report the NRA says if I hadn’t read them in the NRA’s monthly magazine,” he said.

Whitney is critical of the NRA, but he is just as critical of extreme gun-control advocates such as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Violent crime has declined dramatically in America during the past two decades, but Whitney disputes NRA propaganda crediting that to more people carrying guns for self-defense.

“I also don’t buy Mayor Bloomberg’s argument that keeping people like me from buying guns or having them in New York City keeps crime down in New York City,” he said.

Whitney noted that more than half the nation’s 30,000 annual gun deaths are suicides — and half of those are done with rifles and shotguns. While so-called assault weapons have been used in high-profile massacres, most gun crimes are committed with handguns.

“Common sense is what we need to apply to the gun-control debate,” Whitney said.

“Not ideology, which on the one hand says that all regulations are unconstitutional and on the other hand says all guns should be illegal.”

Whitney’s book makes several sensible policy recommendations. History shows that guns have been regulated since the nation’s earliest days, and the Supreme Court has clearly stated that reasonable gun regulations are perfectly constitutional.

One of the most effective strategies, Whitney believes, would be state licensing of gun owners after they receive safety training and pass a proficiency test. Who should do the training and testing? Whitney suggests the NRA.

“Politically, they’ve gone off the deep end,” Whitney said of the NRA. “But I think they do excellent work in the firearms training and safety courses they have.”

Improving the public’s proficiency with firearms was the main reason the NRA was founded in 1871, Whitney noted in his book. And one of the two founders, William C. Church, was a former reporter for The New York Times.

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.”

The three presentations will be live-streamed at Ustream.tv/kyclimateforum.

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.

 The CentrePointe block awaits development. Photo by Charles Bertram

For a project yet to be built, CentrePointe has had a big impact on Lexington.

The most immediate impact was the election of Mayor Jim Gray in November 2010. Were it not for the controversy surrounding CentrePointe, I doubt then-Vice Mayor Gray would have run against, much less unseated, Mayor Jim Newberry.

What Gray understood — and Newberry didn’t — was that CentrePointe focused many people’s longtime frustrations about development in Lexington. People didn’t like the secrecy, the politics and the often-mediocre results.

Most of all, people wanted more say in how their city looks. They didn’t want Lexington’s architectural heritage bulldozed at a developer’s whim. Development occurs on private property, but everyone must look at it and live with it.

Five years later, CentrePointe is still a grassy field waiting for developer Dudley Webb to find financing and tenants. But the project has taught Lexington some valuable lessons.

One lesson is the value of historic preservation. Webb was quick to demolish an entire block, including some buildings that were more than a century old and could have been renovated into unique, valuable space within his larger development.

Lexington’s biggest development trend since then has been for entrepreneurs to renovate fine old buildings and adapt them for new uses — restaurants, bars, stores, offices and homes. These projects make economic sense and preserve Lexington’s history and unique charm.

Another lesson is that good design matters. With CentrePointe stalled and Gray in the mayor’s office, Webb felt pressure to hire top architectural talent and get public input to redesign his project. That work dramatically improved his development plan.

The CentrePointe redesign also helped pave the way for Louisville-based 21c to decide to build one of its acclaimed hotels and contemporary art museums across the street.

The 21c Museum Hotel will be in the century-old Fayette National building, which will get an extensive renovation.

That momentum helped Lexington attract world-class talent to design competitions for two public projects that could transform downtown: the Arena, Arts and Entertainment District and Town Branch Commons.

The arena area plan calls for renovating Rupp Arena, building a bigger convention center and gradually redeveloping more than 30 acres ofunderused, city-owned surface parking lots.

The winning plan for Town Branch Commons would turn marginalized downtown property into a linear park along the historic path of Town Branch Creek. Such projects in other cities have created popular amenities that have attracted many times their cost in new private investment.

Gary Bates, a highly regarded American architect now based in Norway, was chosen to develop the arena district plan.

The winning Town Branch Commons plan was designed by Kate Orff of New York, one of landscape architecture’s rising stars.

Why is such world-class talent suddenly being attracted to Lexington? Because the city has set the bar higher. Why is that important? Because if Lexington wants to attract the best employers, it must create an environment where the best and brightest people want to live and work.

One final lesson from CentrePointe is that Lexington needs better laws and processes to both encourage good development and prevent bad development, especially downtown.

A city task force has spent a lot of time studying “design excellence.” Now, with new leadership from Councilman Steve Kay and help from a consultant, task force members have begun trying to figure out how to turn talk into action.

That won’t be easy. It is not just a matter of creating laws and systems to keep developers from doing bad things. It is about creating laws, systems and incentives so developers can do great things. This will require rules that provide both clarity and flexibility. It will require high standards, but also processes that minimize hassle and unnecessary costs for developers.

I don’t know if the Webb Companies will ever succeed in building CentrePointe. And I worry that the longer the block sits empty, the harder it will be to attract outside investment for other major downtown projects.

But something will eventually be built on the CentrePointe block, and now is the time to make sure that it and other new construction downtown enhances the city rather than detracts from it.

 Watch a video about the CentrePointe block’s demolition:

Time lapse: Tearing down a block, one building at a time from David Stephenson on Vimeo.

To read previous CentrePointe columns and see photos of the project as it evolved, click here.

A CentrePointe gallery:

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.

A Valentine’s Day reminder 

Hardly a week goes by that people don’t tell me how they wish the open block where the Webb Companies hopes to build CentrePointe could become a public park instead.

As the block awaits redevelopment, it is planted in grass and surrounded by a plank fence to resemble a horse pasture. It has become a popular gathering place during downtown festivals. (At other times, it is off-limits, just as horse pastures are.)

CentrePasture’s popularity points to a couple of ironies about Lexington.

One is that we have a lot of open space, but little public space. The other is that we are surrounded by some of the world’s most beautiful rural landscapes — an artful blend of the natural and man-made — but our central business district is a generic jungle of concrete and asphalt. There are only a handful of small parks or plazas downtown, and few trees of any size.

Although recent renovations of Triangle and Cheapside parks have been excellent, the comments I hear make me think Lexington residents still yearn for more public space downtown.

Town Branch Creek resurfaces west of Rupp Arena. Herald-Leader photo

The Downtown Development Authority on Monday will choose the winner of a design competition for Town Branch Commons — some form of linear park on city-owned property along the path of the long-buried stream that gave birth to Lexington.

This project would involve bringing parts of the creek back to the surface, either literally or symbolically, to create attractive public spaces for nature and a variety of activities. A jury of design professionals was to recommend a winner to the DDA board after closed-door presentations Friday by the five finalists.

The competition attracted 23 entries. The finalists are among the world’s best landscape architects and designers: Coen + Partners in Minneapolis; Denver-based Civitas; the Netherlands firm Inside Outside; Scape Landscape Architecture of New York; and Copenhagen-based Julien De Smedt Architects working with Balmori Associates of New York.

All five finalists’ designs will be on display at the Downtown Arts Center from Tuesday until Feb. 22, including during Gallery Hop on Feb. 15.

I can’t wait to see the designs, especially after hearing the finalists make presentations about their previous work Thursday at the Lexington Children’s Theatre. They showed amazing projects from all over the world, including in cities such as Bilbao, Spain, that had far more daunting problems than Lexington has.

(An interesting side note is that three of the six presenters were women: design legends Diana Balmori and Petra Blaisse and one of landscape architecture’s rising stars, Kate Orff.)

(Also worth mentioning: several of the landscape architects showed projects that used wetland parks to effectively solve storm-water problems. Lexington officials should remember that as they decide how to spend millions of dollars on storm water issues under terms of the federal consent decree.)

I can already hear Lexington’s naysayers: This whole idea is impractical, unaffordable and frivolous. It is none of that.

The compelling argument for Town Branch Commons is not esthetic, but economic. This sort of urban public space has been an effective way to attract people and investment dollars to cities of all sizes, from Seoul, South Korea to Yonkers, N.Y.

People who have attended recent Commerce Lexington trips have seen it work in Greenville, S.C., where a long-neglected riverbank became Falls Park; and in San Antonio, where a once-buried stream similar to Town Branch became the Riverwalk, now Texas’ second-largest tourist attraction after the Alamo.

New York’s High Line project turned an abandoned elevated rail line into a linear park that has transformed a once-decaying section of lower Manhattan. Despite huge cost overruns, the Millennium Park that Chicago built over an urban rail yard has more than paid for itself with the private development it has attracted.

The kind of public-private partnership envisioned with Town Branch Commons is under way in Atlanta, which is turning an abandoned rail line around the city into 1,300 acres of parks and 33 miles of trails, and in Louisville, which has raised more than $60 million in private money for the 21st Century Parks project that is creating 4,000 acres of linear parkland and 100 miles of trails around that city.

What excites me about the potential of Town Branch Commons was mentioned frequently by the world-class designers who submitted plans. This isn’t about building Disney World in a swamp; it is an authentic reflection of Lexington’s history, geography and culture.

Pioneers chose Town Branch as the site for their town, laying out Lexington’s grid according to the creek’s path rather than a compass. Its banks were where early Lexingtonians gathered for fun and refreshment before the stream was polluted, built over and eventually buried.

Town Branch Commons will require public money and even more private money. But it could be a great long-term investment, one that uses the authenticity of Lexington’s past to create both an amenity and economic generator for the future.

When I was a child, many white Americans, and most of them in the South, considered Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists to be radicals and trouble-makers. Some even called them “communists.”

Almost everyone now considers them heroes. Ideas about racial equality and justice that were then controversial are now common sense.

Segregationist leaders such as George Wallace, Lester Maddox and Orval Faubus are now remembered with contempt, when they are remembered at all. We pity the average people who enabled the bigots, either with their actions or their silence.

On Monday, we mark the 27th annual holiday honoring King, as well as the second inauguration of the nation’s first president of African descent. Looking back, it is amazing how much changed in so short a time. Racism still exists, to be sure, but it is no longer acceptable in mainstream society.

It makes me wonder: What controversial ideas today will seem like common sense in just a few years?

The first that comes to mind is gay rights. It is today’s most controversial civil rights issue, yet the nation has clearly turned the corner. You can tell it the same way you could tell by the early 1960s that we had turned the corner of black civil rights. The groundswell of support wasn’t just coming from the victims of discrimination, but from others who realized it was wrong and found the courage to say so.

If there has been a consistent theme of social progress during my lifetime, it is this: discrimination against any group of people because of who they are is un-American.

We saw an example of that last week when the small Perry County town of Vicco became the fourth municipality in Kentucky to ban discrimination against gays, joining Lexington, Louisville and Covington. Vicco officials said they weren’t endorsing homosexuality; they just thought discrimination was wrong.

Most opposition to gay rights comes from religious conservatives. During King’s lifetime, many white Christians found Biblical justification for segregation and discrimination, just as their great-grandfathers had for slavery. Everyone is entitled to their religious beliefs. What is problematic is when they try to impose them on others.

Wendell Berry, the renowned Kentucky writer and lifelong Baptist, made that point and many others to Baptist ministers meeting at Georgetown College on Jan. 11. Coverage of his talk has attracted a lot of attention. (Read more about what he had to say on my blog.)

When I think of other controversial issues that will seem like no-brainers in a few years, the reasons for our clouded judgment have more to do with economics than religion.

Kentuckians’ disregard for the environment reminds me of our willful ignorance about the health and social costs of tobacco just two or three decades ago. Only after the price-support system that made tobacco an economic mainstay of family farms was abolished did we stop trying to deny the obvious and defend the indefensible.

More than 30 local governments in Kentucky now have public smoking bans, and some legislators are pushing for a statewide version to curb soaring health-care costs. Restricting smoking in most public places is now common sense, yet it would have been unthinkable in Kentucky a generation ago.

Sit back for a moment and try to imagine conventional wisdom a few years from now. For one thing, I think, discrimination based on sexual orientation will be as unacceptable then as discrimination based on race, gender or national origin is now.

I also can imagine hearing comments like these:

Why did people back then allow the beauty and future economic viability of Eastern Kentucky’s mountains to be destroyed just so coal companies could extract the last measure of profit in return for a declining number of short-term jobs?

How could people back then have denied the scientific consensus about climate change and refused to act when the signs — melting glaciers, the increasing frequency of killer storms and droughts, year after year of record-high temperatures — were so obvious?

What were they thinking?

As we honor civil rights heroes Monday, and pity the bigots and their enablers, let us also give some thought to the future. Who will people honor then, and who will they pity?

And ask yourself: which side of history will I be on?

Wendell Berry, at his home near Port Royal, Ky., December 2011. Photo by Tom Eblen

As an elder statesman of American letters, Wendell Berry is being given some good platforms to speak his mind. He isn’t letting these opportunities go to waste.

Chosen last year by the National Endowment for the Humanities to deliver the annual Jefferson Lecture, the Kentucky author gave a thoughtful indictment of corporate domination and the industrial economy, saying it has abused the land and people and threatens our very survival.

On Jan. 11, Berry spoke at Georgetown College to a gathering of Baptist ministers. The lifelong Baptist used the forum to sharply criticize his denomination’s opposition to the legalization of gay marriage.

Berry’s writing doesn’t lend itself well to sound bites. So here are some extended excerpts from his remarks, which created an Internet stir after Bob Allen of Associated Baptist Press News reported them:

“My argument … was the sexual practices of consenting adults ought not to be subjected to the government’s approval or disapproval, and that domestic partnerships in which people who live together and devote their lives to one another ought to receive the spousal rights, protections and privileges the government allows to heterosexual couples.”

“The Bible … has a lot more to say against fornication and adultery than against homosexuality. If one accepts the 24th and 104th Psalms as scriptural norms, then surface mining and other forms of earth destruction are perversions. If we take the Gospels seriously, how can we not see industrial warfare — with its inevitable massacre of innocents — as a most shocking perversion? By the standard of all scriptures, neglect of the poor, of widows and orphans, of the sick, the homeless, the insane, is an abominable perversion.”

“Jesus talked of hating your neighbor as tantamount to hating God, and yet some Christians hate their neighbors by policy and are busy hunting biblical justifications for doing so. Are they not perverts in the fullest and fairest sense of that term? And yet none of these offenses — not all of them together — has made as much political/religious noise as homosexual marriage.”

“The oddest of the strategies to condemn and isolate homosexuals is to propose that homosexual marriage is opposed to and a threat to heterosexual marriage, as if the marriage market is about to be cornered and monopolized by homosexuals. If this is not industrial capitalist paranoia, it at least follows the pattern of industrial capitalist competitiveness. We must destroy the competition. If somebody else wants what you’ve got, from money to marriage, you must not hesitate to use the government – small of course – to keep them from getting it.”

“If I were one of a homosexual couple — the same as I am one of a heterosexual couple — I would place my faith and hope in the mercy of Christ, not in the judgment of Christians. When I consider the hostility of political churches to homosexuality and homosexual marriage, I do so remembering the history of Christian war, torture, terror, slavery and annihilation against Jews, Muslims, black Africans, American Indians and others. And more of the same by Catholics against Protestants, Protestants against Catholics, Catholics against Catholics, Protestants against Protestants, as if by law requiring the love of God to be balanced by hatred of some neighbor for the sin of being unlike some divinely preferred us. If we are a Christian nation — as some say we are, using the adjective with conventional looseness — then this Christian blood thirst continues wherever we find an officially identifiable evil, and to the immense enrichment of our Christian industries of war.”

“Condemnation by category is the lowest form of hatred, for it is cold-hearted and abstract, lacking even the courage of a personal hatred. Categorical condemnation is the hatred of the mob. It makes cowards brave. And there is nothing more fearful than a religious mob, a mob overflowing with righteousness – as at the crucifixion and before and since. This can happen only after we have made a categorical refusal to kindness: to heretics, foreigners, enemies or any other group different from ourselves.”

And those are only the highlights. Read APB’s full story here.

In a coincidence of history, the national holiday honoring civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. falls on the same day this year as the second inauguration of Barack Obama, the first U.S. president of African descent.

That makes it a good day to talk about leadership, said Jeff Johnson, a journalist, commentator and social activist who is the featured speaker at Lexington’s holiday commemoration program, 11 a.m. Monday at Heritage Hall.

“I’m going to be talking a great deal about current-day leadership and what kind of leadership we need in the face of the daunting challenges in our community,” Johnson said during a telephone interview last week.

“In the face of trying to celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., do we do more of a disservice by being unwilling to do the things that he did to be able to bring about change?”

Johnson, 39, is a political commentator on the MSNBC cable network, the Tom Joyner Morning Show and TheGrio.com, an NBC News website that focuses on news and opinion tailored to black audiences. He also runs an Ohio-based organization trying to recruit and develop 80,000 black male teachers.

Previously, Johnson spent seven years as a commentator for Black Entertainment Television and was national director of the NAACP’s Youth and College Division.

Today’s social justice movements could learn a lot about leadership by studying the methods of King and his colleagues during the 1950s and 1960s, Johnson said. A key ingredient in the effectiveness of the civil rights movement was training in practical leadership skills and discipline.

“You weren’t allowed to be in the marches and the demonstrations if you were not trained, because the various agendas they had were so focused,” Johnson said. “Not just from a PR standpoint, but from a legislative one. They operated from the standpoint of being able to bring about systemic and pragmatic, legislative and policy changes.

“So often the movements of today are about ‘Can I get on the front page of the paper?’ or ‘Can our organization be on CNN?,’” he said.

Training and focus are just as necessary for achieving goals in today’s more complex social, political and economic environment, Johnson said.

“It’s not about antiquated civil disobedience tactics,” he said. “It’s about whatever tactics you choose to use in the process of creating change.”

That can include learning technical skills to organize an online get-out-the-vote campaign or developing human relations and business skills to form public-private partnerships to achieve neighborhood development projects.

Working with business and government is a key to modern progress, he said. So is tackling problems in a comprehensive way, involving players with a variety of perspectives and viewpoints.

“We each have a role to play,” he said. “If we did this in a nonantagonistic way, I think some of these nontraditional partnerships would create spaces where you’re really not asking people to go too far out of the way of what they already do, because everyone is stepping up.”

Today’s social justice issues are more subtle than during King’s era, and the nation’s demographic picture is more complex.

“For example, there are African-Americans who may be in the same family who may want drastically different things,” Johnson said. “I think we have to be sophisticated enough to do that.”

He mentioned the recent controversy in which ESPN commentator Rob Parker lost his job because of remarks he made about Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III, including calling him a “cornball brother.”

“You do the entire race a disservice by saying he’s less black because his black experience is different than mine,” Johnson said. “The real issue is ‘Who believes what I believe, and can I work with them to push it?’ That’s what we’ve got to help people understand.”

Effective change agents focus on simple agendas, even single issues, that others can rally around, Johnson said.

“You should ask, who are the people I can work with? Who are the people who believe what I believe? How can we pragmatically work around a concise agenda to be able to bring about those realities?” he said. “What it also does is it removes so much personal foolishness from what should be about communal advancement.”

When people ask about my job, I say that writing three newspaper columns a week is a lot like being a restaurant chef: you want everything to be good, but it must be done on time.

A good columnist is part reporter, part editorial writer and part storyteller. Thanks to a constant stream of reader feedback, I know when I’m hitting the mark.

As I looked back over my 140 or so columns in 2012, some patterns emerged. For one thing, I wrote a lot about old houses. That was partly because I renovated and moved into an old house in a great urban neighborhood this year.

Readers could relate to my columns about that experience, especially my guilt at needing to get rid of a half-century of National Geographic magazines. Thanks to readers, those magazines are now being put to use by two schools and an artist.

While researching my “new” home, I was put in touch with a woman who grew up there between 1924 and 1943. She told me about the house, including her childhood “secret hiding place” behind the wall of an upstairs bedroom.

I wrote about Kentucky homes and buildings much older, grander and more interesting than mine: Helm Place; Spindletop Hall; Floral Hall; Lafayette Academy; the Ripy mansion in Lawrenceburg; Ward Hall in Georgetown; Bethlehem Farm near Paris; and, most interesting of all, mysterious Elmwood mansion in Richmond.

I also wrote about new architecture and development: the never-ending saga of CentrePointe; redevelopment plans for parking lots around Rupp Arena; ideas for turning long-buried Town Branch Creek into a linear downtown park; and Parkside, Holly Wiedemann’s impressive affordable housing development.

I indulged my passion for local history whenever it seemed relevant to current events.

I told the story behind George Yeaman, a once-obscure Owensboro congressman made famous in Steven Spielberg’s movie, Lincoln. I talked with archaeologist Nancy O’Malley about her dig at Fort Boonesborough.

I learned about native cane to satisfy my curiosity as to why so many Central Kentucky places are named for a plant that has all but disappeared. I marked Black History Month in February with a series of columns, ranging from Lexington’s central role in the slave trade to the pioneering practice of Dr. Mary Britton.

Being a columnist is a great excuse to get to know and write about some of Kentucky’s most interesting people.

Writer Wendell Berry gave me a preview of his Jefferson Lecture. Katerina Stoykova-Klemer told me about her journey from Bulgaria to Lexington, and from engineering to poetry and publishing. Jacqueline Roberts recalled her years singing with balladeer John Jacob Niles. And fourth- and fifth-generation horse doctors Ed and Luke Fallon discussed how equine medicine has changed.

Along the way, I told the stories of three World War II veterans, businessman Stuart Utgaard’s spectacular rise, fall and rebound and Glenn Acree, the chief judge of the Kentucky Court of Appeals who moonlights as a rock ‘n’ roll musician.

Some Business Monday columns profiled local institutions such as Chevy Chase Hardware, Michler’s Florist and Quillin Leather & Tack. Others looked at new, innovative startups such as CivicRush, Float Money and Bullhorn marketing.

Columnists are supposed to express opinions about current events and hot-button issues. So, like it or not, you heard what I think about big-money politics, gun control, climate change, corporate welfare, gay rights, health care reform and the “war on coal.”

Thanks to the Internet, local columnists can be read more widely than ever before. Luisa Sancen, a Mexican-born scientist living in Canada, sent me an email in January. She had been reading my column online for weeks to learn about Lexington because her engineer-husband had been offered a job here.

She asked me to tell her why they should move to Lexington. My response became a column, published in January. I told her that Lexington could be a beautiful and friendly place to live, a city big enough to be interesting but small enough that a committed individual could make a difference.

As 2012 comes to a close, I am happy to report that they did move to Lexington. They and their young daughter now live a few blocks from me. I finally met them earlier this month, and Sancen gave me perhaps the best reader comment I received all year: “So far, everything you said about Lexington is true!”

Guns don’t kill people; mentally disturbed people with easy access to guns kill people. The problem is simple and obvious. The solutions are anything but that.

After every senseless mass murder — Paducah, Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, and so many others — a predictable pattern emerges:

Gun-control advocates call for more gun control. Mental health advocates call for more diagnosis and treatment. Religious people say these tragedies wouldn’t happen if (their) religion were taught in public schools.

Then, this happens:

The gun lobby stirs up fear that any restrictions are a first step toward government confiscation of all firearms. That fear, plus a lot of money, allows the National Rifle Association to cow politicians into complacency.

Insurance companies and taxpayers decide that effective mental health care is too pricey.

Religious people decide it is too much trouble to work with other denominations and faiths — and those who profess no faith — to oppose elements in society that glorify violence. Many of them pay to see Hollywood’s shoot ‘em up blockbusters, or turn a blind eye as their children play violent video games or listen to gangsta rap.

Will this time be different? Maybe.

The gun lobby’s response to the killing spree in Newtown, Conn., was predictable: blame everything except guns. The NRA called Friday for armed guards in schools. The gun lobby has always argued that America would be safer if more people carried guns — as if anyone wants to live in a society where everyone is armed to the teeth and any dispute can end in gunfire.

But other responses were different. Several pro-gun members of Congress and other conservatives acknowledged that some common-sense gun-control is needed. President Barack Obama said he would propose legislation early next year to curb gun violence, which killed more than 11,000 Americans last year.

The politics may have shifted because of the circumstances of this atrocity — 20 first-graders, six brave educators and the shooter’s mother murdered in cold blood in an affluent New England village.

Timing may be a factor, too. Newtown happened 11 days before Christmas. Members of Congress won’t stand for re-election for almost two years. The president just began his second and final term.

Here’s the challenge, though: finding sensible middle ground on gun control. The NRA has been wrong to oppose any gun restrictions. But those who want to ban most or all guns are wrong, too.

A sweeping gun ban wouldn’t solve the problem, any more than Prohibition stopped drunkenness or the “war on drugs” has stopped drug abuse. It would only punish and could even endanger law-abiding citizens. Still, limiting access to the most lethal weapons is essential to any solution.

That is why law-abiding gun owners must step up now and help figure out the sensible middle ground. That includes thousands of gun owners in Kentucky, which a recent study indicates may be the nation’s most heavily armed state.

I come from a family with many guns, none of which have ever hurt anyone. I have enjoyed hunting and target shooting. I’m a good shot, and I’m proud of it. I understand why people want guns for sport, collecting and protection.

But I don’t understand why anyone but soldiers and police officers should have combat-style weapons with high-capacity magazines like those used repeatedly to inflict mass carnage on innocent people.

I also don’t understand why all people owning semi-automatic weapons should not be screened to see if they or members of their household pose an obvious risk to public safety.

I don’t understand why guns should not be subject to licensing requirements at least as stringent as motor vehicles. (Spare me the anti-government paranoia.)

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to own guns. But the ruling was clear that gun rights are balanced against public safety rights, and lawmakers can impose restrictions.

“Like most rights,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, “the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.”

The time for stonewalling is over. Gun enthusiasts must stop hiding behind the Second Amendment, just as media moguls who pedal carnage as entertainment must stop hiding behind the First Amendment.

Responsible gun owners must engage in an honest public discussion about public safety and sensible gun control if they are to have any hope that the results will be sensible. Freedom isn’t free; it comes with responsibility.

Tax reform in Kentucky has always reminded me of that old quip about the weather: Everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it.

After nearly a year of study, the Blue Ribbon Commission on Tax Reform that Gov. Steve Beshear appointed to study Kentucky’s tax code and suggest changes finished its work last Thursday and announced recommendations. A final report is due to the governor by Dec. 15.

Will Beshear embrace his task force’s recommendations and try to sell them to the public and legislators? Will the General Assembly’s leaders exercise the leadership needed to build political consensus and make change happen?

You have to give the task force credit. Rather than proposing safe but inadequate “revenue neutral” tax reform, task force members had the courage to recommend a plan that would add $690 million in revenue during the first year.

That’s still short of what Kentucky needs, but it’s a start. Pension obligations will eat up at least $350 million and the state budget has already been cut a dozen times for a total of more than $1.6 billion.

Among the task force’s good recommendations:

■ Raise the cigarette tax to $1 a pack, up from 60 cents. Given the high public cost of smoking-related diseases in Kentucky, it should be even higher, such as the $1.60 that some task force members proposed. But at least Kentucky’s cigarette tax will no longer be the lowest in the region.

■ Amend the state constitution to allow local-option sales taxes. This is a big issue for Lexington, Louisville and other cities desperate for additional revenue to meet the needs of their urban populations and economies.

■ Make the state income tax more progressive, easing the burden on low-income wage-earners and putting more of it on high-income taxpayers. Much of that would be done by limiting deductions and exemptions.

The task force also recommended creating an earned-income tax credit to give relief to low-wage families. It would be modeled on the federal earned-income tax credit, a Republican idea that has been an effective, low-cost tool for reducing poverty among the working poor.

■ Eliminate two taxes that have always seemed like insults to two of Kentucky’s signature industries, horses and bourbon. The first is the sales tax on horse feed. Cattle feed is not taxed, but horse feed is, which has never seemed fair.

The other is the property tax on barrels of bourbon aging in warehouses. Bourbon has become a worldwide phenomenon, and Kentucky makes more than 90 percent of it. But this tax gives both established and new distillers a reason to look to elsewhere to build production facilities, which could risk Kentucky’s industry dominance.

■ Expand the 6 percent sales tax on goods to include some services. This could broaden Kentucky’s tax base as the economy continues to shift from goods to services. It is essential that Kentucky tax revenues grow with the economy, and this is one way to do it.

The task force also recommended cutting corporate taxes by abut $100 million. It is an article of faith among some business people that corporate taxes need to be as low as possible. But that seems unnecessary, because studies have shown that Kentucky’s corporate taxes already are competitive with peer states.

“What are we going to gain by making them lower?” asked Jason Bailey, a task force member and director of the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, a Berea-based research group. “The corporate income tax is a very small part of doing business.”

Rather than cutting Kentucky’s already-low corporate taxes, Bailey thinks more jobs could be created by investing that money in education, health and infrastructure. Those are areas that companies look at when choosing a good place to do business, and they are areas where Kentucky is behind many other states.

Overall, though, the task force recommendations are the most positive talk in decades toward real, much-needed tax reform. Whether Kentucky’s political leaders will do anything about it remains to be seen.

When a poor person gets a government handout, it’s called welfare. When a rich corporation gets one, it’s called an economic development incentive.

With local, state and federal government budgets tighter than ever, social programs are getting a hard look. But what about corporate welfare?

The New York Times started a good conversation last week with a three-part investigative series called the United States of Subsidies. Reporter Louise Story spent 10 months analyzing corporate tax breaks, gifts and other incentives in all 50 states, which she figured add up to at least $80 billion in annual taxpayer subsidies to business.

Business subsidies have mushroomed since the 1980s, when automakers started pitting states against one another to host new assembly plants. The strategy worked so well that other industries demanded freebies, too.

A big reason corporate welfare has flourished is that politicians love being able to announce lots of new jobs coming to their area. (They often are out of office when those jobs never materialize or leave for another state offering better incentives.)

From a national perspective, it is a zero-sum game. State and local incentives do little or nothing to grow the national economy; they just determine where in the nation the growth will occur.

But it’s more insidious than that. Incentives redirect billions of tax dollars to corporate bottom lines instead of to improving education, health, safety, infrastructure and making other public investments that will create genuine, long-term economic development.

The Times website (Nytimes.com) has state-by-state breakdowns of incentives and a searchable database of recipients. It shows that the nation’s biggest business incentive Santa is high-growth, low-wage, high-poverty Texas, at $19 billion a year. West Virginia and Oklahoma give up incentives equal to one-third of their budgets.

The Times calculates Kentucky’s annual incentives at $1.41 billion — about 15 percent of the state budget, or $324 per Kentuckian. Those include $264 million in personal income tax credits; $108 million in sales tax refunds, exemptions and discounts; and $69.2 million in corporate income tax reductions, credits or rebates.

The Times reports that most Kentucky incentives, $569 million worth, go to mining, oil and gas industries — no surprise there, given their political clout. That is followed by $341 million for agriculture and $180 million to manufacturers.

As is true nationally, some of the biggest Kentucky incentive recipients in recent years were automakers: $307 million for Ford; $83.8 million for Toyota and $10 million for General Motors. Given their high wages and large supplier networks, those might be good investments.

But the big head-scratcher in the Times’ database was $94.1 million in incentives to Tyson Foods from 1995-2009 for a low-wage chicken-processing plant in Henderson County. Is that the kind of economic development Kentucky taxpayers should be subsidizing?

While the Times’ report is impressive in its national scope, there has long been debate about the value of incentives. The Herald-Leader published an investigative series in 2005 that questioned the value of many Kentucky tax breaks and other giveaways. The report resulted in some improved accountability, but did little to stem the flow of tax money into corporate pockets.

A state-commissioned study issued this summer came up with incentive figures smaller than the Times reported, but still pretty staggering: $1.29 billion between 2001 and 2010. The report said 577 companies took incentives to locate 55,173 jobs in Kentucky at a cost to taxpayers of $23,385 per job.

The incentive system favors large corporations over small businesses — often the employers who are already in a community and aren’t looking to leave. Officials have responded by coming up with some incentives for them, too, which just further drains government coffers.

How do we stop this racket, where cities and states compete to steal jobs from one another? It would be great if Congress could pass a law, but it probably can’t. Still, with about 20 percent of state and local government budgets coming from federal dollars, somebody needs to be looking out for the national interest.

Taxpayers should demand reform of these corporate welfare systems, just as they did social welfare systems in the 1990s. But it won’t be easy. Corporations employ more lobbyists and make more campaign donations than poor people do.

“I hope to have God on my side,” Abraham Lincoln remarked in 1861, “but I must have Kentucky.”

Indeed, Steven Spielberg’s new movie, Lincoln, makes it clear that the 16th president needed his home state up to the very end of the Civil War.

Kentucky is all over this terrific drama. Daniel Day Lewis stars as Lincoln, who was born in what is now Larue County, and Sally Field portrays Mary Todd Lincoln of Lexington. Field even spent time in Lexington to prepare for her role.

Early in the film, Lincoln is seen talking with two black soldiers who mention they enlisted at Camp Nelson in Jessamine County. A constant presence in the movie is the ticking of a watch that Lincoln owned — recorded at the Thomas D. Clark Center for Kentucky History in Frankfort, where it is part of the collection.

The movie focuses on Lincoln’s quest in 1864 and 1865 to abolish slavery, in border as well as rebel states, by expanding his 1862 Emancipation Proclamation with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. To do that, he needed to get the Senate-passed amendment through a divided House of Representatives.

A pivotal vote Lincoln needs is that of U.S. Rep. George Helm Yeaman of Owensboro, who is played by Michael Stuhlbarg, a California-born actor who affects a convincing Western Kentucky accent. At this point, even Kentucky history buffs in the audience are scratching their heads. George Helm Who?

Michael Stuhlbarg portrays George Helm Yeaman. AP Photo by Peter Kramer

Yeaman, then 35, was born in Hardin County, the nephew of former Gov. John L. Helm. A talented lawyer, Yeaman was Daviess County judge before being elected to the General Assembly and then Congress.

Yeaman was a Unionist. But the two major parties in Congress were Republicans and Democrats, although their personalities were the opposite of what they are today. Democrats were more conservative, Republicans more liberal.

Many Democrats supported slavery, while most Republicans, including Lincoln, opposed it. The so-called “radical Republicans” even believed in racial equality; at the time, no political idea was more radical than that.

Yeaman disliked slavery, but he feared that abolition would destroy Kentucky’s economic and social structure. On Dec. 18, 1862, he gave a lengthy speech in the House denouncing Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

“I protest against it as a violation of the Constitution and the liberties of my country,” Yeaman said. “I protest against it as unwise, uncalled for, tending to widen the breach rather than to hasten the conclusion of this war.”

“Yeaman was reflecting the views of his constituents,” said Aloma Dew, who taught Civil War and Reconstruction history at Kentucky Wesleyan College in Owensboro and wrote The Kentucky Encyclopedia’s entry about Yeaman.

Most of Yeaman’s constituents supported both the Union and slavery. “He felt that the power to confiscate private property was unconstitutional,” Dew said, adding that he also thought blacks were unprepared for freedom.

In the movie, Yeaman, serving as a lame duck after being defeated for re-election in 1864, is first shown giving a speech against the proposed 13th Amendment. He warns that ending slavery could eventually extend the vote to blacks and, even more horribly, to women. The House erupts in jeers.

This speech leads Lincoln’s operatives to think Yeaman can’t be bribed with a government job, which they were using to win the votes of other lame duck opponents. But the president decides to try to persuade him anyway.

Calling Yeaman to the White House, Lincoln tells him how his father, Thomas Lincoln, moved the family from Kentucky to Indiana and then Illinois because “he knew no small-holding dirt farmer could compete with slave plantations.”

“I hate it too, sir, slavery,” Yeaman tells Lincoln. “But we’re entirely unready for emancipation.”

Lincoln replies that the nation is unready for peace, too, but will have to figure it out when the time comes.

Days later, when called upon to cast his vote, Yeaman first mumbles, then shouts his “Aye!” to the shock of amendment opponents. He becomes a key swing vote for abolishing slavery.

After Lincoln’s assassination, President Andrew Johnson appointed Yeaman as ambassador to Denmark. In that role, he negotiated the sale of the Virgin Islands to the United States, only to have it rejected by Congress. (The sale was later consummated in 1917 at more than three-times the cost.)

Yeaman resigned his ambassadorship in 1870 and settled in New York. The former congressman who had opposed the Emancipation Proclamation on constitutional grounds wrote several books about law and government and taught constitutional law at Columbia University.

President James Garfield reportedly offered Yeaman an appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, but was assassinated in 1881 before he could follow through. With his wife in failing health, Yeaman moved to a country home in Madison, N.J., where he died in 1908.

Spielberg’s movie offers insight into the central role of Kentuckians in the Civil War, including a nod to a reluctant hero who might otherwise have been forgotten.

America zigged and Kentucky zagged. The majority of the nation’s voters rejected right-wing politics in last Tuesday’s election, but Kentuckians outside of Lexington and Louisville embraced them all the more.

Big swings have become the norm in national elections, because neither party has succeeded in solving America’s problems on its own. But deeper forces may have been at work this time.

Much of the post-election analysis has focused on demographic shifts that go against the hard conservative turn the Republican Party has taken in recent years.

Young people, women and minorities voted overwhelmingly for President Barack Obama’s economic policies over those of challenger Mitt Romney, and they rejected socially conservative candidates for the U.S. Senate.

Republicans’ run to the right has been marked by increasingly rigid ideology on both economic and social issues. But analysts of all stripes warn that without more tolerance of diversity — including intellectual diversity — the GOP could become the incredible shrinking party of old, white men.

Demographics are destiny, and it will be interesting to see how Republicans cope with these demographic trends. As it does, Kentucky will be in the spotlight, because the state’s two high-profile U.S. senators now seem to be caught between Barack and a hard place.

Voters in many states signaled that they have grown tired of Tea Party radicals. Paul won election in Kentucky two years ago as a Tea Party idol and immediately started preening like a future presidential candidate. Are his 15 minutes of fame about up?

By re-electing Obama and giving Democrats more seats in the Senate, voters rejected Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s relentless obstructionism. He went to great lengths over the past four years to oppose the president on just about everything.

While other Republican leaders were making conciliatory statements after the election, McConnell, the anti-Henry Clay, struck his usual pose against compromise. He indicated he will continue to fight against raising historically low income taxes on America’s richest people to lower the nation’s budget deficit, even though opinion polls show overwhelming public support for it.

In an especially cynical comment, McConnell called on Obama to “move to the political center.” McConnell is nowhere near the political center himself, and the Tea Party wing of his party would need a telescope to even see it.

Kentucky and other Southern states have played a big role in supporting the Republican party’s anti-tax, anti-government ideology. But that is deeply ironic when you look at the statistics, said Ron Crouch, director of research and statistics for Kentucky’s Education and Workforce Development Cabinet and the guru of Kentucky demographic trends.

Kentucky and other Republican-leaning “red” states tend to receive much more federal assistance than they contribute in taxes, while the reverse is true of Democrat-leaning “blue” states.

In Kentucky, Crouch noted, the largest per-capita federal transfer payments go to poor, rural counties that vote Republican.

Kentucky and other states whose populations are largely white, aging, rural and traditionally male-dominated will increasingly be overshadowed, both politically and economically, unless and until they catch up to these broader demographic trends, Crouch said.

“We need to be more supportive of immigration and open to diversity,” he said of Kentuckians. “When I drive around Kentucky, I see a lot of Confederate flags.”

Immigrants and minorities could play an important role in keeping the state’s small towns and rural areas vibrant as the white population ages and shrinks from declining birth rates.

But Kentucky already is becoming more diverse than many people realize, Crouch said. The majority of Kentucky’s population growth since 2000 — and all of it under the age of 18 — has been among minorities, especially Hispanics.

As immigrant, minority and urban populations grow in Kentucky, voting patterns are likely to become less Republican, unless that party moves more to the political center. The same is true as women gain more economic and political clout in the state.

“Blue-collar men are an endangered species,” Crouch said. “We’re seeing an economy more and more that is favoring female employment.”

Kentucky’s future, both economically and politically, will depend not only on the availability of jobs, but whether those jobs pay enough to support middle-class families, Crouch thinks. And those families are bound to become more diverse, like it or not.