The Moderator
Freelance writer and radio producer Cameron Lawrence has written feature stories and essays that have appeared in The Washington Post, The Hartford Courant, American Legacy, USAWeek/files/storyimages/and other publications. She is a frequent contributor to Louisville and has done several stories for this magazine on environmental subjects, including a profile of the heavily polluting Gallagher power plant in New Albany, a look at the citizen campaign against toxic air emissions in the West End and a study of Louisvillians who have pioneered the building of solar-powered homes. From 1989-96, Lawrence hosted a weekly hour-long radio show, Down to Earth, that aired on the NPR affiliate, WFPL.
The Panel
Louisville Magazine reached out to six citizens of the community who have contributed extensive time and expertise to environmental issues, asking them to join our panel. These panelists, with writer Cameron Lawrence as their moderator, assigned the grades for metro Louisville on the “report card”. They also participated in a roundtable discussion, from which excerpts are quoted on the following pages. Here are brief bios of our panel members.
After spending much of his working life in the fields of education and business management, ?Dan Jones turned his attention to parks development, first by completing a master’s degree in Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and then by taking over as head of 21st Century Parks. This nonprofit corporation manages a partnership that seeks to develop a 4,000- to 5,000-acre park and trail system in the last major undeveloped corridor surrounding Louisville, the Floyds Fork Creek watershed. He currently oversees planning, design and construction of the new parks.
Sarah Lynn Cunningham is a licensed environmental engineer and a state-certified environmental educator. She has a bachelor’s degree in environmental engineering and a master’s degree in environmental education and environmental history, both from the University of Louisville. She is currently self-employed, after having worked 15 years at the Metropolitan Sewer District, five years for the Jefferson County Board of Health and three years with the Kentucky Division of Water. Cunningham, by her count, has been an active ?environmentalist for 37 years.
Gordon Garner was from 1984-2002 the executive director of the Louisville and Jefferson County Metropolitan Sewer District, responsible for sewer system upgrades and expansion, stormwater and flood protection and other Ohio River watershed issues. His board and commission posts have included stints with the Kentucky Waterways Alliance, the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission, the “Beyond Merger” steering committee of the Greater Louisville Project and others. He currently works for clients in the areas of strategic planning, peer reviews and organizational change.
Carolyn Embry is director of development and environmental affairs for the American Lung Association of Kentucky. She’s been with the Lung Association since 1985. Embry served on the Air Pollution Control District Board from 1993-99 and again from 2003-06, and is currently chairman of the Report and Plan of Action Committee for that body’s Regulation 5.30 Advisory Committee, which makes recommendations on appropriate risk levels for emissions of certain air toxics. She also is a member of the Kentucky Air Toxics Work Group, the Sierra Club and the state’s Clean Air Act Task Force.
Executive director of the Kentucky Clean Fuels Coalition since 1993, Melissa Howell has led efforts by that nonprofit organization to encourage the use of alternative transportation fuels and helped coordinate the coming online of three small biodiesel plants in Kentucky. The coalition also partnered with Marathon Oil Corp. to install a biodiesel terminal in Louisville. Howell has served on the board of advisors for National Clean Cities Inc., assisted in the writing of renewable fuel clauses in Kentucky’s first energy policy, written an alternative fuels curriculum for public schools, and been involved in several other clean-fuels projects.
One of the driving forces behind the West Louisville Air Toxic initiative, Arnita Gadson was instrumental in initiating the air-monitoring research and community education that later led to metro Louisville’s STAR (Strategic Toxic Air Reduction) program, which is now in place to control emissions of harmful substances entering the city’s air. Gadson has for 10 years been both an environmental justice coordinator for the University of Louisville and the executive director of the West Jefferson County Community Task Force.
Roundtable on the Environment
Gordon Garner: It’s the elephant in the room for almost everything: our energy use and the environmental consequences from cradle to grave. In Kentucky, I would start with (the question), “Where does coal come from?” It comes from the mountains. What’s happening to the mountains? We’re chopping them down so we can have cheap electricity. The consequences cross all the boundaries and all the media, and if we’re going to be successful in dealing with any of the environmental issues we’re talking about, ultimately we’re going to have to address our energy use as individuals and as a society.
Cameron Lawrence: So are the two big things the coal-fired power plants and the heavy reliance on cars in our community?
Sarah Lynn Cunningham: There’s a third one: Houses are being built so big nowadays that the efficiencies that we have now for hot water heaters and refrigerators and other appliances have been totally offset by how big the refrigerators are and how many hot water heaters we have to have (for things like) five-nozzle showers. We have a real problem there, and the home is most people’s biggest investment.
If we were to improve our building codes we could do something like Davis County, California, did 30 years ago. They say you have to get X-number of points to get a building permit and you can earn it however you want from a menu of options. It allows a lot of creativity, a lot of customization, by simply using things like ramping up the kind of insulation you use, where you put the windows, what kinds of roofing shingles you use – all those things can have a long-term benefit (with energy savings).
Carolyn Embry: We have become so spoiled as a society into thinking that in the summer we need to walk into a building and it needs to be refrigerator-cold — so that we need to take a sweater along. If you go in a restaurant, you can’t sit and have a meal without a wrap on, and in the winter we think it has to be warm enough that we can go sleeveless. Where has that come from? How have we evolved into that kind of mindset? It’s a very spoiled attitude.
Melissa Howell: A lot of this is leadership and walking the walk, and I don’t think the city is walking the walk. How do you go out and tell your public — as an elected official, a commissioner or whatever the case many be — how do you go out and dictate you ought to do this and you ought to do that if you’re not walking the walk? And I think the (Partnership for a) Green City is a good example. In 2004 it was announced and . . . I’ve been to three or four “green fleet” meetings and it’s a waste of time. Nothing is happening.
Now, the Jefferson County (Public Schools) have started using biodiesels in their buses. That was not a result of Green City. I want to applaud the school system for doing something. Two percent biodiesel is not huge. However, I cannot tell you how much my phone is ringing now because people are seeing the stickers on the back of the buses saying, “Powered by soy biodiesel.” So it is raising awareness that there are options.
It’s not the end-all; neither is ethanol. But I think if the city got out there and said, “Let’s be part of it, let’s have a concerted effort” (it would help). I don’t think the city is following through on the majority of the areas of the Green City program.
Garner: I think E.On Energy, the international utility company (that is LG & E’s parent), has a huge amount of influence on energy use. Its capacity, historically, for promoting conservation strategies has been limited, but that’s changing. Internationally, it’s talking green talk, and there’s a little trickle-down starting to come this way.
The progressive, A-plus power utilities are very much committed to conservation strategies, alternative energy and helping individual consumers change the way they do things. I think we have a tremendous opportunity for leadership from LG & E and how it can help the community be more successful in how energy is used.
Dan Jones: This isn’t exactly a bright spot, but it’s reality: Fifty years from now there’s going to be somewhere between two and two and a half billion more people in the world. . . . They will be consuming all of these natural resources at close to our rates. It’s going to force us all to change.
I’m not necessarily doom and gloom about that — supply and demand may force innovation that we can’t even think about today. When you’re a market of that size, it’s going to change and it’s going to force all of us to change in some way. So we might as well start thinking about it
Garner: We talked about comparing Louisville to other cities. (In response to climate change) we’re right there at average. We’re not outstanding; were not an A-plus. We’re an average city dealing with climate change. The average city gets an F. It’s not that Louisville’s worse than a whole bunch of other cities. We’re all at the F level compared to where we’re going to need to be to deal with the impacts — a long way to go, a big mountain to climb.
Embry: I guess the one thing we’ve done is sign the (U.S. Mayors) Climate Protection Agreement that commits us, at least on paper, to a 7 percent reduction (in greenhouse gas emissions) by 2012, along the lines of the Kyoto agreement.
Garner: Yeah, it looks like the mayor and the council have embraced the need for change, and the need for developing a strategy.
Cunningham: However, they’ve had a single committee meeting in December and one in February. What the hell are they waiting for?
Jones: I just have to emphasize here that if it’s all government-driven, it’s not going to change. The Europeans embraced Kyoto — many of their initiatives are not working. . . . I don’t think there’s an easy way to do what we have to do, but I think there’s a tendency to sort of, by default, say that the solution is a policy solution. Public policy can work. If you take forestry and land use and land management, which is what I know, it’s probably 50-50, or maybe less, how many times policy has been successful. I have no pinpoint solution, but that tendency to immediately default to regulations and a centralized policy solution is not the only answer.
Embry: There are two messages on air that are equally important. One is that the air is getting cleaner and we are doing some things to address our air-quality problems. It’s important for the public to know that. . . . Our air’s cleaner than it was a decade ago, there’s no question about that. The fact that we’ve adopted the STAR program, I think, is a tremendous feather in our cap and will set our state apart as a national leader in air toxics control.
On the other hand, we are simply not there yet. We are still a nonattainment area, meaning we don’t comply with the minimum federal health standards on fine particulates, and not even officially on ozone. And the federal government is revising that ozone standard to be more restrictive, so we’re going to be definitely in nonattainment when that comes down the pike. Not to mention that we still have air toxics at levels that create risks hundreds of times what’s considered safe at the EPA.
Cunningham: I would (point to) the clean air landscaping program that gives people cash rebates to buy electric-powered lawn equipment. And they’re using supplemental environmental program money — it’s the fines of polluters whose money is being used to get people rebates. That entails some imagination and willingness to do something they didn’t have to do. So I think that deserves some credit too.
Lawrence: Several panelists have expressed that, on the one hand, the demise of the Vehicle Emissions Testing (VET ) program and the general air quality are bad things, but that the community and its leaders deserve high praise for the STAR program limiting industrial emissions of air toxics.
Arnita Gadson: When you talk about the VET program — it went away — you can blame who you want to blame, but the fact is that if all of us had really fought for the VET, it would not have gone away. So you know we have to take some responsibility for that too.
Garner: There’s an underlying challenge. It’s not just air, though air is one of the places where it shows up particularly. As we continually want our economies to grow and our population grows, the number of activities we have that generate air pollution increases, so we’ve got to offset that even more by reducing those sources to below what may have been considered to be an acceptable level 10 years ago or 20 years ago. Otherwise, with the growth of activity, we’re going to be right back where we were in the first place.
As an example, as long as we travel more miles, there’s more coming out the exhaust pipe in our cars — unless we can ratchet back that exhaust beyond what it might have taken 10 years ago with the population we had then.
Cunningham: I think there’s something inherently wrong that we only regulate industrial sources of air pollution and (drivers of) automobiles can do what they want. They are machines and they have to be maintained. I’m increasingly behind a vehicle that’s sending this billowing cloud. . . . There’s new technology that’s being perfected that is essentially drive-by vehicle-emissions testing so we don’t have to have the business of the politicians being afraid to impose a $10.50 fee and we don’t have the problem of imposing on people that they have to get in line once a year. You merely set up one piece of equipment on this side and one piece on this side — a single lane, like an entrance to a shopping center, and it takes an infrared “photograph” of the emissions out of that car and a photograph of the license plate. And if it flunks, the owner gets mailed a citation. That would reduce a lot of the political wimpiness problem and still address the public health problem.
Garner: I think the efforts already under way need to be ratcheted up for the public fleets to be an example of good practice when it comes to reducing emissions. The buses, the police cars — there are thousands and thousands and thousands of public vehicles out there and the agencies responsible need to be leaders in pushing for cleaner emissions.
There is also the personal choice issue: The next vehicle any of us buy needs to be much cleaner, less polluting and get more gas mileage than the one we’re getting rid of. We need to make a personal pledge to do that.
Jones: People have to start making decisions like Gordon just said, that they’re going to become more efficient, that they’re going to buy cleaner cars. Some of these issues do l/files/storyimages/themselves to regulation, others don’t, and some are mixed. And on this one I’d definitely say that if you had 80 percent of the population of Jefferson County buying efficient, clean vehicles it would be a positive contribution to lessening the problem.
Embry: That’s what we all need more of: education about air quality and contributions individuals can make to air quality.
Gadson: From a consumer standpoint, it’s the old supply and demand. As long as we demand all of the things that feel good and make us look good . . . then there is a supplier. We can say we don’t need this anymore, we can do without this, and then the supply goes down.
Garner: Just a general comment about cities that are A or A-plus green cities: If you go to neighborhoods in those cities, you’re going to see native landscapes in lawns and yards. In arid cities that have good green reputations, you’re not going to see grass the way you used to. There’s a community emphasis in some cities that are green on that way of handling your lawn than we don’t have at this point in time in Louisville. And that’s going to be public education. It’ll be a challenge, but in green cites people become more accepting of these changes.
Embry: I heard someone comment once that it’s a sad commentary that we care more about green lawns than about clean streams. And I don’t know if we’re worse than any other community, but I think there’s an area that’s just ripe for public education. I can remember the days when my family contracted with a lawn service; now we know better and we don’t do that anymore.
Garner: The storm water testing that’s done in Louisville is pretty rigorous, and the hot spots for fertilizer and chemicals, pesticides and herbicides are in affluent neighborhoods, where a higher percentage of the people can afford to have that kind of lawn care. It actually shows up — the more affluent the neighborhood, the more toxic the local stream is likely to be from chemicals.
One thought is we’re in a long recovery process from massive abuse of our local streams and the Ohio River. We let it get about as bad as it could. At one time in Jefferson County, there were over 300 sewer plants discharging directly into streams and people’s back yards. There were 60,000 septic tanks and 25 percent of them weren’t working very well — at least 25 percent. The Ohio River was polluted from one /files/storyimages/to the other, from industry and from cities that discharged sewage without any treatment, so the fact that we can say we’re a C or C-plus (in water quality) reflects that there’s been a lot done because it wasn’t that long ago that we were an F.
The things that we’re not doing as well on are the things we’re still learning how to do. It’s not just the water; you can look at the water and it can be perfectly clear or drinkable, but it may not be good habitat for fish or aquatic life. We may have stripped off the vegetation right down to the edge of the stream without any sensitivity to what impact that’s going to have on water quality. There no filtering, none of that natural process that is part of nature is left. So what we’re doing now is to try to bring that back, to recognize that the natural processes of the stream or a river are going to be very important to it having good water quality. And it’s going to take a lot of different thinking to get us there, a lot of different behaviors than what we now have.
Cunningham: The thing that I see to be the big problem — and we have such an easy answer to — is that we’ve regressed from enforcing our erosion prevention and sediment control ordinance. When that sediment covers the bottom of the stream, it starts to cover the benthic organisms and it messes up the whole aquatic food chain. It’s an easy, simple, low-tech thing to (avoid), if you’re willing to enforce the rules. I am routinely seeing construction jobs now either with nothing controlling erosion, or it’s all been run over and nobody puts it back up, nobody bothers to maintain it. And that’s just unnecessary.
Jones: I’d say two things about water quality generally. One is the combined sewer overflow, the fact that around Cherokee Park and around Beargrass Creek we have this kind of aging infrastructure and we are in a process of fixing that. And I think that is on the plus side. Hopefully, the lessons that are learned there get applied in new places.
Second, the measure to me, as someone who’s involved in the building of parks, in this case the Floyds Fork Greenway Project that has Floyds Fork running right down through the middle of it, is pretty simple: In 20 or 30 or 40 years, you want your kids, or your nieces or nephews, to be able to splash in it and be comfortable that it’s clean. You want them to be able to catch a fish. You want kids to be able to go out and pick up the rocks and find live creatures. And that’s not a scientific measurement, but it’s certainly one of our goals, and the water quality is critical in that.
It’s a challenge. You’re still within the boundaries of Jefferson County out there. It’s very urban; you’re a quarter mile from the Gene Snyder Freeway in some places. It’s not going to be an issue that’s easily solved, but I do think there are good things in place to give us the opportunity to do a better job.
Howell: Regarding Floyds Fork, that’s a perfect example where (the leadership came from the) private sector. Me, as a private citizen, I don’t see it as something governmental leaders did. That’s the case so often here. One way from my perspective to see the grade improve for water is stronger leadership.
Garner: We have a legacy of bad land use practices. We still have a lot of subdivision mentality going on instead of innovative thinking. We’re a long way from what we would call green development.
Jones: In conversations with the (metro government) planning staff — Charles Cash and his people — there’s innovative thinking going on around Floyds Fork. In conversations with homebuilders, they are supportive. Our (park-system) planners came to town — and one of them had worked here 10 years ago on Cornerstone 2020 — and he was stunned in the change in attitude for the positive, the willingness to look at new kinds of subdivision layout and design.
Embry: I think on land use we get high marks for our park system, and that includes the Olmsted parks, the Jefferson County Forest and the new plan for the green circle around our community. We’ve been really forward thinking, and more so than most communities in that regard. But to the extent that we have allowed developers to have their way with our community, we get low marks. I think the grade reflects a bl/files/storyimages/of those two divergent forces.
Garner: It’s an A-plus move that the community has made (to bring more residents back downtown). We’ve put resources behind it and it is, I’d say, exceeding the expectations a lot of us might have had in terms of how fast it could happen and the way it’s being embraced by the community. And maybe it can be seen as an example of what needs to happen in the longer term: What is Louisville going to be like 30 or 50 years from now? What are our neighborhoods going to look like? They’re going to look much more like mixed-use housing. Hopefully, there will be a lot more emphasis on the balance between nature and the people who live here.
Embry: On the other hand, there are development proposals out there right now that, if approved, will go into areas that unquestionably will increase congestion and create traffic snarls. And these things somehow seem to manage to get (approved), maybe with modifications, but approved.
Jones: I think that we often create too big a divide between what happens in the suburbs and what happens downtown. The downtown redevelopment is a great project and we need to emphasize it as much as we can. However, projections indicate the population of the United States is going to grow in the next 50 to 75 years by 100 million people and that a very large percentage of those people are going to settle in the suburbs. And so if our debate about land use and sprawl concludes that the only solution is to move everyone downtown, then I think we’ve failed. There has to be a discussion about what a green suburb looks like, and that discussion is one that most people don’t want to talk about because many environmentalists — particularly urban planners — don’t like the suburbs.
Howell: I have to say something about traffic and transportation, and I think this is something that can bl/files/storyimages/over into land use and some other aspects. It’s about partnerships. I’ll give you a perfect example. Marathon Petroleum — which for years has not been even in the same building as our (Kentucky Clean Fuels) coalition — not only are they now in the building, they’re at the table, on the same side of the table. We got together with the Kentucky Soybean Association and some state money, and with Marathon, and we put biodisesel in the fuel terminal here.
The petroleum industry did not happen overnight; it’s not going to go away overnight. Yes, there are dwindling supplies, but we’re seeing the most success with projects when we’re seeing partnerships — and that doesn’t mean partnerships just in government, or political partners.
Embry: Two quick things on transportation that I don’t think should be overlooked: One is our effort toward making this a more bicycle-friendly community. We were just recently certified as a bicycle-friendly community; we haven’t been given the highest level of certification, but it is progress and we are ahead of our own goals for becoming more cycling-friendly. But the other side of that is the decision to take light rail from sort of a front-burner issue to a back burner or off the stove altogether. I think we really need to weigh in on that.
Garner: We would get high marks in terms of our community’s support for farmers’ markets and supporting local agriculture. That’s one area of the green economy that the community has embraced — and it will continue to grow and prosper as the link between the city and the farms — and I think that’s a good thing for our community. Overall, though, we don’t have a lot of green businesses, we don’t have a lot of public awareness of green businesses and public support for them, as opposed to cities that are greener. There’s a lot of economic opportunity there for businesses that embrace green products and services to be successful.
Embry: When I think of leadership, I think of the citizens and the citizen groups. I think we wouldn’t have a STAR program today if it hadn’t been for the groundwork laid by the West Jefferson County Community Task Force. It’s great that the mayor stepped up the plate, and I think he should get high marks for that. But to me it was the citizens that brought that to the forefront and there are other groups — the American Lung Association has been involved in this effort for 30 or 40 years. So has the Sierra Club and individuals like Tom Fitzgerald.
Gadson: If we spent effort and dollars in educating the general public, we’d see a . . . demand that political leaders get more involved. And so many political leaders work off of who is kicking them the hardest.
I think we’ve done a lot with it because, if you notice, a lot of environmental information now hits the front page of the newspaper. Ten years ago, it was back page of the last section, down at the bottom. I think it’s getting attention because people are concerned.
Jones: I think there’s a huge pool of concern on and about environmental issues, and as a community we’ve not tapped that. We’ve tapped it in certain places, the sort of hot-button issues we’ve talked about here, but I think there are many other issues. It takes leadership; it takes action more than anything else. It takes organizational ability and resources, whether it’s private entrepreneurs in the green economy or (people in the) public sector — somebody, or a collection of people, has to get behind each of these issues. And then go out and tap that interest and concern.
Garner: If we rely, as we’ve been doing since the environment movement began, on the government standards and meeting the bare minimum federal standards as our standard in Kentucky, we’re not going to get there. And furthermore, for the best opportunity to improve our environment, and actually protect and preserve out environment, we need to be looking far beyond what the federal standards are. We need to be looking at these other things and thinking more comprehensively.
