KFTC Blog

 The invitation to participate in member-driven grassroots activism along with music, brownies, cookies, and sweet tea brought numerous current KFTC members and dozens of community members to the new Jefferson County KFTC office in Louisville’s Smoketown Neighborhood.  At the event speakers explained the two new local chapter campaigns, air quality in the Rubbertown Neighborhood and affordable housing, and an information table was there to connect people with state-wide work.  Attendees were invited to tour the new office, meet KFTC members and allies, and write their vision for the Smoketown Neighborhood on poster boards.  People identified 100% voter registration, ending the food desert, affordable housing, more green space, green energy, installing bike lanes and sidewalks, spaces for children, and more jobs as priorities for the neighborhood.

What a day.

Scanning KFTC’s social media feeds confirms, of course, frustration over tactics by House Republicans, and fear about the impact of the government shutdown. Attempts to confirm weekend hikes, fall camping trips, and sources for research projects kept bumping up against websites that are now closed because of the federal government shutdown. The impact of the shutdown will continue until well after it has passed.  What we know now is that it will be significant, with thousands of federal workers furloughed, Head Start programs shutting down, federal school lunch programs and WIC uncertain, and the EPA basically shuttered.

Noted Kentucky farmer and author Wendell Berry spoke during the opening session of KFTC's annual membership meeting in August. We are pleased to share the full text of his speech below. You may also download his essay.

Also, be sure to mark your calendars for a very special interview with Wendell Berry by Bill Moyers. Their conversation will be shown nationwide on public television stations in early October. In Kentucky the program will be aired twice on Sunday, October 6, 2013. It will be shown on KET 1 at 11 a.m. and on KET 2 at 6 p.m.

LOCAL ECONOMIES TO SAVE THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE

Written and delivered by Wendell Berry at the KFTC annual membership meeting, August 16, 2013

As often before, my thoughts begin with the modern history of rural Kentucky, which in all of its regions has been deplorable. In my county, for example, as recently as the middle of the last century, every town was a thriving economic and social center. Now all of them are either dying or dead. If there is any concern about this in any of the state’s institutions, I have yet to hear about it. The people in these towns and their tributary landscapes once were supported by their usefulness to one another. Now that mutual usefulness has been removed and the people relate to one another increasingly as random particles.

Thirty people from nine counties in three different states came to Appalshop in Letcher County to learn how to do basic tests of local streams, to talk about water quality issues we face in the mountains, and to learn how to get involved with work organizations from around the region are doing related to clean water.