The Environment

UK researchers are working to mitigate mining's economic, environmental, and ecological challenges to eastern Kentucky people and communities. They are planting trees to return life to mined areas, capture and store carbon dioxide, reduce pollutant emissions, decrease flooding and run-off of toxic substances, and re-introduce a sustainable timber industry. They are re-establishing stream beds lost in mining, providing new wildlife habitats, and developing lower-cost, enhanced outcome methods for reclaiming coal mined land. Their approaches will become national standards.

Other UK researchers are creating demonstration plants for turning millions of tons of coal ash produced in power production into new natural resources, commercially viable products, and new jobs. Waste products and environmentally degraded landscapes become environmentally enhanced commercial opportunities. Their advanced commercial products make concrete stronger and more durable while reducing greenhouse gases.

Water body/pollutant combinations in Kentucky water have increased from 200 to 1500 since 1990 and appear likely to reach 2000 by 2006. This growing problem far outstrips current state and federal regulatory resources. UK researchers are educating Kentucky youth in issues of water quality and encouraging community actions toward improving water quality in Kentucky lakes, streams, and rivers.

2008 Environmental Collaboratives include the Model Ordinance for Development on Karst Land by the Kentucky Geological Survey and the Land-Use Planning initiative in Landscape Architecture. The Model Ordinance for Development on Karst Land is piloting the ordinance with the City of Radcliff, Kentucky, for later use in adopting communities across Kentucky. It is designed to address the economic cost and environmental damage in Kentucky resulting from development on karst terrain. Since 55 percent of Kentucky is underlain by soluable limestone and dolostone that have developed a landscape characterized by sinkholes, disappearing streams, springs, and caves, called karst, the issue is significant. Geology-related hazards associated with karst include groundwater pollution, cover-collapse sinkholes, and sinkhole flooding. The economic costs are largely hidden from society because the individual incidents of damage, while relatively common, are scattered over broadly separated areas.

The second 2008 environmental initiative is the annual land-use planning effort which constitutes the curriculum of Landscape Architecture’s capstone course, LA 975. Students in the course work with community leaders in visioning land use and in addressing land use issues of importance to the partner communities. Students gather land use data, interact closely with community leadership, develop land use proposals, and present these proposals in multiple community forums.