Production of Kentucky Life is made possible in part by the KET Millennium Fund.

Hey everybody, and welcome to the Season 32 premiere of Kentucky Life.

Thirty two seasons of our show, that's hard to believe.

Over the course of this season, as always, we'll be taking you from Paducah to Pikeville and all points in between to tell you stories about what makes our Commonwealth so special.

We'll also be marking a special birthday in our state, the 50th anniversary of the creation of state nature preserves.

Tens of thousands of acres and hundreds of significant natural areas are now protected across the Commonwealth.

We'll be visiting these amazing natural resources, one of the many things which makes our state so special, and we'll share it with you all this season, right here on Kentucky Life.

[music playing] Hey folks, and welcome to Kentucky Life.

I'm your host, Chip Polston.

It's good to see you again.

We're kicking things off this season on the south face of Pine Mountain here in Harlan County at Blanton Forest State Nature Preserve.

The 3,500 acres here are dedicated to preserving part of the largest old-growth forest in Kentucky.

Blanton Forest is a remarkable ecological treasure.

As you'll see, many of the trees here are three to four feet in diameter, towering more than 100 feet above the forest floor.

And several of the trees still growing here have been dated to the late 1600s.

It's a beautiful setting we'll be exploring over the course of our show.

But first, a classic symbol of a Kentucky summer night is the firefly or lightning bug.

For generations, catching these earthbound stars in a jar, like I did when I was a kid, has been a rite of passage.

But beneath the nostalgic beauty of their glowing light show lies a critical scientific story.

Researchers have discovered how these tiny insects serve as a vital warning sign for the health of our ecosystems and the things we can do in our own backyards to ensure their silent fireworks never go dark.

[music playing] [cricket chirping] If you go outside on a summer night and look up at the starry sky, you'll see something there that's unreachable and unfathomable but beautiful.

Fireflies bring that light down to earth where we can mingle with it.

[cricket chirping] So, a firefly is a little bit confusing with its name.

It's fireflies, aren't flies, lightning bugs, aren't true bugs but they are bioluminescent beetles.

[music playing] Our state offers a lot of diversity in the landscape here, but more importantly we have a lot of river and stream frontage and that's essential for fireflies or lightning bugs because they love moisture.

Some like to be up high in the pine trees, some like to be in cattails along the water's edge.

So, all of those wet kind of riparian areas that we have in Kentucky are going to be a nice little home for them.

[music playing] Fireflies are famous for their mesmerizing light display, but that's just the last couple weeks of their life cycle.

They spend most of their lifetime as larval and a lot of that time is just eating and they eat and they eat a lot.

They eat a lot of snails, they eat a lot of slugs.

They're predatory.

They have a distinct appearance.

They look kind of like an armor-plated grub or worm and they crawl along on the ground because they don't have wings and they're looking for these things to attack.

If you're a slug or a snail, a firefly larva is the last thing you want to see coming at you.

[music playing] When we talk about fireflies as adults, they're usually Black or dark brown in color and then on the thorax it goes over the head and the thorax shield is going to be kind of a mixture of red and yellow colors.

The other thing that they all have is a lantern or most of them as an adult will have a lantern on the rear of their abdomen that helps them to emit the flash that they're most famous for.

[music playing] A firefly's flash is like a songbird's mating call Each species has a male's signature flash pattern that their female counterparts recognize.

It's just a luminous version of Marco Polo like you would play in the pool in summertime.

It's just blink, blink, “I'm over here.” It's a blink, blink, “I see you.

Let's get together.” [laughs] To most of us, a lightning bug is just a lightning bug, but look closer.

Kentucky's diverse landscape is actually home to over 30 distinct species.

From our common backyard big dippers to the canopy dwelling candle fireflies that flicker like lanterns in the treetops.

But deep within forests, you'll find the rarest of them all, the blue ghost.

A tiny unblinking spirit that doesn't flash, it glows.

Blue ghosts are a very famous and infamous and interesting.

They don't have the patterns like we see with the other more common firefly species.

The males, in this case, they create a kind of eerie blue glow.

Some people say it's more green.

It just depends on how you perceive color, exactly what you're going to see from it.

It'll hover about a foot or two off the forest floor and just trail up the forest in the underbrush, emitting that faint glow and leaving that pale light behind it.

The female blue ghost, as opposed to the male, is going to be sitting down and she's going to be emitting her flashes to try and draw him in rather than going out and pursuing him like he's pursuing her.

The big dipper or the common eastern firefly is probably the most recognizable firefly that people will get to know here in Kentucky.

It's the ones that fly low and slow over your suburban backyard.

They're easy to catch and put in a jar.

And they make a very lazy J as they fly around.

They will get a little more elongated the further they get into their sequence, but that's the male flying through the air trying to signal to females down below.

Lightning bugs have an entire language written in light.

[cricket chirping] So, fireflies are one of our more charismatic insects.

People really care about them.

They love them and it does boil down to that nostalgia factor.

If you think about when fireflies come out, it's often right around the same time that people are getting out of school.

They're a harbinger of summer.

[music playing] We prowl around in the darkness with red light lanterns to help our dark-adapted eyes see better these faint glowing animals in the underbrush.

Getting to meet them up close is really a fascinating experience.

And then you explain to them that that's actually just one species of fireflies and there's a whole lot of other ones and then we're just now learning more about them and that's what research is all about is learning as much as possible about each different species so that we can protect them so that everybody can enjoy them.

I have moments when I'm out in the woods and the blue ghosts are flying through and I'm just stopped and I feel like a little kid.

[music playing] Fireflies are typically seen as a canary in the coal mine for ecosystem health.

All insects are faced with habitat loss and habitat destruction.

There's also the increased use of insecticides and other pesticide but with fireflies there's an added wrinkle of light pollution.

When they're trying to communicate with each other, if the glow isn't traveling far enough then unfortunately the males aren't talking to the females and the females aren't being able to respond to the males.

[cricket chirping] Right now, tonight if you wanted to go out and help fireflies in a way you could turn off outdoor lighting or over a longer period of time you could add motion sensors to outdoor lighting.

Anything you can do to limit the exposure of artificial light in your personal little ecosystem will help fireflies thrive.

In addition to that you can let your grass grow a little tall.

Fireflies need that tall grass to when they're larvae to hunt and find food when they're adults, they need those vantage points to find mates.

Even if you simply let a part of your yard grow wild, you'll notice a difference and the fireflies will show up and thank you.

[cricket chirping] One of the more interesting things that you can do is leave leaf litter as well.

It gives firefly larvae a place to safely overwinter in your yard.

They can stay nice and cozy in that leaf litter.

They spend about two years as a larva so they need that habitat to be able to find the earthworms and snails that they want to eat.

And come summertime when those leaves have decomposed, you'll have brand new fireflies coming up to light up your summer.

[laughs] We want these fireflies to be around if we want to enjoy their beauty and their splendor.

If you want your kids and grandkids in the future to enjoy them these natural fireworks glowing around us those are the kinds of choices that we have to make and the things that we have to be willing to do.

[cricket chirping] [birds chirping] Over the course of this season on our show we're going to be talking a lot about the 50th anniversary of the program here in Kentucky that set up the nature preserves here.

This is Zack Couch, he's the executive director of the program.

Zack, thanks so much for being with us.

Yeah, it's a pleasure to be with you today.

Blanton Forest is not a bad office for you, is that right?

It's a wonderful place to visit.

Yes, sir.

It's gorgeous here, it really is, and enjoyed our time here.

So, looking back in 1976, when the office was first set up, what was the landscape then?

What did things look like for places like this in Kentucky?

That's a great question.

So, in ‘76, the nature preserves commission at the time was established through legislative action.

So, we had a bill that was passed, signed by the governor in March of that year; then the work really began of, "Okay, we have the bones of an office starting to come together, now we need to bring staff in and figure out, okay, what's the work ahead of us, what's the landscape?” So, when you got the people together, you were finally staffed up, what were some of those early challenges that the agency faced right out of the gate?

So, one of the big challenges was, “Okay, what work needs to be done here for nature preserves?

Well, what areas do we need to target for land acquisition?

Where does the funding come from for land acquisition?

Where are the rare species and the rare habitats in Kentucky?” Technology obviously has evolved tremendously over the last 50 years; what has that meant for you all in terms of where things were in ‘76 to what you're able to do now?

So, technology has been a huge advancement for us in this state.

You take a place like Blanton Forest, it was identified by Marc Evans, one of our former staff ecologists, who would sit down and spend hours and hours and hours looking at print-offs of aerial photography with a magnifying glass.

And he's looking for big trees, where are large crowns, expansive systems, and you take what that looked like in the early ‘80s, mid-80s, to now, we're able to sit down with all of our GIS programs, pull all this data together, create models, and start to identify where these places are.

What do you wish more people knew about nature, particularly in Kentucky?

For Kentucky, I think most folks see a place like Blanton Forest and they think, “Okay, it's a wonderful trail system,” which it is, but at the same time we buy these properties and protect them not only for passive recreation but also just to maintain some sort of look into the past of what Kentucky was.

When you walk around in Blanton Forest, you're looking at a forest the same way as Daniel Boone would have seen it a few hundred years ago.

It's a step back in time, so it's not only that we want to provide people with this area for passive recreation, but we also want to provide a place where we can see what Kentucky looked like several hundred years ago, what the species were.

As well-intentioned as people may be in areas like this, we can love something like this to death, can't we?

most certainly, yeah, and that's something that we're very diligent about, we continue to monitor throughout our system.

If you ever visit some of our nature preserves, you'll see sign-in sheets, so we can get an idea of how many visitors, are we getting here, that's important data that we have, because we don't want to have people love it to death.

The conservation challenges that you faced in ‘76 versus the conservation challenges that you have now, how have those changed over the 50 years?

The first hurdle that we had to come across, again, was just figuring out, “Okay, what are the rare species, where are the rare places, where are our wetlands, our old growth forests,” we have a good idea of that now.

Now it's a matter of finding the funding to do the land acquisition, to do the protection, to work with the people that own it, to make sure that we don't have issues with invasive species coming in and altering the habitat.

Final question; the legacy that you really hope to leave here, the next 50 years for the organization, what do you hope that will look like?

As great as these places are, we have even more places that we have yet to protect; we want to acquire those, and we want to maintain those areas in perpetuity.

Zach, thanks so much for letting us be here, and we look forward to exploring a lot more of these nature preserves over the course of the season on the show.

Absolutely.

Same here.

Thank you.

Thanks.

[birds chirping] An influential civil rights leader was born and raised right here in Kentucky.

Whitney Young Jr.

trained as a social worker at Kentucky State University, going on to spend most of his career working to end employment discrimination in the United States.

From leading a national organization to create jobs and advising three U.S.

presidents, Whitney Young Jr.

inspired many, and his legacy lives on.

[music playing] I think what we're fighting against isn't so much making White bad as not making Black bad, and what we are working toward is a society where we lift the positives out of both cultures, reject the negatives, and we can find negatives in both cultures, and move toward a new society that is much better than either of the old.

Think about the modern civil rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s, no one thinks about Kentucky, you know, but we were very much a part of the movement.

And then you think about Whitney Young, you know, someone who's part of this Big Six, but, you know, you don't hear much about Whitney Young, just like you don't hear much about Kentucky and the civil rights movement.

And he is one example of the fact that we produced leaders in Kentucky that influenced and shaped policy in the United States.

He was comfortable in the presence of White people, he was comfortable being the only African-American in the room, he believed that he was equal to anybody.

His voice was in the boardroom and in the White House.

He didn't look down on civil protests in the streets, he saw that that was important, but he also saw that, you know, it was important for us to translate those civil rights demands to shape policy.

Whitney Young was born in Kentucky, 1921, graduated from Lincoln Institute in 1936.

In Shelby County, Kentucky, an all-Black boarding school was built in response to segregation.

The Lincoln Institute, founded in 1910, emerged after the passage of the Day Law by the Kentucky legislature, which ended racially integrated education in the state.

Whitney Young Sr.

served as the school's first Black president.

His wife, Lori Young, made history in her own right, becoming Kentucky's first Black postmistress.

Their son, Whitney Young Jr., was raised on this campus alongside his two older sisters.

Today, the Lincoln Institute and the Young family home remain preserved as a national historic landmark.

Whitney Young Sr.

was very astute and crafty, and, you know, not only wanted more for his children but also others who would be attending Lincoln Institute as well.

It focused more on vocational employment, you know, whether janitorial services or being a cook or some sort of domestic service.

Whitney Young Jr.

graduated as valedictorian, then continued his education at Kentucky State University, where he met his wife, Margaret Butler.

During World War II, Young enlisted in the U.S.

Army.

He was trained at MIT in engineering.

He excelled and became a sergeant, but he found himself in a situation where he was constantly negotiating and mediating between White officers and Black infantry.

You know, that's where Whitney Young, I think, actually found his calling in terms of being able to mediate that tension, and from that point forward became more committed to addressing the tension between Blacks and Whites, but, more importantly, trying to elevate opportunities for African-Americans.

I think we can attribute it directly, in part, to the mobility of Negroes as made necessary by World War II, when Negroes were taken out of the South for the first time in their lives, they traveled throughout the world.

They saw how they got a taste of freedom, taste of what it meant to be a man.

They found out that their lives did not have to be lived in misery and abuse.

Once, you know, he gets his master's degree in social work after going to St.

Paul, Minnesota, and, you know, begin working with the Urban League, and then going on to Omaha, Nebraska, and becoming the president of the local Urban League.

The Urban League basically prepared people to take on jobs that were normally reserved for White people.

They focused not just on Black people, but they also focused on low-income people across the board.

We are the social engineers, we are the strategists, we are the planners, we are the people who work at the level of policy making, policy implementation.

We're the highest echelons of the corporate community, the highest echelons of the governmental community, both at federal, state, and local level.

The highest echelons of the labor movement.

The Urban League was an organization that was not known for its civil rights activities.

He had worked with major foundations, including the Rockefeller Foundation, and one of their executives recognized his talent and brought him on in 1961 as executive director of the National Urban League, and now we're getting at the height of the civil rights movement.

It's when the protests are really taking off.

The sit-in demonstrations, stand-ins, economic boycotts.

Of course, it would be 1963 when you'd have the march on Washington.

But I spoke about the responsibility of Negroes to do a lot of different types of marching.

We must also march our children to the libraries, and their parents must march to the adult education centers, the retraining centers, and to the PTA meetings, and to these other places, to be assured that once those rights were won and the doors were down, that the people would be in a position to take advantage of them.

Martin Luther King was quite impressed, with, in his words, with Whitney Young's, quote-unquote, “creative vitality.” King recognized that Whitney Young could complement what the other civil rights leaders were doing.

He was influential without a lot of fanfare.

He knew what had to be said in those boardrooms to prepare them to understand how to address the current social unrest that was taking place.

Because he was in a business suit, surrounded by White corporate leaders, that he was in spaces that, you know, Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown and others could not venture into.

You know, the name-calling didn't affect him.

You know, he had a mission, he had a vision, and he refused to be deterred or denied.

Despite criticism and even death threats, Whitney Young Jr.

never stopped pushing for change.

His work brought him into the highest levels of government, beginning with the Kennedy administration and growing into a powerful partnership with President Lyndon B. Johnson But Johnson felt that he could talk with Whitney Young, and they could think about how we could get into these corporate rooms, and how could we get African-Americans more access to employment opportunities, and to housing and education opportunities, and all of that.

And so, that's where the two of them were able to work together on the Great Society program.

Martin Luther King made Johnson feel a bit uncomfortable, because King's coming at you morally, and Whitney Young was a businessman.

You know, he was an integrationist, but he was a businessman.

He was a pragmatist.

You know, he and Johnson could identify with each other and say, “Okay, what can I get out of this?” He was able to kind of bridge that sort of initial divide between he and Nixon, because of his gift as someone who knew how to speak that language, and, when I say “speak that language,” was able to articulate not only what it meant to be an African-American, but what was needed, and what the government had not done.

And, of course, Nixon ended up respecting him very much.

In fact, when, you know, when Whitney Young dies in March of 1971, he sends a plane to Lagos, Nigeria, to bring his body back.

In 1971, during a trip to Lagos, Nigeria, Whitney Young Jr.

's life came to an untimely end.

His death was first reported as a heart attack, but was later determined to have been caused by drowning.

This photograph was taken the day before his passing.

He was buried in Lexington, at Cove Haven Cemetery.

It was definitely a monumental event, of a Black man being buried in a Black cemetery, in a Black community, and the president of the United States, who was a Republican, is there offering remarks on Whitney Young's accomplishments.

From a campus in Kentucky to the corridors of power in Washington, Whitney Young Jr.

's legacy endures in the pursuit of equality, and the work continues.

You cannot be colorblind today, when color consciousness has been the history of the Negro in this country, and it's not enough now to be colorblind.

For a while, we've got to be color-conscious in a positive way.

It's hard to have a bad day in the forest, and we have certainly enjoyed our time here at Blanton Forest State Nature Preserve.

For a half a century, our state nature preserves have helped keep treasures like this place alive and well, and we look forward to telling you their story over the course of our new season.

Lots more great adventures are ahead.

Now, if you've enjoyed our show, be sure to like the Kentucky Life Facebook page and subscribe to the KET YouTube channel for more of what we like to call Kentucky Life Extras, where you'll have access to lots of other great videos.

Until next time, I'll leave you with this moment.

I'm Chip Polston, cherishing this Kentucky life.

[music playing] [music playing]