Ernest J. Yanarella
(*)From Foresight, Vol. 6, No. 4
published 1999
The following offers some personal observations and professional reflections on the kind of issues that should fuel an open and vigorous debate among emergent leaders about a vision for the Commonwealth in the new Millennium. These proposed resources for generating that vision are the first word, not the last, on the elements of such a vision. This exercise is animated by the belief that sculpting a post-millennial vision for Kentucky will provide the opportunity for what Dr. Karl-Henrik Robert, Swedish physician and originator of “The Natural Step” strategy for sustainability, calls “back-casting”—i.e., working back from a vision of the future to the logical and natural steps that must be taken beginning in the present to realize that vision. It takes as its starting point a belief that the answers of the past are part of the problem, not part of the solution. It looks to new solutions emerging from the give and take of unfettered discussion among new, iconoclastic voices rising from Kentucky’s young leadership cadre.
1. Forging a new Constitution suitable for a new century. The Kentucky Constitution is a creature of the last decade of the 19th century—one deeply influenced by the populist spirit of the times. If the state Supreme Court decision on the state incentive package to Toyota brought the Kentucky Constitution into the 20th century, how will that constitutional framework be restructured to usher it into the Third Millennium? What new tools for executive action and legislative action, what new policy instruments of state agencies will need to be legitimized in the pursuit of a polity and economy appropriate to the new needs and requirements of a post-millennial Commonwealth? How will this new Constitution reflect the changing relations of business and labor, government and commerce, academia and society?
2. Negotiating the promise and perils of state and local/regional economic development. Controversy continues to swirl in the public realm over the best strategies and tactics for fueling economic development for Kentucky’s future. Tried and often not-very-true economic nostrums continue to crowd out and marginalize other means of “growing an economy.” Are the contending strategies of incentive-driven economic development programs favored by successive governors from Martha Layne Collins to Paul Patton and the high-technology incubator approach trumpeted by economic populists like editorial columnist Bill Bishop the only alternatives? Or do economic programs centered around Paul Hawken’s and Amory Lovins’ ideas of sustainable development and natural capitalism provide a bold new vision for achieving real local and regional economic development that honors nature’s services and limits? Can and should Kentucky take the lead in instituting processes of sustainable economic development as a means of leap frogging over so many states it presently trails and position itself on the cutting edge of economic paths to affluence and plenty in the 21st century?
3. Nurturing a system of higher education targeted on excellence and quality. The longstanding framework of higher education has fostered inter-university competition, regional conflicts, and turf battles that promise only to intensify with the growing interest in distance learning programs for delivering quality education over the Internet. Initiatives in the establishment of the Commonwealth Virtual University and bids by the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville in attracting state and federal funding for such programs foreshadow the emergence and proliferation of homegrown and exotic prepackaged courses bought and sold in a new educational marketplace. These trends point to the uncertain promise of revolutionizing higher education in the Commonwealth in the new century. Will Kentucky universities become net consumers or producers of new forms of undergraduate and professional education? How will educational technology at the university level be steered? By whom? And based on what values? How do these issues impinge on the overall quality of education for new generations of Kentuckians? What new demands of the coming century will give shape to the structure and administration of higher education of the future? Who will mold this new structure?
4. Fashioning a new culture for Kentucky’s primary and secondary education. The anti-intellectual strain in Kentucky’s traditional culture is born in the elementary, middle, and high school classroom and gymnasium. The late Harry Caudill’s worry over the role of high school sports as the center of attention and funding and the glue of local pride and identity has remained a staple element of the social and cultural lives of many Kentuckians. As such, it acts as a drag on the hopes and ambitions of other Kentucky citizens and leaders to create an educated citizenry and a workforce capable of meeting the challenges of the 21st century workplace. To what extent can the lessons and values of high school and college sports be a positive source of academic inspiration and educational renewal? How can the recognition and pursuit of educational excellence become a permanent fixture of elementary and secondary education in our communities and counties across the Commonwealth? Thinking beyond the initiatives and reforms of KERA, what changes from the local and county school to state educational agencies must be enacted to meet the requirements of the next Millennium?
5. Sustaining our towns and cities—beyond smart growth to sustainable cities. Kentucky is blessed with many towns and communities that retain much of the charm of small town life and the remnants of community values and practices. Its largest cities, on the other hand, contend with trends promoting explosive growth and urban sprawl. Before it is too late, the rules of the planning game and the vision of local leaders must be altered to re-imagine the shape of the post-millennial city and to institute local and regional practices for bringing into being those new visions. Governor Patton’s Renaissance Kentucky initiative (pooling state resources from many administrative agencies on a few selected small cities) showed great promise, but its potential now seems stillborn. Can processes that widen the involvement of interested parties be fashioned to institute a new game—a sustainability game—where consensus rules and where everything can be put on the table for negotiation, except urban sustainability itself? Can a new basis for urban planning be developed that recognizes the legitimate interests of divergent parties and simultaneously avoids the negative growth models of Lexington, Louisville, and Elizabethtown? Can the charm and quality of small towns, the global reach of modern technology, and the limits and needs of natural environment be balanced in a new planning synthesis?
6. Steering Kentucky’s farms into the post-tobacco era. Fewer predictions are more bankable than that Kentucky’s farmers must one day early in the next century give up their tenacious defense of tobacco growing and switch to other cash crops. Not only is the regulatory handwriting on the wall, but it is clear that major cigarette-manufacturing companies are already preparing for the day when federal controls and restrictions will prompt them to buy tobacco exclusively from farms in South America and Asia and shift their focus almost entirely to the burgeoning global market. Prescient legislators and forward-looking policymakers have already begun to rethink policy avenues for easing the transition to a post-tobacco farm economy in Kentucky without destroying rural communities as a way of life worth preserving. When will genuine leadership in tobacco counties and the state legislature emerge to convince reluctant farmers that there can be life beyond tobacco and that they must “switch” rather than continue to “fight”? Who will take up the cudgels of support for outlining a future for rural farmers and farm communities that does not make them victims of emerging economic, health, and political realities?
7. Crafting a new role for the body politic in expanding and enhancing the quality of health care in Kentucky. Any health care delivery system and health care policy involves personal and social choices. In this sense, all such systems and policies are appropriately termed managed care. In the last decade of the second Millennium, Kentucky’s health care programs have been buffeted by contending political and institutional forces that have left the future shape and extent of coverage to all Kentuckians in doubt. In a game akin to musical chairs, major corporate health care providers have moved in and out of the state. Local and regional hospitals around the Commonwealth have been bought and sold, merged and downsized, seemingly without direct concern with any value other than the financial bottom line. Disparities between urban and rural health care have been modestly mitigated, though regional differences in the quality and availability of health care and health care procedures remain stark. How will a new generation of movers and shakers begin to rethink the role of government and corporate leadership in restructuring Kentucky’s health care infrastructure and policies as a system? How will the disparities and gaps in the present system, especially for high-risk groups, be closed by far-reaching and insightful civic leaders from diverse walks of life? How must the policymaking arena be reshaped so that the necessary intellectual, political, and financial capital can be deployed to surmount existing institutional obstacles and to meet the challenges posed by Kentucky’s health care situation?
8. Going beyond the choice of smart people or smart machines. In the new world of work that Kentuckians of this and future generations will face, Shoshana Zuboff has asked a fundamental question: “Are we going to have smart people or smart machines?” The revolution in work caused by dizzying developments in microchip technology will no doubt move apace and even increase in velocity in the first decades of the new Millennium. Where will Kentucky workers stand in relation to these continuous changes in the workplace, the office, the college classroom, the world of business and finance? Will our economic policies grow the kind of high-technology businesses that will foster an environment of entrepreneurship and innovation in the Commonwealth? Will they become smart workers for whom the old meaning of machines as tools will become the norm and whose products will be invested with value added by their creativity and brain power? Or will we remain content to see native Kentuckians minimally trained to build other country’s products on other company’s technology, while watching the bulk of profits go to other people’s corporate headquarters?
9. Moving beyond stale policy options for environmental protection and natural resource management. Finding new and high-skilled jobs, rebuilding our cities, stoking the engines of economic growth, and better educating our children for the new Millennium are all worthy agenda items for new leaders for a new century. But if the scenic beauty and natural resources of Kentucky are destroyed in the process, a special and unrecoverable feature of the quality of life in Kentucky, a precious and unique gift of God, will be lost—or preserved only in memory and lore. Pitting developers against environmentalists, industrialists against ecologists, in unending battles over environmental protection and resource management issues has generated regulatory policies that have sometimes improved environmental quality or blocked damaging growth but have not always avoided the consequences of the politics of zero-sum games, where one party’s gain is another party’s loss. New market-based policy solutions (e.g., pollution rights) and novel sustainability-driven policies (feebates, Pigovian ecology tax reforms, etc.) have been proposed that promise to achieve greater results with less onerous political costs and economic disruptions than traditional standards-based regulatory mechanisms. Can Kentucky policymakers get ahead of the policy curve and convince legislators to pass and administrators to institute such novel and promising alternatives? What is the role of local citizens and leaders, civic organizations and environmental groups, in persuading state representatives and other public officials to break from past regulatory practices and boldly embrace such policy innovations?
10. Laying the foundations of a truly civic culture of leadership and democratic participation. No significant change in the Commonwealth after the millennial divide is possible without a transformation of Kentucky’s political tradition, including the practices of its leadership and the attitudes of its citizens. The buzz words for such transformation are all around us: civic professionalism, civic capital, civic leadership, even civic ecology. To breathe concrete meaning and relevance into these flowery, but obscure terms, new leaders from locales and regions around the state must work within their own home turf to break the grip of personal ambition, narrow self-interest, and pervasive corruption that animates so many Kentucky politicians. They will also need to overcome the cynicism and fatalism of its citizenry that leads to shoulder shrugs and passive acquiescence to the supposed limits and follies of Kentucky political life captured by the old saw, “That’s Kentucky politics.” How does new leadership instill in citizens the belief that old-style politics is not good enough, that Kentucky’s children deserve better, and that their future depends on a new civic politics? How by example and practice does a new generation of Kentucky leaders in politics, education, law, the workforce, and business mobilize the necessary civic resources and, through political education and civic entrepreneurship, revolutionize Kentucky politics from the bottom up?
* Dr. Yanarella is a Professor of Political Science with the University of Kentucky. Return to text.