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NEWS SUMMARY
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EKU has honored late Letcher County community activist Joe Begley with its 
first Earth Day Environmentalist Award.The award was presented posthumously to Begley's wife, Gaynell, and other family members Wednesday, April 19 as part of the University's month-long Earth Days in the Cumberlands observance. It was established to recognize individuals who have made a significant impact on sustaining their community and environment. "Our observance of Earth Days provides the University community with another opportunity to focus on Kentucky's environment and culture," said EKU President Bob Kustra. "This award recognizes those who have made a tremendous impact on preserving and sustaining the environment and quality of life in the Commonwealth. "We are pleased that our first Environmentalist award honors the legacy of a man who displayed such passion for the land and people of the region he so dearly loved," Kustra added. "Throughout his life, he showed us how we could make a positive difference in our own communities." For the past 34 years, Begley and his wife ran the C.B. Caudill Store and History Center in Blackey. But he is best known as the activist who helped organize opposition to strip mining in Eastern Kentucky. "Joe was a man of rare courage who never failed to take a solid stance on key issues affecting mountain people," Tom Gish, publisher of The Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, told the Lexington Herald-Leader after Begley's death March 27 of this year at age 81. "It was Joe who, early on, recognized the damage strip mining was doing both to the land and, more importantly, I think, to its people." Gish said Begley played a key role in the establishment of state and federal strip-mining laws and Kentucky's 1988 broad-form mineral deed amendment. As organizers of a citizens' revolt in the 1960s and ‘70s, the Begleys, according to the Herald-Leader, became "national touchstones for people seeking solutions to various social and economic problems in Appalachia." In addition to their efforts to fight strip mining, the Begleys were involved on numerous other fronts to help protect their community, including a fight for severance tax on coal and unmined minerals and a protest of unjust utility rates. They also fought to save a local school and help bring a library, senior citizens center and public water to Blackey. Author Studs Terkel traveled to Blackey to interview the Begleys, and they were invited to the White House in 1977 when President Jimmy Carter signed the first federal strip-mine law. In 1997, Joe and Gaynell Begley received the Helen Lewis Community Leadership Award presented by the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development (MACED). |