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Hank Graddy

Midway, Kentucky
Volunteer Leader
Kentucky Chapter

Hank Graddy's family has been in Woodford County, Kentucky, a long time. Jessie Graddy came to the county in 1787, built the first county courthouse two years later, and bought farms for all his children. Two of them are still in use by the family today.

"The ethic of staying in one place teaches one to take care of that place," says Graddy, a general practice attorney in Midway, which is, well… midway between Lexington and Frankfort, the state capital. "I inherited a commitment to stay within the limits of the land, farm it responsibly so it will continue to sustain us, and instill in our children a love for that land."

Graddy remembers that his grandmother, an Audubon member, would read books to him about stewardship, and as an undergraduate at the University of Kentucky he participated in the first Earth Day. "Then in law school in 1972," he says, "I had the good fortune of seeing the Sierra Club's name as a plaintiff, and it appealed to me that this organization used litigation as a tool to fight for the environment." He joined the Club after passing the bar and receiving his first paycheck as a lawyer in 1975.

Author, farmer, and cultural critic Wendell Berry was chair of the Club's Kentucky Chapter at the time, and Graddy's experience as a farmer helped connect the two men. "I came to the Club from a farmland protection point of view," he says. "There weren't many people working on that back then." He worked on the Farm Bill in the early 1980s, and has focused largely on water quality issues over many years of Sierra Club activism.

More recently, he has applied his activist and legal skills to the Club's campaign against Peabody Energy's proposed Thoroughbred coal-burning power plant in Kentucky. "We've led the fight to stop Thoroughbred, and this was a bold move," he says. "The Club has had a presence in Kentucky for quite awhile, but in the past we were easier to ignore. Now we're a force to be reckoned with."

Graddy is these days identified with the Thoroughbred fight and sometimes takes flak for it, "but that's what I signed up for; I wanted to join an organization that fights. We're also taking on Tyson Foods here. The Club stands up to abuse and we're not easily intimidated. Kentucky is a good place to be fighting these fights right now."

Graddy has always been, and remains, a registered Republican. He joined the party mainly because of Teddy Roosevelt and the influence of John Sherman Cooper and Thurston Morton, two Kentucky GOP senators who he calls "inspiring leaders in the 1960s." Morton is perhaps best-known outside Kentucky as the first Republican senator to come out against the Vietnam War.

"I want to believe that the party will evolve away from the madness of the Reagan Revolution and not be the party of denial it's been for the last 25 years," he says. "But I'm disappointed the Democrats haven't advanced a true sustainability platform. I'm looking for a whole lot more from the Democrats, and it's my protest to remain a Republican. But a lot of Republicans nationwide are dismayed at their party's current leadership. Once this administration is gone, my hope is there will be a sustainability revolution."

Graddy says one of the Sierra Club's great strengths is that it is "by and large a democratic organization, with room for different perspectives that are respected. It's not a top-down organization; there's pushback from the ground up, from the grassroots, insisting that we deal with issues like where our food comes from. This isn't one of the Club's central issues, although it should be. But the Club remains a place of diverse activism. I hope it stays that way."

Published: December 3, 2007