If you want to see a specimen of the plant known as Kentucky glade cress, you'll have to travel to southern Jefferson County or northern Bullitt County in that state. Otherwise you're out of luck because, as environmental reporter Connor Griffin explains in the Louisville Courier Journal, the plant exists nowhere else on the planet. Nor should you wait too long to visit, because Griffin's story is about how Louisville's sprawl is steadily encroaching on the plant's territory. In 2014, the federal government designated about 2,000 acres in the two counties as critical habitat to protect the flower. That remains the case today, but developers have plans to build "on or near" that land, and advocates say the federal protections are too weak.
“There are definitely populations of glade cress that are going to go under pavement," says Jeff Frank, founder of Friends of Floyds Fork, which is fighting to save the plant. But even if bulldozers don't directly roll over the land, the fear is that abutting developments will spoil it anyway—think runoff from herbicides on all those new lawns, for example. Meanwhile, Louisville Gas & Electric has gotten permission to install a pipeline that cuts through several patches of the flower's habitat. Advocates are fighting back against all this, through initiatives to buy up more land to keep it from development, and to root out invasive species to give the Kentucky glade cress a better chance to survive. Read the full story. (Or check out other notable longform stories.)
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