I have been known to myth build. I think so much of people and their actions and tell their stories so long and often their stories grow in importance in my mind and I project that story, giving their role in what occurred perhaps more worth than might have been considered appropriate.

We need heroes. We certainly need environmental health heroes, the Tar Creek Superfund Site has some, and we deserve more. I was telling one such story to a woman at the Ottawa County Free Fair this week, and with the fans pushing hot air around the building, to tell a story, a person raises her voice. And that is what I caught myself doing while telling this one.

It is an important story how actions taken by the Indian Health Services brought 300 million dollars to Ottawa County and one of those responsible never knew it happened, never claimed his fame.

Don was working for Indian Health Services in the 1990's when I got to know him. He dealt with helping tribal families get access to potable water, either from a well or from rural water districts, served as the safety officer for the facility and made sure tribal nutrition centers were food safe.

Working 9 to 5 in the years before the internet, to earn his Masters Degree in Public Health, he jumped on the turnpike after work to make the evening classes held in Tulsa by the University of Oklahoma. In order to finish his degree he had to produce a thesis, which required research and the libraries he could use were closed the hours of his day he had available.

Surveillance of data for trends could have described one of the duties he took on near the end of his stay in Miami, OK. It was there that he discovered a trend that concerned him, that of lead poisoning of our tribal children, discovering over a third were lead poisoned.

I cannot tell you how often I told this to high school and college students in the years since knowing Don, but he may have done something major to help protect the children in Ottawa County from lead poisoning, but he has inspired countless students to find the ways to do their research, continue their education, just by learning that his very own research could impact such important change. But it wasn’t just the research project, or presenting it, that made Don’s efforts so memorable to me, it was the next step, it was what he did with it. He passed on what he learned to the authorities who for whatever God Blessed reason, took their next step, to confirm his data, and then begin the long process to make the children in Ottawa County safer for the future.

But just as the last steps of this story are important and most significant, they could not have happened without the earlier part of the story. Let us begin with a simple conversation between a nurse and the new woman doctor who worked, at our “Indian Clinic.” The doctor wondered out-loud to her nurse why so many parents were requesting a drug known at that time to help with the symptoms of hyperactivity or Attention Deficit Disorder for their school-aged children. The nurse had read the latest research on lead poisoning suggesting children could have been lead poisoned since lead was being linked to those symptoms. The doctor had been taught in medical school lead poisoning frequently occurred in inner cities due to lead-based paint in deteriorated housing units. How could that be possible here on the plains in small towns? The nurse explained the proximity we are to then abandoned lead and zinc mining district. With that understanding, the doctor ordered all children since to have their blood tested for lead. And all the results were placed in their charts.

And that is where Don Ackerman found those surprising numbers he later reported to the then EPA Region 6 Administrator.

And where the story could have ended, another story began, EPA assessed the possibility the Indian Health Service "underlying" might be on to something. And he was. Not just Indian children but all kinds of children were lead poisoned. EPA’s immediate actions began in 1995 to begin removing the lead and zinc from places children played and the work continues now for places children play, their own yards. Throughout the county, all are eligible to have their yards tested for lead and to have it removed at no cost and replaced with the soil those children could both play and raise a garden of their own.

There are some powerful stories in the history of the county. But you might not have known this one. But you have heard the myth-building story. You can hear Don Ackerman tell his own at the 21st National Environmental Conference at Tar Creek September 17-18. The other thing about Don, he is a poet, and you can be, too. Be sure to come for our Poetry Slam on Sept. 16th at 7 pm in the Ballroom at NEO. The other thing you might get to see happen, Don gets to meet the new EPA Region 6 Administrator, who will be attending the conference.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Months go into the planning of each of the 21 Tar Creek Conferences, each done to provide an opportunity for our community members, just regular folks to have a chance to meet the people who are doing the work on what is known as the largest Superfund site in the Nation.

We have a chance to see the science, see the results, question the techniques and the reasoning that went into the decisions that are made to make our environment cleaner and safer. Some years we have big crowds of people, some years lots of people, but scant local faces. We want to change that. It is your face in the face of regulators that will make this cleanup as good as it can be. It is your questions that make federal, state and tribal officials re-examine the methods and even the practices that actually may not be practical.

For many of the people who come, it is some sort of reunion, they have been working on this site for decades, and you don't know them. Let's change that. Come early Tuesday morning Sept. 17, walk right up and pick up your packet and walk into the Ballroom at NEO in the Student Union, choose a seat where you can see THEIR faces, follow the speakers after their presentations and meet them and ask the question you wished you had asked aloud. We will save you a seat.

The conference is free to Ottawa County residents, Activists and students. It helps us get you in the door quicker if you will register and you can do that at www.leadagency.org. You can bring a sack lunch or buy a ticket to eat in the college cafeteria at lunch, which is another great time to meet the regulators and deciders who are charged with cleaning up our mess. You will also have easy access to other scientists doing research here, for US, as they learn what happens to our water, how our birds are faring if they live in chat piles, and what happens to those birds when their homes are remediated and what kind of birds like a clean environment.

If you have planted those pollinators and have been watching them all summer out your window, and are seeing the butterflies loving them, then you will LOVE hearing Jane Breckinridge from the Euchee Butterfly Farm. If you have some questions on how much water all these HUGE poultry houses might be consuming you will definitely want to hear about the study two agencies are doing on the Roubidoux and the Boone aquifers. I will be taking notes on that.
We all have been waiting all summer to find out how the cleanup on the asbestos at BF Goodrich has been going and Mike McAteer with EPA will give an update and welcome questions. DEQ will let us know how the benzene cleanup is going, too.

Sure we have been having these conferences for 21 years, but we have had BAD WATER flowing down Tar Creek for 40 years come fall. That is just too long. A couple of generations have lived in a town that shunned that creek, but it will help us put the PRESSURE on these agency people if we show our LOVE for that little creek of ours and that we want it better.

There will be many speakers coming from all over the country, that is why it is a national conference and with all the topics, that is why it expanded to be environmental rather than specifically only Tar Creek.

Wonder why all this extra money is being spent cleaning up this site? It is because there is lead in that mess and lead can poison children and it poisoned lots of ours. The fellow who made that public, Don Ackerman is coming this year as a keynote speaker. He didn't even know that his little letter revealing that 1/3 of our Indian children were lead poisoned has been the catalyst to bring EPA back in force to find ways to remove it to protect the future generations. He also writes poetry and that is another thing you must get set to do. Write your own environmentally themed poem and enter the Poetry Slam we will have the evening before the conference starts.  All of this is open to the public, because folks, it is for you we do this work.

LEAD Agency will be posting the whole agenda soon, but it will be packed, so save the dates on your calendar, register early so you will be able to go right past the long line and get coffee, a Danish and settle in or you can select the sessions of greatest interest and slide in just in time for those.

Some of the most influential individuals in our community have attended these conferences in the past, but many have passed on and you must take their place, take some responsibility and become the informed public that you need to be. We need you to do this.

                                          ...the care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy
                                        and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility.  - Wendell Berry

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

It is that season a person who is wild about WILD PLUMS could  only have dreamed about. Whatever we want to say about the climate changing weather we have had this year, it somehow has been the most perfect conditions for the crop of a lifetime for both of my favorite fruits: blackberries and wild plums.

I anticipated making mansion out of a pigsty when a WHOLE field of mine gave it up and went full blackberry. People recommended POISON to get rid of them. But they did not know the way these little guys make me smile as I contort to pick the ripest berry as the sun catches on the smooth surfaces of each tiny segment.

So with the plan for the field made, I brushhogged rows only wide enough to be able to pick from both sides and not have to OvER reach to the middle. I kept the rows mowed. Until, if you remember the monsoon season hit and the field was TOO soggy to continue mowing. I know this because I got one tractor stuck and almost the second one getting the first one out. I picked lots of blackberries, for sure, but the rains knocked those ripest plumpest ones off, but the crop was good, the grasses TALL and wet to walk through to pick. For a month it looked like I had voted in every election in countries that require marking a finger with indelible ink, to prevent subjects from voting multiple times on election day. I am a marked woman during blackberry season.

Then the quiet time as anticipation builds as the wild plums take their time to ripen. The little trees were covered. High winds, heavy rain did not do them in, these trees are producing the most amazing beauties ever. Red, ripe ones almost jump into your hand and if they don't they will in a few days. Some make the leap when no one is watching and lay on the ground for me to find like that candy we used to get at the movie theater, those bright red chewy treats in a flat box. While picking these jewels, it is tempting to pop them in your mouth to get an instant delight. But they for the most part are more like bright red marbles than anything else I can compare them to.

Every day for weeks, I go back to my favorite places. My dad and I tried over and over to transplant some to my property because he knew how much I loved them. He would be so happy to know they came on their own, in their own time.

Just as picking blackberries gets a bad rap because of the chiggers, which are known to have a symbiotic relationship with that fruit. It is best to get right out of your picking clothes and into water right away to deter some of them. For the plums, I am finding it most important to do the same practices, but the followup that is necessary is to take a long close look on this skin you are in and inspect for the tiniest of meanness's: the mite.

A young friend of mine declared fond memories of picking wild plums with his mother and seemed excited to be invited to come do some picking with me. We picked on that hottest day we had, both of us sweating. He filled a bucket and I filled containers of varying sizes until almost dark. I have taken a few other young people to pick, but none who showed such signs of pleasure at the quiet effort of picking.

It wasn't that day the mites got me, that happened today. I am sure that the native relations who hunted these plains put a big black X on their winter counts for this place ensuring only visitors, no permanent communities were built as they discovered the weapons of war the land here uses to protect herself: chiggers and mites. The wee ones.

They and the ticks got the last fellow to escape from what we locals call the Vinita Prison. He escaped in the heat of summer, after blackberries and before plums. He was walking up my dirt road when I met him. I was hot riding in my Gator and was out of water.

He asked for water and I responded I wished I had some, too. When he asked to use my cell phone, I asked what number he might want me to dial for him. He replied with his mother's number and when she answered, I told her where he would be waiting for her: a hill about 2 miles from my house. From there he could watch for her. He walked on and I called the sheriff and they were sitting up on the hill waiting for the reunion of the mom and her son, when the escapee gave up and walked out of the bushes. He told them he was thirsty and covered with chiggers and ticks. But you know he had to have those little mites, too, they were the ones that brought him in and should have gotten some kind of reward.

There was another escapee. I would have thought he would give up because of these little varmints, but regretfully when he was found he had committed suicide on the grounds where he had taken shelter from a rainstorm.

Respectfully Plum Crazy ~ Rebecca Jim

The last chief of the Cherokees before statehood lived in Vinita, IT (Indian Territory) and I knew his last living daughter, Margarette Buffington Garner as my old friend. I mean she was old when she allowed me to become her friend.

What a gift she gave, of herself, of the old ways, and an example I hope to pass on to the young people in my life who allow me to be their friend. She used to call me out of the blue, once saying she wanted to give me something. I went to visit and she regretfully stated she had something that had come over the Trail of Tears, but had broken it that morning. She had placed the blue and white pitcher and bowl. She had put the bowl in the sink to wash it and the temperature of the water had broken it, into 3 pieces. She explained it's history, first the trip from the Cherokee homeland, then how it was buried packed with hay along with many of the other family treasures in their backyard during the Civil War. It glued back together and the set has been a joy now for over 50 years.

Generations of separation begin not to matter when we simply take the time to talk through them and understand the significance and pass them on.

Evans Ray Satepahoodle, say that fast, was a great big full blood Kiowa who remembered all the old songs, and created many for his tribal family members. He would call late at night and tell me the story of how a song was created, where and who was there, and why and then sing it. He was desperate to pass these on. He called me one evening and said he was in the 4th quarter, and as a former football player, he meant he had made it to 75 weaving in his football heritage. I would try desperately to take notes of the story and try writing the Kiowa words by how they sounded. But thankfully Huge Foley at Rogers State University learned of Evans Ray and recorded many of his stories and the accompanying songs. You can find them on YouTube, honest.

Evans Ray had been an Indian Counselor during many of the same years I had been, so we knew each other well enough, if he had had a bad day at work, serious issues lay on us as counselors, he would call and say simply, "The counselor needs counseling," as a signal it had been one of those heavy days. As a counselor, sometimes having a listener made all the difference.

We were connected even before I ever heard of him. One of my distant Cherokee cousins Sparlin Norwood had told a story about meeting ER as we called him, when life was not going so well for him. What Sparlin  did after listening was to reach over and tap him on his chest and say simply, "There is a good man in there." Those words made all the difference to him and he spent the rest of his life being that good man. Sparlin was known to speak up and out for cause.

These elders allowed me into the tail end of their lives and have given that generational sharing gift I intend to pass right along.

And this week, a young woman who I had come to know after she knocked on the front door at LEAD Agency as a freshman at NEO College, Maddie Geiger came to visit, bringing her love and her loved one with her. We talked of the past, only slightly, but on to the lives we live now. One of my questions was how to have a Poetry Slam at this year's National Environmental Conference at Tar Creek Sept. 17-18. Did I learn a lot? Oh, yes, so get to thinking now about the poetry, or the story you want to share with the broad topics we will cover this year: Tar Creek, of course, BF Goodrich, lake level flooding, Poultry and by golly climate change.

Are friendships only with people? Not so to me, this land, this piece of the earth I live upon and the earth that stretches beneath all of our feet, leaving still room for others. We have not filled each spot, we have room, and all of it needs our care, our, if you would dare to say, it needs our love.

Our earth, much of the solid ground we have been counting for the future will be going under, as the ice melts at the poles, in the glaciers around the world, our seas will cover more of our ground. There will be less ground to share and peoples along the coasts, and our island people will be heading for higher ground. As Sally Whitebird said 25 years ago, "We have only one mother." She meant our mother earth and all of her children are going to be scrambling to stay dry.

That Sparlin Norwood, I spoke of earlier had a great deal to do with the establishment of the National Indian Education Association and they had a conference in Alaska that I won a trip in a raffle to attend. And while there was able to visit briefly a glacier. Peering into the ice was a blue I will never forget. Old ice. Our old friends are passing on, our old ice is melting away adding daily to the steady rise of the oceans.

I'd like to keep my old friends longer and keep our glaciers and poles frozen longer.
One is silver and the other blue...  Friends are warm and the ice caps cold, (my new versions of that song about friends sung by the Brownies/Girl Scouts).

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Earlier this week Oklahoma's Secretary of Energy and Environment Ken Wagner and ODEQ Executive Director, Scott Thompson actually sat on our couch at the LEAD Agency and we had a conversation. They each brought some of  their staff so pretty much every chair in the room was filled.

LEAD Agency has been the environmental justice organization for NE Oklahoma since 1997. We listen and when we are allowed share your stories with people who have power and influence to make our lives safer and better. That's what we were doing while June Taylor and Tim Jones worked with the Ottawa County Boys and Girls Club on their last day of summer in our Community Garden. Lois Lively was quietly making cookies because nothing makes a place smell friendlier and cozier than freshly baked cookies. And since I was probably most nervous the scent made getting through the experience easier.

It is a responsibility to carry the messages of community members, to get them right, to hope to convey the seriousness protecting your health and your children's health is to us. As the author and therapist Clarissa Pinkola Estes would say, "Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach." Right there in the front room we discussed a complaint I made on the DEQ Hotline, a complaint about something I was relieved to learn the whole entourage had seen for themselves on their site visit the day before.

 As a Waterkeeper, my role is to protect water and especially waters most at risk from polluters and that is exactly what it appeared we were seeing as Virgil Tarter drove his mother's car down a narrow dirt road in the all but abandoned area known as Hockerville. After we had driven around the Tar Creek Superfund Site and mile after mile we had viewed restored land, reclaimed from the mine waste that had laid upon it for nearly a hundred years, now green with growing crops from the work of the QUAPAWS, DEQ and EPA.

I was prepared to see even more as we crept up a narrow tree covered dirt road nearing what had been the always disappointing scene of a huge sinkhole where thousands of used tires had been dumped over the decades. I had prepared myself for the relief of NOT finding it, just knowing it would have been filled, and of course all the tires removed before the filling. But I was aghast to find it was still there, the tires not visible as the whole site was covered with car bodies. It was as if all those old tires had called their cars to join them in the void, "Come on in the Water's fine!" Not all the cars and trucks and the lone boat could get in, as there was a brand new shiny chain link fence keeping them from entering as the crane, not a water bird, as the crane-able-to-lift-a-car-type crane stood like the prison warden inside.

But what I saw were vehicles with oil, gas, antifreeze all sitting on the edge able to be spilling those fluids into the sinkhole and as such straight into the Boone Aquifer, still a drinking water source for people not far from there. A young man was working on a vehicle as we passed, demonstrating it was not an abandoned site.

Just think: A single drop of used motor oil can contaminate a million drops of water, or a single gallon of oil can contaminate a million gallons of ground water, it was clear right then that operation must stop.

Had you seen it, you too would have known, THIS IS NOT RIGHT. And that is when we have to remember the thing we say to kids, "See something? Say Something" and in this case the who to tell is the DEQ Hotline 800-522-0206. Ottawa County does not have a ECLS an Emergency Complaints Local Service person anymore. When Clyde Mason and Sharon Robbins retired, DEQ closed their office, so the person to investigate the complaint has to come from Delaware County. I hope he took help with him to investigate this complaint. Sinkholes have been known as great places to look for missing persons.

All to say, the conversation continued as they listened, and their staff discussed why they have made decisions we have not understood when changes to the cleanup standard is proposed.

The topics to be covered that day were on a cheat-sheet only Martin Lively and I had, and we went through them. But we were all caught off guard when LEAD's Board President, Louis "Red" Mathia interjected his hope that the barrels buried offsite and the sludge be investigated. Barrels that were brought here from Sayre, Oklahoma. It got quiet as he spoke.

Reflecting at that moment of the list we have and how it can grow with the knowledge our community members have, we truly are an environmental justice community and as such need the ear of the people in power who come to visit.

UPDATE: I received a call from the DEQ ECLS who investigated the complaint. They already had an open case on it. These things take time, I was told.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

What does it cost to volunteer? and who would want to? And how much time does it take?

The worldwide company Cisco allows their employees to spend a week volunteering for a non-profit of their choosing and Will Frayser, my nephew: OUR LUCK chose LEAD Agency! This is his week volunteering and he will still receive this weeks' salary, getting paid to do good deeds by a company reaching out into communities to lend a hand! Cisco develops, manufactures and sells high-tech products you probably have in your house or office.

LEAD Agency has a Cisco router but they have fleets of employees who are producing networking hardware, IT services and equipment used in telecommunications. So Cisco is big and Will is doing work and works with others doing the behind the scenes that we all use to make our lives operate into the decades to come.

Maddie, a LEAD Agency volunteer from the past and her friend are bringing  their bicycles on Saturday to ride our Recycle Tar Creek Bike Ride and Rally. It is a 5 mile ride right through Miami over the unmarked Tar Creek bridges. Why would we do it? Just checking to see how our creek is doing as the anniversary of 40 years of BAD WATER approaches this fall. Let's peek over the edge, let's look for fish and frogs. We will see if her notorious tainted rust color has left stains again after the latest flood waters have receded. Will Frayser had seen Tar Creek when he was a little boy, but had no recollection of it as he peered at it just yesterday, but I remember and know it looks the same now as it did when he was half his height and age.

It is estimated to take another set of decades to get this place cleaned up, making it look like we are actually STUCK IN THE MIDDLE of the cleanup. Our 21st National Environmental Conference at Tar Creek will be held September 17 and 18 at NEO in the Student Union. We are reaching back to find some of the people who first made actions here and are asking them to share what they did and why it was important to them then to do it. Many of who we might have asked have passed on, forty years is a long time to most of us. You will have memories and probably questions about what all happened and why it is taking so long to get on with it.

Our native flowers are thriving in our Community Garden, the Spiderwort Tradescantia obiensis  and the wild Bergamot Monarda fistulosa have finished. but the Black-eyed Susan's, Rudbeckia hirta, the Purple Milkweed Asclepias purpurascens which looks pink and the Blue Vervain Verbena hastata which looks purple to me are blooming, both will soon be standing nearly 6 feet tall and making a stand for the incoming butterflies. They of course will stop at the welcoming butterfly center, taking a sip of water and visiting the Blazing Star Liatris, milkweed and periwinkles the Boys and Girls Club kids have planted with June Taylor this season and fed with fresh banana peel.

The tall grasses, the lambs quarter, marigolds all popping up from the seeds they left behind last year and the kale and sage are coming up from the seeds they dropped this year. But sprinkled in between these are the usual garden variety vegetables and the spreading ever-bearing strawberry plants, you can see a variety of volunteers who make sure our Community Garden thrives.

We celebrate both the garden and the volunteers at our summer Garden Parties. Mark your calendar, the next one will be August 1, with music and the Pile it All On Salad, but until then, stop by carry a bucket of rainwater to a thirsty pumpkin or choose your favorite and baby it this summer. The rains have stopped and they all got spoiled.

There was a surprise this week, our garden actually grew. What? Yes, we had a section of our garden we had never been able to use because of the lead contaminated soil. We had covered it with sheeting and bounded with railroad ties, with a warning sign made by one of our Youth Activists to NEVER USE RR ties in a Garden. If you call the DEQ Hotline number 800-522-0206, you can get action. That is what we did, and all of that BAD DIRT is gone and they took the railroad ties, too! Clean soil was brought in and we are planting corn and cantalope, of course.

It takes work to loosen that new freshly packed soil but volunteers are doing it and it is happening. Perhaps the challenges seem too great, but the small spaces we have around us can be improved, whether by our own work, or with the volunteers who choose to help, or when the Superfund Program brings in dirt movers in hazmat suits.
Changes can happen and the rewards can be beautiful and the butterflies are free.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

 
Last Friday while many were recuperating from a 4th of July holiday, I entered a boardroom in Tulsa to meet with people who spoke Arabic from a country our country spent billions tearing up in a war we will always wonder if it should have happened. The six officials I faced were in charge of water in Iraq, and I spoke to them as a single woman who speaks for water, as the Tar Creekkeeper.

How quickly time passed with the questions they asked, as well as the answers they gave to my questions. Water is precious, anywhere, but in a desert country, what a responsibility to protect the resource all require for life. Industrial processes, waste water discharges pollute their water which is scarce and being depleted. Since becoming the Tar Creekkeeper, the creek has experienced an intentional oil spill, a black water fish kill and recently flooded neighboring properties with her metal-loaded water.

LEAD Agency is a member of the Waterkeeper Alliance with 2 programs, first our Grand Riverkeeper with Earl Hatley and more recently the addition of the Tar Creekkeeper position, which I am humbled to claim. But more importantly for the water officials that day learned Iraq has their own Waterkeeper! The translator announced it and they wanted his name, and I simply said, "Google Iraq Waterkeeper" and moments later, they knew all about him. And a bit more about how state and national environmental agencies need Waterkeepers to inform them where pollution is occurring so it can be dealt with quickly.

My time was over with them, but not before we stood together proudly united as Water Protectors, my brother, Clark Frayser and I were captured in the photograph. After teaching Indian Art at Alexander Elementary in Commerce, OK, Clark taught art another twenty years at Eisenhower Elementary in Tulsa. And since retiring spends time volunteering with Tulsa Global Alliance as they host international visitors throughout the year. This meeting was hosted by that organization. 

It has taken me awhile to settle in as the Tar Creekkeeper, since though pushy, taking the center stage has been awkward, not being a scientist or a lawyer, as many Waterkeepers are. The organization is the fastest growing grassroots environmental movement in the world dedicated to swimmable, fishable watersheds and those are certainly our goals here.

Nelson Mandela spoke in his Inaugural Speech, "as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously Give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, Our presence automatically liberates others." To be a movement for a Clean Tar Creek, it will take many others being liberated into action.

So it was fitting that yesterday, a man from St. Paul, Minnesota who had previously lived in Oklahoma where Mike Synar had been his US Representative called our office. Brian was his name, and he knows more about Mike Synar than anyone I ever knew.

Though it was Governor Nigh's Tar Creek Task Force that gave that little creek importance on a national stage, results of the findings were presented to the public at a meeting held in Tulsa at the Vo-Tech that I attended with my son, Dana, who had just learned to write in cursive and took notes during the whole event. Two people I remembered from the meeting, were Mike Synar our district's US Representative and Dr. John Neuberger with his findings on the health impacts in Ottawa County. Perhaps it was Synar's influence, Tar Creek made it as a Superfund Site in 1983 where it remains today.

All of us put Tar Creek to bed in our minds until all those Indian children were found to be lead poisoned and children are why money is still being spent here to lower lead exposures. Students at Miami High School took on Tar Creek and we thought the work ought to be dedicated to Synar. Ironically, I had just found my son's notes with maps and graphs and with that in hand did what we did back in those days before Google, and dialed information and an operator helped me. I got Mike's phone number, called  and when he answered, mustered the courage to ask his permission to let our Tar Creek Project be dedicated to him... and he agreed!

He died of a brain tumor at age 45 only a month later on January 9, 1996. But just months earlier he had received one of the Profiles in Courage Awards given "to individuals who, by acting in accord with their conscience, risked their careers or lives by pursuing a larger vision of the national, state or local interest in opposition to popular opinion or pressure from constituents or other local interests," and he had done that throughout his career of public service. Those Cherokee Volunteers decided they would give out Environmental Excellence Awards in his honor to people who exemplify the spirit and drive Mike Synar embodied and LEAD has continued since.

And Brian the Synar "groupie" had found us by viewing a YouTube of one of our awards being presented. There ought to be a book about Mike Synar and that young man may be up to it, but he needs to consult with my son Dana Jim, working together knowing what they know, Mike could be pleased with the results.

But there ought to be a book on all the Mike Synar Environmental Excellence Awardees, those who showed courage, risked their lives and pursued a larger vision. But it will have to be in volumes because there are always more to honor, as the work continues and will for the coming decades as we pull together and muster this place better.

LEAD's Garden Party is Tuesday July 16 with Tulsa violinist Linda Adkins and Recycle Tar Creek Bike Ride and Rally on Saturday July 20. Call 918 542 9399 for details.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Most of the resolutions we make we give up before we even announce them out-loud. In fact fewer and fewer people put them out there anymore knowing this.

But there are the other resolutions, ones we formally announce with whereas and therefores and signatures to put them out to the public for the greater good. Whether they produce greater good or not, will at some moment in the future be determined.

The vote was unanimous at the Intertribal Council, with all tribal leaders represented passing approval of a resolution for EPA to conduct a complete investigation of the BF Goodrich plant and conduct a complete cleanup of the site, making sure the mine shafts and the Roubidoux wells were closed properly to protect our drinking water aquifer.  The vote at the LEAD Agency meeting was to approve the resolution and we learned later the Democrats of Ottawa County also passed the resolution.

My resolution week ended officially last Friday morning by handing over three duly signed sets to EPA: David Gray, the Acting EPA Region 6 administrator and Erin Chancellor, his Chief of Staff and we forgot to get a photo to commemorate the moment. As most resolutions, we were left with no evidence it had been delivered and only hope the signed documents would do the good we had expressed in the resolving.

And that is all we ever have. Hope. And the understanding that hopes usually never come true if they are left unspoken, left as those silent hopes for the future we never dare to ask to come to pass. Our hope, of all those signatories on these resolutions, hope this works for the greater good and the BF Goodrich site is duly investigated and cleansed of the pollutants left behind.

This week we remember our country's Revolution, made possible by the acts of the people FOR the people and for the hope of creating a country with the freedoms we have ended up enjoying.

While we were focused on BF Goodrich, and looked away from our recent flooding, only for those few moments, we have learned that Senator Inhofe inserted an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act which as Senator Inhofe said, “The National Defense Authorization Act helps our military meet the goals of the National Defense Strategy, supports our troops, and protects American freedom and prosperity. It is the most important bill we’ll consider all year.”

But his amendment contains no National Security implications, no words describing how American national security with be protected from undue influence and other security threats. There is not a fighter plane, a helicopter, a submarine, or a word about our military in it. His amendment takes away the hopes for the freedom to sleep at night in Miami with the sound of rain on the roof without the fear of flooding. All sorts of individuals, organizations and tribes, including the City of Miami have submitted comments to FERC on GRDA's request to raise the flood pool in the new 50 year re-licensing of the Pensacola Dam. All those comments were written with the hope of protecting citizens from more extensive flooding caused by the next rain events, and those that follow for the next 50 years, we know will occur.

It seems when reading the amendment, that all our comments were read, and the amendment manufactured to maneuver ways to block each of them and ensure future floods will be yet more devastating.  The Senate passed the bill before they left for the 4th of July recess.  When the people cannot trust officials in power to look after the greater good, revolutions occur, as demonstrated in our nation's past that we celebrate this week.

But for these times, Senator Inhofe’s action may result in simply somebody writing the Senator a letter, maybe he gets two letters. But what he might get is an opponent in his next election. That for the quiet, resolved people we are, that would show him there are consequences for actions like his recent amendment for GRDA. But what would get the real change would be the numbers of votes at the ballot box for that opponent. This is where the real revolutions that change this nation happen these days.

It won’t be a revolution for me this week, but In honor of all this resolution talk, I decided to resolve to give up my favorite bottled beverage. Four days and counting, that will show the industry, and not a single other person had to sign my resolution to save the money, the calories and the bottle from the recycler.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Yes, we will turn the keys over soon to a brand new crop of people, our kids are growing up and their kids have, too. We will hand over the mess we have made of the world and before long be LONG GONE before they really grasp the un-endearing legacy we have left for them.

I am of the age where if I came to a stream, felt thirsty, could belly up to it and scoop up a refreshing drink of cool clear clean water. No one I know has been able to do that for the last 50 years, even in remote mountain streams.
The changes that have occurred in our environment are man-made, not so much by individuals, though we have all probably done some polluting, but primarily by industry and extraction or ores and fossil fuels and our use of what got taken from the earth and how it was left behind to bleed, like Tar Creek.

We are experiencing the effects of extreme weather. This season for us, it is rain, copious amounts. With all we have had, my soybean field has not been planted, the garden outside my barn has not been planted. The 80 acre field that went to blackberries, which I mowed into rows to make lemonade as they say of too many lemons! But the rains came so quickly I could not continue mowing between the rows and to pick I slosh along through the tall grass prairie that has grown up between the rows. Heavy rains knock off the ripest berries before they can be picked.

This is what climate change can do, changing the patterns of rain and drought and allowing fewer crops to even be planted, forcing people to seek refuge to  places they believe they will be able to survive. Where crops they believe are still growing. Drought has dried up the once plentiful countries in Central America. And the US is experiencing  the first wave of people seeking to survive. There will be more as our planet continues to change and become more inhospitable.

I know a double-crosser, or a border crosser. He was recommended to me after that big ice storm when the weight of the ice broke down all the trees from here to yonder. It also collapsed barns, two of mine went down. He did fix my barns, all by himself, jacking up first one segment, and then the next, went to the field to cut just the right size trees for sturdy posts to use available resources and help save the cost of new lumber. He spoke little English, but some and as he got to know us more, he began to communicate his stories. How he got to America, and how he went back to Mexico to visit his family and then come back across the river. I grew up in Texas and that river was of course the Rio Grande and people who crossed that river, were called the derogatory term "Wet Backs" because they literally got in the water to cross and got wet. That is the image we saw in the news this week, the young father and his two year old daughter drown in that river.

My family used to take vacations in the summer and we did Texas, went to the gulf to swim in the ocean, and San Antonio to see the Alamo. One summer when I was probably seven my mother bought me a painted wrap around skirt and the cute little white blouse to go with it.  Wearing it we drove to Brownsville and then crossed into the border town in Mexico to go shopping. There at an outdoor market, I got separated from my parents and was shuffled out by the shopkeeper and found myself standing with perhaps 50 other children or more all my size, all, brown like me, but speaking Spanish  asking the adult shoppers for money. They had their hands out, but I did not. It was a profound experience, being there without my parents, which was probably only a few minutes, but one etched in my mind for a lifetime. I can only imagine what those dear children are experiencing now, separated from their parents or adult caretakers, separated with the other children. I will never forget when my parents found me and hope they each one are able to be reunited with their families soon.

We are not the only ones seeing these images and learning about the plight of those children and separated families. Our children and those all over the world are seeing these images and understand the urgency to do something. They get this and are organizing as environmental activists. They see the future we have created for them and they are not liking it.

While we have this time together on this one precious earth we share, let's do what we can to change our ways to conserve and protect our resources and influence policymakers too. We will celebrate the Youth Activists Kit Waters is training this week at LEAD Agency and know we can give it up to them knowing they have the skills needed to meet their changing world.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

It has been a long time since I retired as an Indian Counselor for the Miami Public Schools, but it was my career here for 25 years. This week, I got to try it back on when a Native couple came to the back door of the LEAD Agency with tears and anger. After listening and understanding long standing grief and anger issues could not be solved with a glass of cold water and time on the front porch, I suggested they go with me to the garden since we had some potatoes that needed to be dug. There is magic in the garden, or maybe it is old fashioned therapy, but there is something special that occurs when your hands begin to dig in rich soil and the very first potato is found. I believe potatoes can change lives. And just this week, I saw it happen to real people with longtime unresolved issues. Indigenous people have always believed that the earth has what we need, she provides the medicines that can heal, and the earth herself can be that.

Our good earth, we need to ensure we keep it that way. Protect it from the poisons we can apply, poisons that may then lie beneath the ground decades later that still can poison. We know this only too well with the metals left behind by our lead and zinc mining and what it did to our Tar Creek and what our prized industry left that lies beneath the neighborhood just south of the now abandoned BF Goodrich plant. Those chemical substances just didn't go away, they linger, resting beneath the ground hovering there waiting to be reclaimed, removed and taken away for the risk they pose to harm the humans who live above.

The marvelous research Dr. Ean Garvin did on the plants that grow in the soil tainted by the metals from the Tar Creek Superfund site and the additional Tri-State Mining District Superfund sites in Kansas and Missouri proved that in many places not a single blackberry can be safely eaten. That strikes home to me since I live on a plot of land long deemed the "Blackberry Hill" and come mid-June the picking begins. To not be able to consume one of these black beauties would break my spirit and leave me saying, THIS IS NOT RIGHT! and it is not right for the downstream affected lands and all that grows there. And not right for the BF Goodrich neighborhood.

A month ago, a funny thing happened. June Taylor came to visit and brought a box. It was a wooden box her husband Bob had made for her when she was teaching. On the top of the box he had painted the single word SOAP. And they had decided to give it a new home with me. . . Do you think they thought it righteous? Timely? Needed? I have to admit, they really nailed me with that one. Seems as you read these words, you might be wondering: "is she actually ON her SOAPBOX?" I do realize more times than not, these articles seem that way (when re-read later by the writer). Because of my height, there have been many times the box would have been handy for lots of situations.

So for your imagination, please assume the box is not so nimbly climbed upon, to allow you this opportunity to dream with me about that wrecked land at Miami's BF Goodrich plant. I am truly thankful the United States EPA, what I am calling today (the E for EARTH ) is hard at work with the white suits removing the loose asbestos that remains on site to (the P for PROTECT THE PUBLIC) us.

The soapbox speaker is asking all of us to ask EPA to conduct a complete investigation of the site including the lagoon, the offsite dump AND to clean up the whole site of whatever they find that can harm human health and the environment. We want EPA to stay here and SUPERFUND this site and protect our community, our school children, the soccer kids who play north of the site. It would be SUPER! We want the Polluters to PAY not the taxpayers! Go get a box, stand on it, tell your friends, gather your family around, go to the soccer field and holler. Or write a resolution.
Imagine so many soapboxes with people of all types standing on them, standing up for themselves and for the future of the whole. I am imagining if you need to borrow mine, there are times it can be shared.

When you all get off it and what we have said worked, and EPA cleans it up and has cleaned up your yard to remove the lead. We will feel better. AND you will have a soapbox just in case you need it to carry the potatoes you are going to grow in your newly reclaimed soil or the blackberries when the season brings them.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

The people wearing the white tyvak suits are easier to see working at the former BF Goodrich plant because one of the first things they did in those suits was to clean off the fences so YOU CAN see them in there, working safe and doing it for the nearest neighbors and the 900 kids who go to school nearby and the kids who do a lot of deep breathing on the soccer fields just north of the plant.

EPA is here working on this 5 year old mess, but doing it as the emergency it has been all these years. Asbestos was applied to the surface of most structures, machinery and parts used throughout the facility and when the "Rip and Run" guy  removed what he could sell, he left the rubble and BOY is it loaded with friable asbestos!

I knew it was bad last fall when Rhonda Jefferies with DEQ, gasped when I told her the city had an inspector walk the plant once a week to check on break-ins. In the next breath she was able to speak she said, he should inspect from the street-side of the FENCE. It was THAT seriously dangerous. For a week now the trucks are loaded and we are able to say goodbye to load after load from the site, of Miami's BF Goodrich Superfund site.

BF Goodrich has other Superfund sites they left polluted (It is their business model to walk away, stall and hope the former workers who know as they say "where the bodies are buried" pass away without revealing the company's polluting secrets.)

One BF Goodrich Superfund site is 60 miles outside Los Angeles, CA, dealing with asbestos and the site in Calvert City, Kentucky which was dealt with by the state of Kentucky until EPA's understanding of the magnitude of contamination increased.

Our state of Oklahoma was charged with the oversight of the BF Goodrich site until EPA's understanding of the magnitude of contamination increased and they stepped in to begin this action on asbestos removal.
EPA can do the cleanup Miami deserves. But this is the moment to speak up, let's let EPA increase their understanding of the magnitude of contamination there is here so Miami gets the CLEANUP we need. Dear former workers we need you now to expand EPA's understanding while they are HERE.

Lawsuits for the individuals living in the nearby neighborhoods may end up compensating their participants, may end up with a buyout for some. But DEQ and EPA need to apply the pressure to the polluting company, our former friend, BF Goodrich, and their new owner, Michelin to DO THE RIGHT THING AND CLEAN UP THE SITE.

Whatever the milestones in your life you have accumulated or lived through, I am wishing you the victory, the relief or the satisfaction each has brought. Getting the Asbestos OUT of BF Goodrich is a milestone we are experiencing, and knowing it will protect human health, the health of people you know, of children who deserve long healthy lives makes us know the value of the removal action taking place in our behalf.

Another milestone we reached together was living through another major flood. Wondering about how Tar Creek lay her waters had me out collecting samples to analyze for heavy metals from willing neighbors on blocks that received heavy doses of the polluted creek water. How many more floods will we be spreading those metals on parks and yards? EPA needs to get with the Tar Creek in the Tar Creek Superfund Site. She gave her name to the site, and spills out 1 million gallons of tainted water EVERY DAY for 40 years. I say EPA, it is time to MILESTONE TAR CREEK!

The new EPA Region 6 Administrator David Grey and his assistant, Erin Chancellor are coming to Tar Creek June 28 and for an hour that day Milestones will be on our Wish List with them. Over a year ago, Erin came to LEAD Agency with Ken Wagner (who is now Oklahoma's Secretary of Energy and the Environment), when they both worked with Albert Kelly at the EPA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. We will certainly have reducing lead levels in children on that list and making sure there is funding to sample every property in Ottawa County for lead AND to remove and replace with clean yard soil when needed.

Reaching my newest decade brought garden work, friends, young friends, new friends, former students who span some of those past decades to be the friends I need most in my life now. Looking back, I was the young friend to some really special elders and now realize how special it is to cross those generations and be their elder now. These decades have given me good friends and personal milestones, but on a June day there is nothing more rewarding than finding beautiful ripe blackberries in the field and sharing the cobbler they become with those friends.

Blackberrily Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

I went to visit my friend Mary when she was taken with her family to the Red Cross Shelter in Miami at the Christian Church. She had seen the water was rising one night and thought by morning the family would gather their goods and leave for higher ground, but when they opened the door, their next step was into the rescue boat.

She is a dear woman who is the most resilient person I believe I ever met. But there she was at the shelter sitting on the cot and settled in for the long wait to get to go home. But this time, she will not go home. It was flooded and has ruined her only belongings and the grandchildren's toys and memories of the carefully taken care of things a person accumulates to remind her of the times past.

Mary manages. But then the phone rang and one of her sons died in the night. Last night. A deep grief can settle in on a person. And she of many, of yet many more in this state and the other states affected by the flood we will remember. She and those most touched will remember it in deeper ways. How much can a person manage? What is the tipping point? How many more people will be touched by the "weather" and the changes in frequency and severity we experience? When will it be just too many?

I think it is now. I am believing the things a simple person can do differently, well it is a good time to begin doing as well as each of our friends and their neighbors. WE  begin to reign in what ways we impact our world, ways we might just be impacting our very own environment or someone else's downstream.

The simple things like skipping the fertilizer on your yard this summer, because what you already had got washed downstream with every other flooded yard in the states affected, which now blend and rush down those rivers full to the brim and overloaded, spilled onto pastures and fields the farmers and ranchers had added fertilizer and all, all of it is headed to the Gulf of Mexico to widen and deepen the dead zone devoid of fish and life.

I am doing this because Mary can't take anymore. Mary will be my mantra and yours if you need her to be. She asked about all of our LEAD Agency regulars who are managing through with little flood affect in comparison, but then there is Martin Lively who has wheeled himself out of Miami, past the high waters and is way on his way through Kansas on a two-wheeler with himself as the motor making it take him on what I bet he will call, the Trip of a Lifetime. For me, it inspires me to bring my bike to work, so the errands can be done around town without burning more fossil fuels.

Houses and businesses are mucking out and leaving the doors open to begin the airing out process. It is the smell of a flood that can never be forgotten. But Mary's grandson will turn eleven this week and his ten years of gathered stuff is a pile of muck. And with his asthma, he will not be allowed to muck through it because the mold could kill him. That is a serious reality a kid should not have to know. Floods are a deep grief and each one touched knows losses lay there in piles scraped out to the road.

Our climate has changed and will continue changing, but that doesn't mean we can't each one do what we can individually. LEAD's 5th Community Garden Season had our kickoff this week with the Ottawa County Boys and Girls Club members right there on their first day of summer programming, digging and planting, watering and preparing what will be our southside pumpkin patch. Plants came from Cherokee Nation, Frisby's in Vinita and this week the Miami Library's Literacy Program. Our first Garden Party featured Grant Smith and our invited guests were our neighbors and the EPA who are bringing the cleanup of the asbestos for BF Goodrich.

It is one thing to have a flood impacted by a superfund site, but the un-superfund site cleanup for asbestos, which put neighbors and down-winders all at risk for mesothelioma. But this piece of our world is getting the fix and people, probably everyone you know will be protected by these actions. It is satisfying. But that cleanup could be better if ALL of the site was made better. All of the issues.

If you are wanting to begin those changes that make our lives better, get into learning how to speak up and say what you want and ask for all we need.

And one of things I want would be for Mary to have some peace, in a new house, a good book to read and time to grieve her losses and know that all of us are concentrating on doing the whats we can to make our piece of the world better.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Lois Lively helped remove the poison ivy patch last week from LEAD's Community Garden and made sure it will not be part of anyone's experience there. We took precautions, but not enough.

Poison ivy can cause rashes and blisters and Poison Ivy Blaster the magic elixir created by Miami, Oklahoma's own usually works for me and I will go nowhere without it.  But when my eyes almost swelled shut, I sought medical care this week from a little splat of exposure. The doctor asked about my airways and breathing, explaining the reaction had gone systemic which for some sensitive people can be life-threatening.

I often hear people say they are immune to poison ivy. That can change at any time, then the immunity to the allergy is lost.

I am finding out Poison ivy today isn't your mother's poison ivy. Climate change is making it more potent. Rising carbon dioxide, CO2, levels feed plants and poison ivy is effectively using it to grow bigger and produce more urushiol, the oil causing rashes. Evidence shows the urushiol gets more concentrated, in each part of the leaf, and the plants produce more leaves, stems and berries.

You surely were taught, "leaves of three let it be," to help remember what poison ivy looks like. 80% of us react to poison ivy and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have figured out how much of that oil it takes and it is 50 micrograms which is less than a grain of table salt!

We are understanding Climate Change is responsible for the early snowmelts, according to the National Climate Assessment because the planet is warming. Add to that all the heavy downpours this season in the Midwest and the resulting flooding.

To take a look locally Earl Hatley, LEAD Agency's Grand Riverkeeper will be the guide on a LightHawk flight beginning with Tar Creek to document the width of the Grand Lake watershed. LightHawk, an international non-profit based in Colorado uses aircraft and volunteer pilots to "accelerate conservation success through flight." Photographer J. Pat Carter, will document where our Tar Creek width and metals have gone,  and how she joins the Neosho and drops a load and proceeds on with more of them to Twin Bridges and helps the Neosho fill our lake with Kansas soils and her precious metals. We and of course the Spring River have been sending our sediment loads into the bathtub our lake is for decades. Waterkeeper Alliance made the flight arrangements for LEAD Agency's Grand Riverkeeper and Tar Creekkeeper.

The water loading can pass right through the dam, but we are filling the lake as all man-made lakes do, they fill and become more shallow, but GRDA is in the business of generating energy from the discharge of the water and in order to continue doing this, the lake has to have the power and the power comes from the height of the lake. So the Grand Lake watershed continues to grow, to be enlarged and as it does, more lands, homes and lives are affected.

We know that every Oklahoma County is under a State of Emergency and along the Arkansas River: Every large community will see major flooding within a week or less according to the National Weather Service. We are not alone with this slow motion disaster. Once the flash flooding subsides, the rest comes often slow enough to watch the worms "run for their lives."

Before my grandfather married my grandmother, he had been married to another Cherokee woman from Fort Smith and when she died, was buried there, but during a serious flood, her grave was washed away. Fort Smith is flooding this year which reminded me of the endless list of losses floods can cause.

The Illinois, the Missouri, the Arkansas and the Mississippi Rivers are all at risk of spilling over in the coming days. We are not alone, but joined in the newest worst flooding for many states  since 1927. That year, the Arkansas River was 80 miles wide in Arkansas. According to Christopher Burt that flood "was the seminal event that led to the federal flood-control program and gave the Army Corps of Engineers the job of controlling the nation's rivers via the erection of dams, dikes and other measures of flood abatement."

Tulsa and Sand Springs are closely watching 70-year-old levee systems for signs of a potentially catastrophic failure and have asked whole neighborhoods to evacuate for safety. Some levees in Arkansas have failed already causing flooding. We are all watching the lake levels and the amount of water allowed to be discharged.

We know the Army Corps of Engineers very well as they GRDA, and FERC are intimately involved with Miami's future. Perhaps at times we might sometimes know them as our other "Leaves of Three."

Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

Another night watching colored screens with tornados on the ground and listening to the weatherman dance from one to another, enough so, his team expanded and 3 others take on the other cells throughout the state.

Tonight, the smell of wood took us all off guard. None of us had heard of that. But this week, I traveled through Peggs, OK and slowed. Downed trees, broken uprooted lined the highway, but also along the side roads, large trees that had made summers shadier, more tolerable for the heat we all endure in Oklahoma. But the trees were cut in sections, segments removed so roads were accessible for the residents. Trees down for miles through the countryside and white trucks working on restoring power  and knowing they had miles more to accomplish.

But all along there, I was only looking, I failed to notice, to follow the smell of wood, as the weatherman had mentioned I know it would have been there, had to have been. The fresh woods were only taken down 2 days before, just as tonight more of the shady woods were going down again, as a series of tornados were being tracked by the colors of the wrapped around features throughout the state.

We wait and watch and wonder whose lives are changing as they and we settle in with the weather as it comes upon us. Others wait for the all clear signal, still others wonder how much closer the water will come as it rises, higher so very slowly.

Weather watchers we all used to be, when that was the way we determined what was coming at us. We watched the color of the clouds, the temperature, the wind and the hail we knew would be coming. At night we sat on the porch and watched the lightning as it lit up the sky and counted until we heard the thunder to determine how many miles the storm was from reaching us. We were good at it, but somehow we turned it all over to the “weathermen” and the colored screens and radar. And days like we have had lately and endless nights, I am grateful they have the stamina to keep it going, keeping ever ready to be our fulltime weather-watchers.

But what we have done to amplify our own weather? What ways are we all complicit in the changing climate we are experiencing? Each of us can do better. Changing can be satisfying, and each of us can become members of a grateful nation as we each make those decisions.

I read the coal miners chapter in Hidden America by Jeanne Marie Laskas and what their work was like and how the world beneath us is for them and why they toile to help keep the lights on. And it made me want to simply turn the light off and give them a break.

And then just that suddenly the lights, all of them and the colored screen with the multiple colors indicated headed this way and that way went off. The wind died down and the rains have stopped. I stepped outside to not listen but to smell for the new broken wood and am pleased not to find it.

Out on the prairie, the only sound is the water rushing in the gully. No wind. No rain. Just dark upon us all. And in my mind are the people in shelters coming out, those others up and wondering what has happened to neighbors, towns, the country roads that connect us. And wait for daylight for news of who have been affected, lost lives, or property.

Not even the birds can be heard, what a night they have experienced, nights in a row for them. They who are left with us also wait for the daylight and wish for one more moment of the power of coal to light up the screens and bring back the weatherman to assure us of what we are assessing. The storm has passed.

The first bird is speaking, sending that message out she has survived. The crickets made it, the wind still, the gully water rushing and then just for a moment the moon, the only light.

Peaceful it is, and peace be upon you all as we learn the rain has returned and filled the whole sky wet  yet again.
Just how much can the gully hold? When will it breech the mudroom and fill the floor? Why keep the lake level so high? How do we begin the work of clean up when more keeps coming? Homes filling with water, the water filled with what all we have left to change it from the life-giving water to the toxic waste of the blends of what we left in the garage, what was spread on our lawns, all the dog poop left in the yards all the cow manure stacked up in feed lots and chicken waste, at the edge of poultry houses.

Here in the dark, the questions keep coming and the resolve to do the small things tomorrow to help others and respond to ways I contribute to the bigger picture.

Reflectively yours ~ Rebecca Jim

It was summer vacation after the Cherokee Volunteers had started their Tar Creek Project. They were learning everything Tar Creek and all things associated with the superfund site when I called Rokho Kim about his research.

He had conducted a study predicting lead exposure by examining baby teeth in 1995 that linked extreme obesity to early exposures. A high school student asked me a simple question while riding in my car one night after an EPA meeting held in Picher. Did I think she might have been lead poisoned as a child?

She explained she had grown up in Quapaw, with a chat pile in her yard that she climbed, but also played in the sandbox her dad had built and filled with, not rough sand, but the softest sand ever, sand we know now was loaded with 10 times more lead than the regular chat sand he might have used. Dr. Kim suggested bringing her to Boston for a bone lead scan by an instrument I learned later he had a hand in developing, but later explained a baby tooth is like a "Time Capsule" and perhaps I could send one of her baby teeth. Knowing as an only child, her mother would have saved her baby teeth, I asked if he could analyze hers and other teeth from additional residents and... be our Tooth Fairy? 

He didn’t laugh because he was a serious student, a medical doctor and a Korean activist in his home country, risking his life for freedom and justice and had never heard of the Tooth Fairy. But he did agree.It is because she asked that question, we got answers. It isn’t always quick to get answers, as we learned, but the answers did come. All of the teeth we sent had lead in them, but the girl’s, the girl who asked the question, could she have been lead poisoned?

She got her answer, but the Harvard School of Public Health found many more questions to ask about exposures to metals our babies and the health and behavioral consequences that may follow. Harvard sent their brightest to ask many more questions and seek answers for our community.

I think looking back on these years since meeting Kim on the phone and know that the years may change many things about us, but they have not changed my quest and yours for answers. Is our environment making us sick? Are there long term effects from our exposures? If those questions are answered with YES, then my next question is: Can we make our environment safer? And the next question is to you: will you help by asking your questions?

I met Kim a number of years later. He was working with the World Health Organization, based in  Geneva, Switzerland and was back in Boston visiting his Harvard colleagues.

There was a lot I never knew about Dr. Kim. But I marched with him and 10,000 other people in the streets of  Boston March 16, 2003, while millions of others were marching around the world for peace and no war with Iraq.  He marched with other Koreans and I marched with Earl Hatley, wearing our Cherokee Volunteer jackets with Ghandi's message on the back: You must be the change you wish to see in the world. And 3 days later the Iraq War began.

It seems like war is edging closer to us again, all these years later, another old man’s war where young men and women do the dying.

There was a lot I didn’t know about Rokho Kim back then, and why laughing about the Tooth Fairy” I had asked him to be for us wouldn’t be funny to him then, and probably with his life experiences might still not bring a smile of recognition now.

When Rokho graduated from Harvard shortly after our phone conversation in 1995, he was awarded the Albert Switzer Humanitarian Award, For his "reverence for life" for his devotion to the Korean workers suffering from occupational diseases.  He was a founding member of Korean Physicians for Humanitarian Actions in 1987.  He was a leader in the Great Labor Uprising, the democratization of 1987 when millions filled the streets to end authoritarian rule. He is known for untiring activities promoting "health as a human right" and advocating for the workers and the urban poor since then in South Korea.

I am thinking they knew a lot more about his struggles and work in Korea under the authoritarian regime than I did, but what he has done since touches my heart as well.

We know climate is changing and the polar ice is melting at such a rate, there will be a northern passage open for shipping. The oceans are rising and Rokho’s latest work with the WHO has been in Figi and other Pacific Island nations most at risk from shrinking land base, infectious and non-transmittable diseases.

Ottawa County's island residents from Micronesia, may never be able to go back to their island homes due to climate change and its health impacts there. I stand with Dr. Kim and I invite you to do so as well for Health as a Human Right, as is peace and our right to ask the serious questions.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim 

Elizabeth Elliot from Natural Resource Conservation Service sent me a link to the Plants of the Monarch Butterfly, Southern Great Plains Staff Guide. I spent an hour looking through it and pondering which plants are living in my yard and the surrounding fields. The guide shows the flower, the stem, leaves and get this: the back of the flower.
 
All these years, I never peaked behind or under the flower, never really paid attention to the unique features of the leaves and how they attach to the stems. But as I looked through the pages, my wildflowers are exactly what the butterflies need.

It got dark too quickly, but morning will come so my camera can fully see these most admired flowers more clearly. An old rose is blooming on the LEAD Agency office fence but the wild roses are blooming in the field and the fence rows. The milkweed by the backdoor and the one near the walnut tree are cousins with unique differences.
 
The Audubon Society recommends native plants for their resilience and identifies the favorite trees of a number of birds though not all birds nest in trees. Not the barn owls who actually have lived in my barn for perhaps an owl generation or two. The phoebe at my mother's house made a mud nest over the front door that we haven't been able to use in at least 10 years because she or her little ones return and use it again each year. A fellow painted her house and said it was the only time he ever painted around a bird nest since we wouldn't let him remove it!
 
Birds are getting a lot thrown at them right now as the climate changes and insect species they depend on go extinct and their territorial boundaries shift.  Oklahoma University Master's student Heather LePage is doing a study on the swallows nesting in the chat piles. Those birds are dealing with silica and heavy metals found in the chat as well as the water they drink there. All of us can learn more about her study at the National Environmental Conference at Tar Creek  September 17-18 at NEO A&M College.
 
Humans are changing the environment. What we use, what it's made of and how long it lasts. Things I used to do to "Help" birds included putting the dryer lint out along with strings and bits of fabric for birds to pad their nest and maybe even add a bit of color to their surroundings. I don't add dryer lint to their nesting materials any more since understanding the clothes we wear made with polyester or other man-made synthetic fibers breakdown in the washer and go down the drain unrestrained at waste water treatment facilities and become 35% of the micro plastics found in the oceans!
 
35% of the micro-plastics are from our CLOTHING/Textiles. That is our pollution out there. Straws, plastic bottles and those white plastic sacks are there of course, but what you don't see is there, too and fish are consuming our micro-plastics and we consume the fish.
 
No one would indulge scoops of plastic by choice and no one knows for sure how what we are consuming will ultimately affect us. The on-going research done both by consumer advocates and by industry oddly give differing opinions. But the little ones, the insects, birds and the fishes may all be the canaries for us on this subject. They can do nothing, but we can make decisions on what we purchase and certainly be more mindful of how we ultimately discard it.
 
Rain, we have surely had some and the LEAD Agency Community Garden is way behind where we thought we would be by now. But the rains will cease and it will flourish and our Garden Parties will begin on June 6 with Grant Smith performing during his hometown visit.
Rain has my own garden way behind too. But intense rainfall damages crops throughout the Midwest when the flood water recedes the soil may be washed away. As the climate changes the models predict the region will experience even more frequent and intense precipitation events in the coming decades.
We have been treating our soil like dirt. Our gardens and cropland don't need dirt, they require soil which is alive with microorganisms. Soil grows 95% of all the food we eat, so we better start respecting it and quit taking it for granted since it has always been there. Grow your own compost and your garden will thank you. Feed your soil and it will feed you. But mind what you add, the OSU Extension Office can analyze your garden soil and give you a prescription for what you need to add before you over apply and get it loaded with too much phosphorus, which has occurred here in Ottawa County.
 
I never met Louis Armstrong, but I got to hear him sing What a Wonderful World, and isn't it?
 
I see trees of green
Red roses too
I see them bloom
For me and you
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world
 
Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim

Grumble. Then fuss about a wrong, or a right, maybe cuss out loud in your kitchen or in your car. Allow a person to hear you. Then say it in the grocery line or at the big store at the edge of town. Complaining is actually great practice for a budding activist.

What pushes some to the next step? A personal experience or a longing can do it.
I have a friend a year older than me who said while at college he watched from his dorm window  protesters rallying to end the war in Viet Nam and his greatest regret was not walking down the stairs and joining them. He waited all his life and one of his proudest moments has been joining the teacher demonstrations at the State Capitol years later, asking for education funding.

There are a couple of songs that get in your head but could have been written for budding activists. Remember that song by Aaron Tippin: You have to Stand for Something or you'll fall for anything? It is the standing for something that can work for you.The other song demands a story. Years ago at the Little Mr. Cherokee Contest for the 4&5 year olds, three little boys sat on the step in the Cherokee Council Chambers in their ribbon shirts with finger-woven sashes when one of them suddenly began a verse of Lee Greenwood's Proud to be an American and just as quickly the other two covered their ears with their hands so as not to hear it!

That's how I feel lots of times when a friend asks me what issue I am working on at a particular time, and I burst out practically in song quickly telling it. It's as if the hands virtually cover the ears of some, but demonstrating clearly: "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction."

Who will speak up once I go home and stay on the farm? Land that lies ready for attention without toxic waste or bad water. It needs exploring, butterfly watching and wildflower walks. Fish to catch and clay to dig, process and charm into form. So in preparation for that day, come by the LEAD Agency for private lessons on activism. Sign your kids and grandchildren up for the Youth Activist Trainings that will be held monthly beginning this summer. The pecan tree Janet Humphrey brought for the orchard I am starting there was symbolic. “If your plan is for one year plant rice. If your plan is for ten years plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years educate children. ” ― Confucius

Learn how to be brave enough to speak up.

How do you become brave? Try something new, even a recipe, learn what wrongs need righting and how much this community and others deserve justice. Start with the Declaration of Independence, the right to pursue happiness and focus on the phrase in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag "justice for all."

Activists from the 60's went quiet. We knew how to change the world. Stop wars, clean up the environment, desegregate schools, big stuff like PEACE. But once we accomplished these huge goals and stopped the DRAFT, we got jobs, became our parents and what I say, went to sleep. To replace them or wake up who's left of them, coffee's on at LEAD Agency.

People power can change the world and save sacred and natural areas by speaking up, standing up until the impossible happens.

Chaco Canyon in New Mexico is magic and ancient. I went there once and walked through the canyon with a group of Native 8th graders. The Navajo lived there for several centuries and within the canyon grew peach orchards that helped sustain them. When the Army forced  them to leave, Kit Carson and his men cut down the trees and signed the wall in the canyon claiming their work.

100 years later, my son as a 16 year old carried out a service project with the 8th graders, planting a peach tree to begin rebuilding the orchard of the Navajo in the canyon.

This sacred space will be protected from oil and gas extraction because that was banned this week. Protection can come slowly, slower much slower than the river when it rises with flood waters. But it can come.

Two years ago an astonishing event occurred in New Zealand when the government granted the Whanganui River legal personhood—a status in keeping with the Maori worldview that the river is a living entity and conferred on it “all the rights, powers, duties, and liabilities” of an individual. The Maori say:“I am the river, and the river is me.” An activist involved in this movement pointed out, "It wasn't the politicians who toppled the Berlin Wall, it was the people."

It can take a movement and you can join it. We have mountains of chat, we have Tar Creek, we have our rivers and what was once the Grandest Lake ever. We have benzene and asbestos at BF Goodrich bordered by a neighborhood, schools and soccer fields and we have children to protect from lead poisoning. And air issues.
Imagine you standing up, taking on our issues, it just takes the people.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

I saw Nancy Gee early Monday morning standing in line for jury duty along with surely another 100 people waiting to get into the courthouse. They allowed me to get into the County Commissioner's Monday morning meeting to make sure they had the information on the Tar Creek Strategic Plan and know that the deadline for comments had been extended to May 10.

When Kindergarten classes were held in what was called Lincoln Elementary School a couple of decades ago, I remember seeing Nancy Gee taking her students out to meet their community. They kept together, minded and always returned knowing more about the town where they lived.  This week that sort of happened again. It was a joy to see a whole covey of students emerge out of what is now Miami's Academy and begin their walk into the community. I saw it all. For me it takes 380 steps to go from their front door to the front door of the LEAD Agency which was my lookout.

LEAD had invited the students and their teachers to come over to begin a partnership for the future. We are not sure what it will look like, but it starts with that first step (and finishes 380 steps later!). What a great beginning with the teamwork effort they demonstrated when constructing a new raised bed donated from the Miami Public Library Community Gardening project to our organization.

The Academy students had already performed some incredible work this year on what we are calling their BF Goodrich Project. When we informed them about the asbestos that was discovered this year at the abandoned tire plant, they used their personal skills to develop ways to educate themselves about the dangers present there, the known benzene, but the newly discovered risk of exposure to asbestos left on site.

The state of Oklahoma might try to stop towns and cities from banning this or that, but the students at the Academy will take it on, they will educate themselves and figure out ways to educate the public.

Everyone at the Academy wrote letters that we made available to the City, the DEQ and the EPA, not asking for much, just for the cleanup to make this town safer to live in. They took a stand and they can do more. If you have a club or organization and want to learn more bet you could book the students, or we will share their presentation and short movie with you. If you teach and need a good way to interest your students these last weeks of school, think about this lesson.

Asbestos was widely used at the BF Goodrich plant during the 40 years it operated and lots of it was left behind. Asbestos can take almost that long to ruin a person's lungs and cause Mesothelioma, "a rare, aggressive form of cancer that develops in the linings of the lungs, abdomen, heart or testes. The only known cause of malignant mesothelioma is asbestos."

We don't need any more people exposed and these young people have been our best hope out in their circles of friends, letting them know for months, the risk that lay just inside the fence surrounding the BF Goodrich plant, and warning them to STAY OUT.  The chain-link fence is a barrier that can keep some folks out of the site, but the fence continues to be breached and anyone entering can bring out these deadly fibers on their clothes and share them with family and friends. Spread the word there are now cameras watching!

There will be actions occurring on the site very soon, but if EPA, the City and the DEQ thought there were really people concerned, there could be quicker actions. It is worth the effort to ask for more, even to have our status as a Superfund site reassessed since it sits there on the list with many more like ours that "do not qualify based on existing information" all over the nation. There are already BF Goodrich Superfund sites and our mess is not new to their corporate ways. Remember, companies believe it is cheaper to pollute than the fines would be.

The State of Oklahoma has some new laws that will go into effect this year. People in towns don't have to worry about organizing and attempting to curtail pollution, our state just took your rights away.

But Nancy Gee and others who have followed her have led our children out into the world, wide-eyed to see how their community works, and more will wake up soon and really get what she was showing, that they would be those leaders stepping into those roles and taking on the future we will live through, and wouldn't she be proud to know there are still young people walking out of that old Lincoln school, stepping out and standing in the street with the message, this is our world now and we want it better!

It was like the Wizard of Oz  how Nancy Gee came into this story and how this came together. God bless her!

Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

Last Saturday I rode with internationally known geologists James and Susan Aber, retired Emporia State University professors on a field trip. A group of students followed with their instructor Marcia Schulmeister to the Flint Hills to discover the beauty, but also to learn about the Cottonwood Limestone formation.

There it lay exposed because of what is known as "Kansas Burning" the annual burning of the tall grass prairie. And exposed it lay. As if the rocks were the back bones, perhaps the ribs of the earth, starkly white against the green of the new emerging grasses. To determine these were the Cottonwood limestone in yet another way, one could strike it with some vigor with your hammer, and it has a tone that almost rings! (In my mind, I wondered if a series of the stones could be struck to create a tune of some sort out there on the prairie?)

We paid attention and found evidence of the Neva, the geological formation beneath the Cottonwood, which for some reason was James Aber's favorite, unusual because of its different "look" caused by its relationship with exposure to groundwater. The Permian era strata laid together throughout time and though exposed on the ridges of the Flint Hills, their presence and durability have kept the hills from change the ages might have brought.

The Abers are really a pair, and James looks at the BIG PICTURE, but Susie was reminding us all day to look down and notice the rock samples we might find. I found a doosie! It looked like an arrowhead on one side and a vertebrate on the other, with each side a perfect worry stone to develop. When I was a teenager, I gave my dad his first "worry stone" and he wore it plum through worrying about me.

To get to Emporia, means driving 3 hours through Kansas and seeing the burnt or burning fields, the greening grasses and evidence of oil and gas production. I asked the Abers about fracking and they promptly stated, it isn't the fracking, which by the way was introduced in Kansas, it is the injection wells that cause earthquakes. James explained in 1912 people were looking for domes and anticlines in the quest for oil in the Mississippian and hit granite and gave up. But it looked like they had found it now.

Lots of the middle of the United States were shallow seas and all the marine life through the ages are what later became the Cottonwood formation we studied all that day with the students.

That shallow sea made me think of Great Lakes and that brought me to thinking about how Toledo, Ohio as a city made a decision that may change the way we think about our current water bodies. That city passed a law giving Lake Erie Personhood status. This allows Toledo citizens to act as legal guardians for Lake Erie, and make polluters pay for cleanup costs.

Imagine this for a minute. I am. First thing I will do is bring a resolution to the LEAD Agency Board of Directors at our next meeting, always the last Thursday of the month, which is open to the public, and ask if they would vote on declaring personhood status to Tar Creek. She has had a really hard time, and although she has a Tar Creekkeeper, wouldn't she fair better if she got more respect and our organization, even if the city of Miami, or the town of Commerce might not want to give her personhood status, LEAD Agency could.

Why not?

We will start with Tar Creek, then we will look at Grand River next. What goes down Tar Creek ends up in our dammed up Grand River doesn't it? AND don't the Spring River and the Neosho when they join form the Grand River? Well on this trip to Kansas, right in the middle of the valley we were following observing the Cottonwood Formation, was the Cottonwood River, which the Abers explained was actually the headwaters for the Neosho River.
After the students gave it up that day, we traveled on to a special place few people get to see, the Kaw Nation's, Memorial, the "People of the Wind" who by treaty left Kansas in 1873 for present day Oklahoma.

The colorful circular memorial reads,
“Wiblaha Wakanda. Bless all who walk here. May we know and respect all your creation and what you have taught our people.”
We looked on quietly with respect and felt the presence of the Kaw as the wind joined and chilled us.

It is wind that was my first introduction to the Abers when they came to NEO several years ago and taught Kite aerial photography (KAP), a form of remote sensing—collecting information about an object from a distance. We took pictures of NEO football stadium with using aerial photography that day. We have one of the fanciest kites ever and can use it to take photos when drones are not allowed.

The wind and the water and people who bring them together remind us to walk gently on this Earth, her bones are showing as we eek more out of her and pollute her streams and foul her air.

For us all Everyday must now be Earth Day.

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim

This State of mine allows mine water to roll down Tar Creek 40 years without outrage into a drinking water reservoir understanding that at this rate another 30 years may pass before it runs clean. This state of mine will find a way to allow runoff from passive treatment systems in the Tar Creek Superfund site to be loaded with nutrients and celebrate it as a success, replacing metals with nutrients. This state of mine puts up with decades to complete the cleanup of the once largest superfund site and celebrates success because it will be deemed smaller.

This state of mine passes bills to give polluters rights so quickly and quietly no one knows it is happening.
This state of mine could pass rules to protect children from living in housing that is known to contain lead paint. It could pass legislation to protect children and teams of people could be taught how to renovate, repair and paint safely and be protective of the young. State-wide and individual towns might seek funding opportunities to address the issue of the OLD housing stock we have in Oklahoma. Homes which were built before 1950 almost always have been painted and that OLD paint was probably loaded with lead and poison children living in them.

This state of mine protects oil and gas by not allowing towns to ban plastics bags while 59 countries like France, Greece, Mexico AND India, the largest democracy in the world has. 6 US states including New York  have, too. But this state of mine stands tall with Alabama to not allow a ban of any sort for plastic bags. Goodness, we must stand with our state's real blood, oil.

Oklahoma won't be able to keep oil and gas alive all by ourselves. the world is waking up, and someday Oklahoma will too. The choice does not have to be a state's choice. Each individual can walk into any store in the state and BRING THIER OWN reusable sack or vessel to carry your goods home. You and I have choices each time we make purchases. Forget the styrene food containers, too. Bring your own take home containers, have them filled or use a bit of aluminum foil. This state won't say a peep against these personal efforts until they find out it is a movement and then they will attempt to ban personal choices somehow.

This state of mine is an example of what can go wrong very wrong. But as a land owner and Tar Creekkeeper I will not remain silent. But this state of mine could use new thinking not "stinking thinking" as Albert Ellis the Behavioral Therapist would call it. The great land run taking place now will place more fertile ground under roofs of chicken barns and more fracked land ruined and the water underground tainted with chemicals we can't even pronounce, should we be privy to be given their names.

The great land run will take all our water this time, too and the old lead paint and Tar Creek's chat will leave ever more children too dumb to know better.

This all sounds so dire and negative because sometimes we have to face where we live and the choices being made here are looking dire.

But the look on the faces of the children living in the home in Commerce, OK where a couple of gentle old souls spent some time sealing the lead paint on their front porch, made all the difference. Why bother and fret over what the state does or doesn't do, when we as individuals can lift our own selves up and make someone else's life better.

That is what Jennifer Lunsford did every time she got up in the morning, she brightened the lives she encountered, ones she went to school with, worked with and spent her life loving. She came into my life when I first went to work in Miami at Will Rogers and Indian Education agreed to let us start an Indian Club and start assisting our students in designing and making their tribal dance clothing. Barbara, her mother was set on making sure Jennifer could dance in her Apache dress and made it. I remember the color and weight of the skins that were used.

I do have to admit, some years back I prepared photo albums, so looking through them, there she was as a 7th grader doing the Lord's Prayer in sign language. So many people have seen her perform. She was such a young child. And really that was how I felt again, seeing her in her Apache dress in her coffin, she was so young, a gift and bright light now gone.

        So be good to your kids, go gently upon this earth, think about your garden because:
                       "To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow."- Audrey Hepburn

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

UN Messenger of Peace, Jane Goodall turned 85 this week. Some other things happened this week that made listening to her message extremely relevant. She said, "What is important is hope. If we don't have hope we give up. We do nothing. and in this world we must have hope for a better future."

She went on to say what I have been feeling lately and that is, "It is you young people who give me the most hope. When you understand the problems and are empowered to take action what you are doing around the world is unbelievable." Two of the most remarkable young people allowed me to join them at the Fairland Schools' Denim and Diamonds fundraiser. When the two were Cherokee Volunteers at Miami High School after their study of our environmental and political issues faced at Tar Creek they stood up, took on all the members of then Governor Keating's Task Force on Tar Creek in an exemplary demonstration of empowered youth. Moments such as this are embedded in my memory especially after reading Jane Goodall's reminder of the hope she has for the future because of the indomitable human spirit she has seen with people overcoming seemingly insurmountable problems around the world.

I was on a panel this week at the University of Central Oklahoma with degreed and credentialed people to discuss Environmental Justice and Inclusive Sustainability at the student organized  Summit, and after listening to the higher level approaches to the questions posed, I simply said environmental justice happens in places to people who are exposed to environmental toxins where they live and gave the invitation to come and see ours and meet us.

This week the EPA took the Tar Creek Superfund Site off the Administrator's Emphasis List of Superfund sites. Not yet a month ago the Strategic Plan was issued which we have until April 12 to submit comments. Remembering Jane's message, on hope, my hope is our comments will be considered.

We are grateful for the commitment of $16 million a year, but at this rate, their own plan states it will take decades to complete the cleanup. That does not seem accelerated to me. Chat piles will be trucked this way and that way, sold or stacked on site and while we will have thousands of residential yards not yet even sampled. The sampling is voluntary, and the EPA funding is keeping up with demand, because few people are calling the DEQ number 800-522-0206. I am eternally optimistic, but hope is hard to hold on to when a county full of thoughtful people do not seem to want to ensure the future generations won't have to deal with lead in their yards. Because so few children are having their blood lead checked, our percentage of children lead poisoned is really low, but we have no way of knowing if there are more who have yet to be found. I do have hope but what did Ronald Reagan say, trust but verify? Shouldn't we verify our kids are not silently being lead poisoned? If they are, the source can be removed and the child's future can be protected since lead poisoning is a totally preventable disease.

Another EPA deadline next week is for your comments on the change to the Clean Water Act which would change the definition of Waters of the US. Streams, creeks and rivers fill when it rains and dry creek beds, ditches and wetlands fill and flow into them. Sometimes these can transport pollution and cause harm. This happened here last summer with the J-M Farms spill that ended up in Tar Creek killing thousands of fish. Because of the Clean Water Act as it is now, J-M cleaned it up and paid their fines. We have until April 15 to let EPA know we want our water to continue to be protected, whether it is our Tar Creek or the Neosho or all the other water bodies you care about. We want the Clean Water Act to protect our water, not be changed to protect polluters.

Jane Goodall has the hope we need right now, "When you understand the problems and are empowered to take action what you are doing around the world is unbelievable," she said. I want to have hope you will make some comments about how you want the cleanup to happen in Ottawa County at the Tar Creek Superfund site, that you want it cleaned up before the decades pass your kids by. AND find out if your children are lead poisoned and where it is coming from so the lead can be removed. I have a great deal of hope just like Jane and know that, "we will only gain our human potential when head and heart work in harmony."

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
 
Comments can be made until April 12 by emailing R6_Tar-Creek_Site@epa.gov
To review the proposal, go to https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0601269 and click on Tar Creek Strategic Plan.
Read the proposed rule change to the Clean Water Act here: https://www.federalregister.gov/…
By April 15 Submit your comments,  identified by Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OW-2018-0149, at https://www.regulations.gov

Water Day at the Oklahoma Capitol was hours long with speakers and attempts to train regular people  how to talk to elected representatives and time to engage many of them, regrouping with conservatives, I mean conservationists. There was a time not so long ago when they may have been. Water issues for LEAD Agency ranged from Tar Creek's metals, Poultry Expansion and the effects on the Roubidoux Aquifer by BF Goodrich. (Tim Jones says it!)

Drew Edmondson provided proof of this when quoting from the Robert S. Kerr book, Land, Wood and Water. The Water protector organizations were delegated to the 1st floor of the capitol, and if you have been to the building, you may never have seen what felt like the basement, a place where the B-team and step-children could be left to not be a bother to the daily doings of the “real” people. But in that place, we grew closer and had the time to visit and understand more deeply the reasons these people came to speak out for water.

Yes, Drew Edmondson, who only months ago had sought the highest office in Oklahoma, was not speaking to the legislature, but to this hardy group of leaders who spend their days, spend their lives in the quest to protect the silent hope for the future, our shared water.

He began with a quote by Robert S. Kerr, a former Oklahoma Governor, “It is in our power, under the watchful eyes of God, to determine the physical form of the world in which we live. We can make it a paradise of ‘land, wood, and water’ or by neglect, permit it to become a desert. The choice is ours.”

The choice is certainly ours, but our elected officials may vote otherwise if they are never told how we feel about water and how our future relies on their being the best stewards of it while in power. So going in groups to visit our elected officials was a way to experience taking the people to the people in power. And to see that happen best was to see Berkley Ulrey, a 10 year old, take it to heart and stand right up there and ask to be heard. And BOY WAS HE!

Last Saturday at NEO the musical The Picher Project began and with each page the readers turned in unison, I found myself attempting to sit lower and lower in my chair as it became ever more apparent a character practically on every page was me. I know it because those were my own words spoken, things I remember saying decades ago, and as recently as the day before.

The choice is ours, as Robert S. Kerr had said, and to be captured in prose written by these talented “outsiders from New York City” for making those choices was humbling beyond measure. Their audience stayed as we had hoped and gave them feedback after the reading, but in different ways than we had imagined. The feedback was not from the audience, it came from individuals to individuals. People stayed and shared intimate feelings, stories of loss and yes, tears streamed as these were told. Lauren Pelaia, Quentin Madia and Alex Knezevic had done it, they had captured the essence of us, they had come to love Picher, and with their efforts, given a pride back that has ricocheted since their leaving.

The years have passed but Oklahoma should heed late President Eisenhower’s suggestions “we must make the best use of every drop of water which falls on our soil” and with that direction, Water people walked the halls of our capital, some with reservations, but the ten year old took the mission to heart and directed his message to representatives, their aides, to every keen person from 911 on the 4th floor rotunda and then well practiced, on seeing Governor Stitt, approached him on the move to relate how much he cared about the environmental missions for his very future. As it turned out, the Water protectors had been scheduled for time with the Governor who had not been available to meet with them, but instead heard our message from this child.

He made us proud, but think about it. What are we leaving him and the generations to come? The future will be bleak and the chicken houses empty without water, the aquifers left for the future cannot give what we wasted to cool the chicks in the hot summers, springs and falls on every day over 80 degrees. Didn’t President Eisenhower stress: ”best use of every drop of water?” Are we doing that?

Oil and gas extraction and agriculture are taking more than their share to help make us the waterless wasteland in the middle of the country and this will only lead to more hometowns which had promise and potential becoming places we use up and walk away from.

The Picher Project found that the heart and soul of a town can live on, but each one of these towns could have lived on. Extraction of our precious resources will leave us with no place left to live.

LEAD Agency represented our issues and our hopes with the incredible team we took to the capitol. These are serious times and our 10 year old Water Protector and his allies need your voices speaking up, too. Myself, I am pulling that "I like IKE" button out and wearing it proudly all day.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Three young performing artists are spending a Spring Break this year in Picher and our surroundings. Their friends might have gone skiing, or to the beach, maybe on a mission trip in a foreign country, but these three flew into Joplin, followed Joplin Globe reporter Kimberly Barker through the back roads to Picher for the singular motive to capture us and our essence for the musical they are creating.

There is something special about their excitement and their acceptance of this place into their lives. For over a year, this place has been their world apart from the New York City scene they lived. They have read every article, seen YouTube, searched obituaries, learned about the winning 1984 Gorilla team, no actually WATCHED the whole game!
During the week they are meeting as many people as they can to make sure our voices woven into this amazing story is told with the desired measure of truth and respect. And then put to... music. We ought to have more music in our lives, much of our lives are actually songs unsung... as yet.

Tune into their work on The Picher Project on Facebook, get excited, enjoy being discovered and know our story is being told when hundreds of other damaged places are still getting little respect, no let up of pollution pouring down their streams and rivers. Maybe this story will inspire a nation to wake up to the harm corporations: mining, manufacturing, even agriculture can cause to the environment, but also those who toil those who work their youth away only to leave their world too soon. Come listen to the Picher Project Saturday at 1:30 in Commons Hall at NEO, leave with a tune.

Their work is with us, but those folks in Colorado, Montana with orange colored streams and rivers know our voices are theirs. Perhaps they will be humming these tunes and standing a little taller knowing soon the nation might know just a bit more about mining, and industry devoid of consequences, what good regulations might do to protect our world, our water, our resources.

You got to know these young people are not alone in knowing there is some heart in these mined places:  Mary Kathryn Nagle captured in her play Miss Lead, and the incredible work being done by Mary Sue Price on the trilogy she calls Chat Piles. What does this mean? Live your life like it matters, say what you think, no matter who hears you. Express yourself and want a better life, some justice, where ever you are, speak your truth and hey someone may quote you and pretty soon, your character is telling the world all about how to.

We truly do have art in this place and poet Maryann Hurtt found us, Jim Stricklan recently released a CD with a Tar Creek song in it and EPA's Bill Honker wrote "Made to Last" about a mining town.

There is a quote on my wall at home, "People need more than jobs and the economy, they also need art, they need spirituality and they need to touch wild, flowing water and they need it to run through their town," according to the Poudre Riverkeeper, Gary Wockner.

Last Saturday, I went to Tahlequah to honor an artist who has depicted historic Cherokee stories for decades. Murv Jacob had died a few weeks earlier and we gathered by the creek that runs through a park in the heart of the town he loved. And I thought, this is why Miami is where it is banked up by the Neosho River and why NEO A&M College is set beside Tar Creek, and why some of the historic homes in the town are situated nearby, too. Our creek was loved once. Get that? Loved. People gathered by it, told their stories, found time to wade in it, fish a little.

We have many ways for us to reflect about water. You can have too much water, as the states north of us have found out. Photos cannot describe the vast scale flooding has caused, it is still happening, changing lives and making difficult times unbearable. Farmers are telling their cattle and calves are lost, gone to water. Roads and whole counties shut off. During Calvin Coolidge's tenure the big flood came, sandbags failed, rescues were required but then and now how do you rescue herds? and make plowed ground work again?

We still have letters which need to be written expressing our comments on the Waters of the U.S. (WOTUS) and the Strategic Plan for Tar Creek with deadlines in April. But this Spring Break, hey, think about how we put place and water to song, give them the respect they need, and enjoy the enthusiasm artists of all sorts bring to our lives.

Next week with Spring Break over, join LEAD Agency on Wednesday down at the Oklahoma State Capitol Building in the first floor Rotunda for Lobby Day for Water. If you are out there catching a spoonbill, or a crappie, if you put your kayak into the water at Twin Bridges, if you had a full glass of water today, join us from 10 until 2 pm March 27 as we speak out for water! Water is life. She is needing our help, Water Protectors!

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
 
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/2001/05/mississippi-river-flood-culture/

When Ken Wagner called, it had been over a year since he had been in our office. He and Erin Chancellor came from EPA Headquarters to meet Tar Creekers since Tar Creek had been on the Administrator’s Emphasis List of Superfund Sites Targeted for Immediate, Intense Action. Meet us, they did, in 10 minute intervals; we had all sorts of community members visit about their concerns and hopes for the future. Ken and Erin left their jobs at the Washington, D.C., Erin to be the Chief of Staff for EPA Region 6 in Dallas, and Ken to serve as Oklahoma’s Secretary of Energy and the Environment chosen by Governor Stitt.

So when Ken called, I pulled over and turned the car off. There were countless issues to ask him, like: will he be watchful for oil and gas leases let too close to Tar Creek that might cause earthquakes that could cause collapse, could he be mindful of the Roubidoux being depleted by the influx of poultry industry use, could he consider the burden our environmental justice communities already have and help protect us from more? How many times do you get the chance to talk to people in power over any sort of environment, much less our own here in Oklahoma? He called to apologize for not knowing soon enough about the Meet and Greet at Tar Creek we were hosting that very day. He regretted it because the New Strategic Plan for Tar Creek was going to be announced at our event…. No I hadn’t heard… he assured me he would email it as soon as it was officially released.

It all came together for me. You might not remember, but just last week, I was shuffled out of a meeting, shunned as it seemed, but now I understand it to have been the coolest thing. The US Government has to consult with tribes on a government to government basis, and that was what was about to happen in that meeting! The Tar Creek Superfund Site is on the Quapaw Nation land and EPA represented the US Government and the strategic plan had to be revealed to the tribe first! Not only was Tar Creek getting some respect, but so were the Quapaws!

The announcement to the public came this week at the Tar Creek Meet and Greet held at NEO. The 48 page document was released too late to get copies made for us to view Monday afternoon, but we have left hard copies at the NEO College Library, Miami City Library, Miami High School so far.  It is easy reading with big print and lots of pictures. The plan is big, addressing our wounded landscape and our troubled waters and remembering the goal to protect our children and their future. You can read it and make comments, we can and I certainly will. We have until April 12, which is not much time, strategically speaking.

If you are like me, we can make time for what we deem important. How about deeming this? Read it and have like me, actual hope. Think what it would be like to know the other half of our county could be different, more like it was before mining wrecked its prairie features. Would you like to have the seven watersheds we are in the midst of get better? Imagine finding mussels again in the rivers? People, we were mussel way-station before mining with 24 different species.

The coolest thing EPA could get would be letters from us saying something. Like: YEA EPA, keep it coming, we’ll keep the light on for you! You might even say: I like the plan but could you do more and do it faster? Could we go ahead and double the plan? If the ground is cleared and cleaned for crops, could you work on stabilizing the ground so it is safe against collapse? Could we let EPA know that is still important for us? Ask for dredging upper Grand Lake right away so GRDA won’t have to raise the lake level 2 inches and put Miami at risk for flooding.

I know you will have your own ideas and knock them around with your friends over coffee, but EPA won’t be sitting with you over coffee and will never know what you think unless you put it in a letter and get it to them. EPA does not read minds, but they do react to letters. I was at a meeting in Washington D.C. last year and a man from a community with a lot of really toxic issues. He brought in a stack of letters ONE FOOT HIGH from his neighbors and their neighbors. That community is getting help right now, I believe because of the letters.

This all happened this week including the release of Jim Sticklan’s new CD “EARTH” with environmental songs like Clean Up Tar Creek, he hopes will bring the kind of change to make a better world for future generations.

Looking forward, substantial cleanup work remains here and will take decades to complete… at this rate. Grateful for better, but hey, quicker works for me, too.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

http://www.epa.gov/superfund/tar-creek
Letters:  Amber Howard / Rafael Casanova at EPA Region 6, 1445 Ross Avenue, Dallas, Texas  75202

Camron Wright's book suddenly fell out of my hands, I was so near the end, picking it up quickly only to find it open to black and white photos with the names of the characters in the book I had believed were fictional. They had each touched me with their harsh life experiences which were now revealed to have been real. Their faces were in the book the whole time, they were actual people, who lived in a dump in Cambodia.

Life at the dump was full of relationships and a range of human emotions experienced each day. The stench was unending and the mountains of garbage changed only as they were combed by the residents in the search for discarded treasures to use to make life easier or to sell to buy enough rice for the day.

Mounds of stinking trash could spontaneously combust and burn their feet when they were too near. For one small family everything changed when the grandfather said the day would be lucky. A mother found a small book with beautiful pages. She picked it up for her sick son, hoping it might bring him joy to see the pictures. Nothing worked while he was so sick, so the book laid unused when the Rent Collector arrived for the rent only to pick up the book and begin to read it. The mother saw she could read and offered her book if Rent Collector would teach her to read. Reading she believed could make their lives better and if so, surely her son could be healthier.

Their relationship began with a book that changed both of their lives and the lives of their families. This book took me to a garbage dump and from there to learning in a new way about the history of Cambodia, a place I never thought could be so relevant to us now.

The dump is what we will have surrounding us all in America if we continue living as we have as a "throw away" culture. Much of what is accumulating is made from plastic and plastic comes to us from fossil fuels. How? The Magic of making something out of waste is how plastic came to be.

What is one man's trash is another man's treasure.
In the past once oil products were processed for gas and oil for cars, heating oil and such, the residues were  waste. When my family lived in Big Spring, Texas, with the wind in the right direction we could smell Cosden Refinery, where my best friend's dad worked. He wore a suit to work, my dad worked for Shell Pipeline wore ironed khakis. Her dad worked on a new products and would bring home "things" he had created. One was what I used as a cake-stand made from what we call PLASTIC. The refinery's waste had been costing them. Plastic has since become integral to our lives even being found in the fish in the deepest oceans. All we have used and discarded will last for the next 500 to 1,000 years before degrading, virtually every piece ever made still exists in some form.

The characters in Rent Collector found dignity and demonstrated to the readers how neither poverty nor place has to limit their humanity.

We don't have the harsh lives of adverse poverty for the most part. But we do endure odors when winds favor us. We know and sometimes acknowledge our fears of waste piles both left all over the Tar Creek Superfund site  as well as the rubble at BF Goodrich, the asbestos and the benzene beneath the soils. Both provided the jobs we valued and left our workers abandoned when they jerked to standstills. Both left waste behind as their legacy.

Our communities wait and watch as the stuff left behind just sits there. Our workers did the work following standard operating procedures of the time under orders of the company and the standard for them was profit. It costs money to clean up after yourself. They found it cheaper to pay fines if they came, and bet on company loyalty to keep bad practices quiet.

We fear piles of waste coming from expanded poultry facilities and the implications of spreading too much in our watershed. We have begun to organize our trash pulling papers, cardboard, plastic bottles to recycle just as China rejects them. Decisions will have to be made but towns, counties may soon not be allowed to make the tiniest decision to help reduce the piles of waste since ordinances won't be allowed to ban single use plastic bags or other single use containers even straws! if Oklahoma House Bill 1001 passes marked as an EMERGENCY. 

Our state is going to protect even the tiniest oil industry products.
Our waste will grow because China and other countries are not buying used plastics like they were and  US has not created enough uses yet. Piles in some states are being burned, others just piling them higher in dumps we pay to rent.

Each of us can pay less rent. Reuse grocery bags, make homemade ones, take containers for leftovers when you eat out. Buy straws you can reuse, take your own cup for coffee or at quick stops for pop.
The state can't regulate our decisions, we pay our own rent.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim