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

I am not sure who sits in on all Governor Stitt's Oklahoma's Turnaround decisions. Plenty are being made there while other decisions are made in boardrooms we will never be allowed to enter. Corporations with message-makers and attorneys to protect them like we could never afford ourselves. Corporations are untouchable, we don't always know where they are in real time.

But all 77 Oklahoma counties have a non-profit fb, not Facebook, but Farm Bureau office for members  with for-profit companies which provide a full range of insurance products sold by agents who are associated with county Farm Bureaus.

FB members have a 100% club and state legislators were recognized Feb. 21 for voting 100% for FB promoted policies in 2018. I recognized some of the names on the list: Senator Michael Bergstrom, Speaker of the House Charles McCall, Rep. Josh West, Rep. Dell Kerbs, the head of the House Ag Committee that failed to let HB 2534 out of his committee for a hearing. We banked on legislative help resolving corporate poultry operating facilities issues when the Dept. of Agriculture, Food and Forestry failed to pass protective regulations. But with the 100% club, we may never have a fair chance. These folks got a coin for voting to promote FB policies and the public has to question what they received.

We need water for life and we know what protecting water could look like, we have embedded in our memories images of the people standing for water at Standing Rock in the heat, in the cold, standing in water or roads facing corporation protectors wearing uniforms and carrying weapons. We won't get to find a PLACE to stand up for water like that around here, but we have to stand somehow. Deal making is happening right now in boardrooms and in state agency boardrooms that will result in rules that will be become our new Oklahoma reality and later in federal agencies.

Maybe you haven't made a phone call, sent an email, signed a petition or attended a meeting, but even if you had, the protections you have counted on to protect our water will diminish anyway with rules you will not like even in those corporate ad masters whip it into a motto like "Clean Coal" a term that is totally ridiculous, just try picking up a hunk of coal with a white glove!

WOTUS, abbreviation used by EPA for "Waters of the United States" in the Clean Water Act ensures us to have clean drinking water. We know water is life. and water that is not clean will not be healthy. I missed a trip to Kansas City to speak out for WOTUS because icy road warnings get my attention and when Kansas City school buses shut down so do I. I will send my comments before April 15 and you can too (https://www.epa.gov/wotus-rule).

WOTUS has been attacked by AFBF President Zippy Duval using "Ditch the Rule" and "Clean Water Clean Rules," falsely believing WOTUS will harm farmers, when agriculture is exempt from the rule. We need a 100% club for the environment, for water and air quality. Why didn't we think of that? We need to meet in a board room the size of a stadium and yell loud for water, for air. We haven't done it and everytime we lose, we just get quieter and go sit in our corner and fester. But we don't have to.

We can look hard at that list of 100%ers and we can find some folks to replace them. Elections matter and you get the results THE elected ones STAND UP FOR. I am not sure what kind of COIN our new 100%ers  for the environment should get but boy we could shine it up and be ready for them. Elections have consequences and that's our ticket to make this all better. RUN for water, and run for air, and good common sense, we will have a coin waiting for you.

I got shuffled out of a board room this week, out of a meeting of people I know and respect because it was private. There are times I know this is expected and in fact needed, but it was a new feeling to be rather shunned.

You won't be shunned March 11 from 4 to 7 pm at NEO in the Calcagno Ballroom where you will be able to meet the agencies charged with the Tar Creek Superfund Site Cleanup. You will be free to meet people representing all the agencies working at this site. It is one of the largest superfund sites in the country, tackling our issues for decades, plodding along trying to figure it all out. Come out and meet them, ask your questions, give suggestions. There will be other organizations represented as well who are environmental stewards, you will want to meet.

The public is welcome for this short meet and greet type experience. Consider it a crash course to get you ready for the fall event LEAD Agency's 21st National Tar Creek Conference which will be held in the same place September 24-25. There you will be able to hear more in-depth information about the projects, the research about the site as well as other environmental issues, because, boy do we have them in spades.

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim

Tourism could save Oklahoma!
 
Our new Governor wants to make Oklahoma a Top 10  State and has given his commitment: the people come first and he'll be a good listener, a continuous learner, and a bold leader for the decisions that make a difference for today’s children and the next generation.
 
Our Lieutenant Governor Matt Pinnell, named as our new Secretary of Tourism and Branding, can make this happen.
If we want to be a tourist destination, we have to want to be here ourselves. If we go away we have to long to come home. Lt. Governor Pinnell needs to understand what is happening right now to our hopes for Tourism. If we make bad decisions today, we will be branded a state to by-pass tomorrow, not just because we have toll roads, but because you won't be able to drive through with the windows down and we won't have a water body that will be safe for swimmers or for fish tournaments.

Don't TRASH Oklahoma to benefit corporations. They might grow, but they will not grow children who will love this state and fight to protect her.

There is so much to see and enjoy throughout the state. Thousands of tourists from around the world follow Route 66 every year. Consider what our tourists see. They enter the state with Quapaw as the first town on their journey but they have also entered one of our nation's largest and oldest Superfund sites, named after our very own Tar Creek, which they will cross before they enter Commerce, Mickey Mantle's hometown, also within the superfund site.

On both sides of highway 66 near the Mantle Statue they can see Dr. Bob Nairn's world class Passive Water Treatment Systems at work, cleaning bad mine water. In downtown Miami our tourists can experience the Coleman Theatre Beautiful, a community treasure built by one of the original mine owners.

Many tourists follow original remaining sections of Route 66. Just south of Miami our tourists will get a whiff of the brand new flocks of chickens living their short lives in three mega barns. Route 66 travelers might not stop to shop at the tack shop. As generations of birds live and die in those mega barns, as the smells become entrenched, bicyclists and motorcyclists will become faster, rushing through to escape the odors.

These poultry houses will be growing birds you and I may never consume. Most of these birds will be hauled to Arkansas for slaughter, then shipped abroad to help feed the world. But Oklahoma will keep the waste with runoff flowing into our streams, rivers, our precious Grand Lake and her sister lakes down the Grand River. Each stream, river, and lake will hold trapped runoff water from the fields spread with excess chicken waste.

Our Green Country has lakes and rivers that are GREEN already, and as we feed the algae in the water more nutrients from poultry waste, they will get only greener.

Oklahoma's Department of Agriculture Food and Forestry passed rules February 19 giving occupied homes a set back from a poultry barn of 500 to 1,000 feet, but dwellings that are not occupied all year long could have a new poultry house built 150 feet from the property line. Our summer Grand Lakers might open the back door to find they have hundreds of thousands of brand new neighbors who live in the manure they excrete for months as they grow to seller size. 

A Tourist Bonanza for Oklahoma! Bound to help us get the status as a Top 10 State for Get the Tourists out the fastest!  Hundreds of poultry houses are already constructed in Northeast Oklahoma and the new rules will encourage more.

Two state agencies have let us down: Oklahoma Water Resources Board and the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture Food and Forestry. The environment doesn't fare well in a state that doesn't even have a Department of Environment. The environment is not even listed in the issues on our current governor's website. We need to protect our water, soil and air quality.  Because our tourists have earned time off and want a "get-a-way." Those people are us, too. We want to stay close to home, fish and swim in clean water and when we get home we want to be able to wash up with clean water and sit in the yard with our children.

I have given lots of Toxic Tours to educate the public about the legacy mining left us, with chat piles and our ruined Tar Creek as reminders. Our Lt. Governor might use this latest industrial growth scheme for tourism branding with images of chickens and MegaBarns. We can Toxic Tour our tourists through our state with their windows up.

We know that smell can drive away customers, can drive away potential, can shut down towns. We ought to be speaking out for the rest of the state. We ought to watch how we grow and what we grow, or we will lose the best thing we have... our future.

Wake up Oklahoma, we are going to have to fight right now to protect this state from our own agencies’ bad decisions. We have to convince our leaders to be on the PEOPLE's side.

Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

Knowing what I do, there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent. ~ Rachel Carson

I listened to David Suzuki speak about our future as a species on this earth this evening. I want people to listen to scientists, pay attention and take notes. But I put off listening to him because he is a scientist and I thought he would talk over my head and well, put me to sleep.

But instead, I reached for paper and a pencil and took notes, I paid attention. He had me right away when he stated Rachel Carson's Silent Spring had gotten his attention back when it came out. You might remember me admitting it was the only book I ever took from a library 45 years ago and never returned. She died 2 years after it was published from cancer, perhaps from exposures to the very chemical pesticides she wrote were deadly to animals and birds.

Suzuki spoke of the challenge of our time, to have our species survive to the end of the century. Yes, this got me listening very closely. What an urgent message. He and all of us should be talking about the future of the planet. Economics and chasing growth has gotten us here, but in this finite world, growth cannot be sustained. Of course he meant 'Fossil Fuels has Got To Go' was not just a saying but the true message, we have got to get off fossil fuels to protect our land, soil and water. Pursue energy sources from the sun.

Speaking as the genius he is, but bringing it down so I could keep up, he explained how we need air to live, and can only live without it for about 3 minutes, though we can live longer but sicker if the air is not clean. We need water and can survive without it only about 3 days, longer but sicker if the water is not clean. We need soil to grow the crops we eat and can live only 40 days without food, longer but sicker if the soil is contaminated by toxic elements. Life sustained on this earth can provide all we need to survive, but clean water, soil and air gives us a better healthier life. And all of this can be provided with proper sunlight and the sacred elements cultures throughout the history of humanity have known.

It is the changes our species have made in the last century and into this one you might not believe we had the power to do, but believing that or not, Dr. Suzuki left us with a path every person could begin pursuing. #1 Use your voice, which might also mean to vote, #2 Live in a different way, be thoughtful in what you consume, #3 Create community.

I can do those things. I might not have a loud voice but you are reading my voice, I can live differently,  plant more in the garden and eat out of it and share the abundance while we all save seeds as we grow our community, our circle can widen as we come to know each other better.

I have been allowed into the lives of people lately I had never known before or not as well, as my circle widens to learn more from the people who worked at BF Goodrich, or were household members of former workers.

That "create community" Suzuki spoke of, is the goal. I want us to create the public voice which asks for the community we deserve, one with the cleanest of air, clean swimmable, fishable and drinkable water, the land clear of rubble, without the fear of asbestos in the air and benzene in the soil beneath, and metal-loaded chat removed.

We need to remember to widen our circle of community to include our country neighbors. They need our help and we need theirs. There are 3 new mega poultry houses on highway 69 south of Miami. The new poultry processing plant our community did not get Gentry, Arkansas got and complete will need another 250 mega poultry houses to make it profitable. If you have land for sale, pay attention to who is buying it. Question buyers who have money in hand, loans already approved. Ask questions. Protect your land's neighbors this way. Hold off selling if you are suspicious.

Residents in towns take notice: setbacks are a topic you might never have thought could be important to you. But there are 2 bills in the Oklahoma House this session. House Bill 2534 by Rep. Meloyde Blancett, D-Tulsa — currently has requirements that are more stringent than what the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry proposed in December, while the other bill, Senate Bill 873 by Sen. Casey Murdock, R-Felt, currently has requirements much less stringent than those proposed by the department.  I go stringent 2534 to protect  air, water and quality of life and legislators must know.

Rachel Carson spoke of the road we must take, the one less traveled  since it offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth. Written 55 years ago it was the urgent message we failed to take, but now must heed.

Respectfully submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim
 

Last year Dr. Robert Wright decided to provide a gift to LEAD Agency to help us with our efforts to lower lead levels in the area.
 
Dr. Wright has been associated with Ottawa County and the multiple metals our children have been exposed to for now just over twenty years. He was originally at Harvard and now is in a position at Mount Sinae Hospital in New York City.
 
The gift is a LeadCare II, a portable blood lead analyzer that will analyze a blood sample, a simple drop of blood from a fingerstick providing results in 3 minutes. The Ottawa County Health Department has the exact same instrument, so if you have taken your child 6 years old and younger there to be tested for lead, that would be the first test they would have administered.
 
We will not duplicate their service, or that of the Northeast Tribal Health System, but to offer blood lead screening to individuals over 6 years of age.
 
Our plan is to set up at health fairs near the county health department and screen the mothers, the dads or those over 6 years so a family might leave with a fuller picture of what they may need to do overall to make sure everyone in the home is on track to lower those lead levels for the whole family.
 
We received the instrument months ago but it has taken time for us to gather together a team to train to use the up to date instrument and commit to helping us provide this service at various community events this year.
 
Then suddenly this week, ONLY this week it all came together. After presenting a session on local metal exposures in Dr. Lesli Deichman's psychology class Monday morning, several students volunteered to assist us. It seems many of her students are on track for nursing as a career, To top off the team we were joined by Karen Fields, who had worked with Dr. Wright and his MATCH Project for nearly a decade during the years the research was ongoing here. Our first outing with our LeadCare II will be at the NEO Health Fair on February 19.
 
We know that exposure to lead can be harmful to children but also to us in our later lives. While we able we should do everything in our power to do the things that will keep us healthy in our personal lives, but also in our workplaces.

TSET is a trust in Oklahoma established from the tobacco industry settlement to provide funds to improve the health of Oklahomans by reducing our leading causes of preventable death – tobacco use and obesity – to reduce cancer and cardiovascular disease.

TSET funds projects that can improve the health of every Oklahoman. With Pat Hecksher's help as the coordinator for TSET, LEAD Agency was able to improve and update our Worksite Wellness Policy recently, adding additional ways we can encourage better nutrition and more physical activity.

It is a wonder more businesses, non-profit organizations and churches haven't signed up to make more healthier places for people who work or volunteer in those spaces. We all need all the help and guidance we can get to change our ways and our official policies to make work be as healthy as possible.

I have been speaking with former BF Goodrich workers recently and BOY could that plant have done better for the health and safety of their employees! The workers were exposed to heat, unspeakable  heat, noxious and toxic odors provided poor air quality, but also deafening noise. Asbestos was everywhere, the "cortisone" of builders and business. It was on the walls, covered the machines that molded the tires, it was thick and thin everywhere. In addition, of course chemicals were part of the tire making process, and the workers' personal cleanup procedures.
We long to have safer work places because they will help us have longer and healthier lives. Businesses did not always have their worker safety rules in place because they were making sure their profits got  their upmost attention.

All sorts of industrial processes can get in the way of profits, no wonder some businesses slight their workers' health and safety.

Our BF Goodrich workers, almost to the end have kept quiet for loyalty to the company that helped them be able to feed their children and provide a home of their own. "Goodrich was good for me." I hear it. And business professionals long for the days of those paychecks were spent right downtown.

The company town helped keep the pressure on these hard working men to keep quiet and keep working, even when the air in the tube line was white from the soap stone dust heavy in the air. Soap stone dust would have been loaded with silica which we know can cause silicosis, but also some deposits of soapstone also had asbestos. To me these living legends would have loved to have had a safer work place or the use of respirators to provide some protection. With that they could have worked smarter to live longer.

It seems a coincidence that our BF Goodrich plant that used so many forms of asbestos closed the same year that Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act of 1986 passed.

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim

Years ago the people in America rose up, stood in the streets and demanded to have clean air and clean water. President Richard Nixon responded to the outcry when our rivers were on fire and cities' air was visible as brown haze from miles away.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970 and rules began to pour out of the agency that would be protective of both our air and our water. Ever since, those rules have been chipped away, bits of those protective rules broken, erased by our Congress, under influence by lobbyists from mining, oil, other industries and agriculture.

Our country is not alone. The mining industry is a dirty business and what works for them is to continue business as usual, paying any fines that come is cheaper. It is their business model. We know that from the legacy waste the companies have left in our Tar Creek Superfund Site. And the unending flow of it down Tar Creek ending up in Grand Lake all these years.

Last Friday a dam in Brazil broke loose in a tsunami of red mud, releasing iron mining waste in such force 200 of their own workers were the first casualties as they were eating their lunch in a cafeteria near the dam.  The Vale dam collapse announcement caused Vale shares to "plummet" on the New York Stock Exchange that day.

I was in the backseat of a small plane with photographer Vaughn Wascovich years ago. He was taking photos of chat piles, but as the plane turned the landscape changed beneath us. There below were fields of green and trees lining Tar Creek. I knew it was Tar Creek because of the ribbon of bright red bordered by the trees. We both took photos of that moment. But it was his that got the attention of the TIME reporter who saw it and immediately knew our story should be told.

Now imagine what Brazil's red tsunami waste is looking like, wide, powerfully wiping away structures as it passed. This occurred in the state of Minas Gerais, barely missing the city of Brumadinho. The President of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro flew over it and exclaimed it was “difficult to not be emotional."

Someone was definitely at fault. There ought to be consequences. Minas Gerais state courts quickly froze billions of Vale assets. Vale had been involved in the collapse of another dam in 2015 which 250,000 people were left without drinking water and killed thousands of fish. Brazil's environmental protection agency fined Vale $90 million then, this time $2.1 billion has been levied for this disaster.

The Brazil office of environmentalist group Greenpeace said the dam break was “a sad consequence of the lessons not learned by the Brazilian government and the mining companies.” Such incidents “are not accidents but environmental crimes that must be investigated, punished and repaired,” it added.

Vale had requested a new license to expand the capacity of the dam so it would be allowed to hold more, but the National Civil Society Forum for Hydrographic Basins, a network of civil society groups  urged authorities not to grant the license.

Brazil's President Bolsonaro has attacked environment agencies for delaying development with excessive licensing requirements and has advocated freeing up mining in protected indigenous reserves. His efforts are much like our current president's attacks on the U.S. environment, to lessen the protections our laws have had for human health and the environment and give free reign for extraction on public lands for industry.

Indigenous rights and land in Brazil's Amazon region are at risk. Bolsonaro's belief is that he will "integrate" those citizens and free up property for mining and agriculture. He did this in an executive order transferring the regulation and creation of new indigenous reserves to the agriculture ministry – controlled by agribusiness lobby. This executive order has to be approved by Brazil's legislature in 120 days. Perhaps this tragedy may offer a look into the future for their country, of what de-regulation looks like.

Years ago, one of Miami High School Indian Dance team's youngest dancers said, "We're Indians, we ought to be for the environment." Well, yes, we all should be. Native or not. We have only one mother and only one earth.

There ought to be a law, and the law is still alive in Brazil. Five people have been arrested in connection to the collapse of the ore tailings dam! There was never anyone arrested for any of the environmental disasters we have in Ottawa County. But in a twist of irony our same young Native dancer when he was old enough to drive, did get the first fine for crossing the ditch the county had dug to keep our recreational riders off our chat piles, which are tailings piles to the rest of the world.

The chief of a native community that lives 14 miles from the Brazilian city of Brumadinho reported all life in the river on which his community depends for food, bathing and cloth washing is "dead" and polluted with the mineral-loaded mud. There is always another way to get rid of natives in the way of progress, one way is to pollute their water, kill their fish and ruin their environment for the foreseeable future. There ought to be a law.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
 

It comes together and then the pieces just fall apart as if the glue hadn't set and the wind was too strong.

I was only beginning to know the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver and settle in with her poetry, poems my friends have cherished for decades were becoming my new favorites, ones I snatched snippets from and quoted to others in ways of encouragement or words to inspire. She had written 30 volumes, and I was slowly turning the pages of the 3 gifted books which arrived this fall. Word was spread quickly on Facebook about her passing this last weekend, tributes were coming in between the tributes of local elders who would be buried at the same time in different places on the same day. There were lots of thoughts of loss, of people, but also the ages they had lived through, what they had all endured, the songs they knew together in their youth, the changes the world has made around the places they began and how each had seen their lives to the end.

So I waited all of 4 days to call my friend who had gifted the poetry books to me, to commiserate about the poet's death, thinking he would have had time to deal with the loss, but he had not known, I blurted it out, "she died." No, I did it, looking back even more bluntly, but as you and I have learned through our lives, there is no rewind no delete for words that leap out there and mess with someone's universe. Immediately spoken words can hang out there.
It can happen and you may have been the speaker, but also to hear a new truth, not wanted, not requested, as truth laid out there unattended.

Sorry would not begin to fix this. But look up her poetry and marvel at how easy she approaches the world around her. And somewhere in one of those volumes, this whole unfixable will be happening in nature, in the wind, found in the water. And therefore will be natural and as such forgivable. I am banking on it.

It fit so well with the book June Taylor had lent me months ago, Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry. The Wendell Berry who wrote much like Mary Oliver, about the nature that surrounds him and how change is coming and the must we have to pick up and carry to protect what is left of it. Jayber Crow is a novel and so far as I can tell his only one.

Reading through it, I was reminded of the world my mother grew up in along the river in Missouri, in the hills nestled with families getting by in the early 1900's hidden from the wider world. They made their lives full by doing what made their lives possible there. Growing and preserving what they grew to get them by through the winters, making enough to take to the store to trade or sell for what they couldn't produce themselves. Her family changed when the whole slew of girls were born, followed finally by the lone son. The girls would scatter as they will going to new families, creating their own. And the son, would stay and make it on the land as long as it permitted. But he too and his mother finally left the land when my grandfather died.

I grew up with the stories of that homeplace and the relations with the neighbors, the hills, the river and that setting was in my mind the whole time reading Jayber Crow who "liked the river best. It is wonderful to have the duty of being on the river the first and last thing every day." My mother always said she pitied a person who didn't have a cold, clear river to enjoy.

We had a fabulous  Day of Service at LEAD Agency as we celebrated the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A morning made full with the energy of the NEO Women's Basketball Team, fully engaged in activities we needed done to get us through the winter and into the spring garden season. We ended with quotes on banners, "I have a Dream" and another inspired by an experience one of the young women told.

That evening another man of service Harris Wofford passed away. You might not know who he was, but you have known his dream. He worked with Dr. King, was an advisor to President Kennedy and made the Peace Corps real. From 1995 to 2001 I coordinated Miami High School's Learn and Serve projects, while he was head of the Corporation for National and Community Service. Our school won a big award and Donna Webster and I went to Washington, D.C. to accept it. Mr. Wofford spoke before us so we met a man who knew the man with a dream as we went on stage. All of us are waking up and living the dream, doing the work that serves our neighbors, enriches our souls and improves this earth.

Our poets and writers have found words to inspire us to service, but Dr. King assured us that, "Everybody can be great... because anybody can serve... You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love."

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Oklahoma City is not on my usual route, never seem to get my bearings there, so I go only when it is absolutely necessary and that usually means it is a have to for the environment. Sometimes when you help a friend it can change up your plans. It just does. I had every intention of attending a meeting at the Oklahoma Water Resource Board on Tuesday morning. I was prepared to make comments about the changes to rules that agency was proposing to make to how our water bodies in the state will be protected, or not be protected by these new rules.

The meeting would be held in a room not really big enough for it, so the plan was to drop my friend off for a doctor's appointment, go quickly to that crowded meeting, wedge into the room and wait to be able to stand up for the environment and our state's waters, even while already standing, since that's what you do in a 'standing room' only space.

When we checked my friend in for her appointment we were told she would not be able to have her procedure if her "driver" was not with her when her name was called. Now who could leave? NOT ME. So we waited together and watched the time for the meeting come and pass. Friends are pretty special and to be asked to stand and wait for one, is pretty precious time, well spent. She survived and got up the next morning for the follow-up exam only to get the best of news on her results.

The brand new day allowed for time to make it to the Oklahoma Water Resources Board, a day late, but a day before the comments were officially do, to hand over in person written comments. It was my letter, but honestly most of the comments were written by Earl Hatley, our Grand Riverkeeper, who has been writing comment letters to every agency Oklahoma has and telling them 'how to' for decades, I just got to put my spin on his comments and sign my name.

It is a sweet thing to do what you came to do, even a day late. The last time I came to Oklahoma City had been for the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture Board Meeting and afterward I went to the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality and requested official records.

I am continuing to pour over pages of B F Goodrich documents from a corporation commission hearing that was held in Oklahoma City in 2012. It is a page turner. If only the hearing could have been held here in the gym at Will Rogers a block from the plant. It could have been open to the public, open for the residents, open for the former workers, their widows, their children to hear what was known and perhaps to have the chance to offer the missing pieces. The missing pieces of evidence of what happened, what was left behind so a for real cleanup could be determined. A cleanup that valued our community and the hours our fathers and uncles and grandfathers we never got to know tolerated unbearable heat and conditions we cannot fathom.

Through the documents, I have met scientists, researchers, field hands, lawyers, the corporate representatives who deny this chemical was used and call it by another name in the next sentence. Every way chemical waste could be disposed of is exposed in the documents, including, scouts honor in mine shafts on the property.

I have actually met some of the officials who work for the state who have been tromping through the muck and the asbestos filled spaces for decades. They have worked for us and been stymied by samples that failed to be collected, by conflicted recollections and the puzzle of how come benzene was where it was when the underground storage tanks were somewhere else. And the question of what really was held in those tanks and how many times the railroad cars carrying benzene spilled their whole cargo.

Our living treasures know some of these answers and for whatever reason have not been asked. I remember once in a while my dad would talk about his experiences in WWII, but he never told me about  the death and dying he must have seen. He told me about the funny things that happened and the friends he made for life. Some whose lives were shortened there in the war.

This is what we have failed to do with our Goodrichers. I have broken free lately and asked several men who have told me about their work, what they did those days and what it was like. My latest to recollect was Louis "Red" Mathia, who has been the LEAD Agency Board President for almost our whole existence.  He described his work, the heat, told some of the most tragic things he saw occur in the plant and went right into the fun and camaraderie  that filled in around those times, that made our Goodrichers practically brothers for life.

I hope you will come to our next LEAD Agency meeting January 31, or come especially at 6:30 pm, when we want you to have a chance to meet our board President. Let's start these conversations by listening.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
 

 
Meet LEAD Agency's
     Board President
  Louis "Red" Mathia

What will be the longest government shutdown settles in and those federal workers who are non-essential shift in place wondering what is not being done, how they will catch up on the work that is stacking up that the government thought was important enough to hire them in the first place to do. The paychecks they were counting on will not arrive and their bills go in arrears.

The government is shut down for political reasons.

This shutdown is not a strike. They are different. The workers have not walked off the job. It's been awhile but we have had strikes held in this area. 

In 1935 the mine workers in Ottawa County and into Kansas held a strike that closed the mines down. Our miners worked in some of the worse conditions in the country. They were hoping to improve their conditions by shutting down the mines and were led to believe the International Union would help get them by during the strike, but the help didn't come. Then the mining companies organized their own "worker's union" and hired only those who joined it. Work started back up, but actual safety and wages didn't improve, the men just got to work again. They were duped by the companies and made to believe the "other" union members were communists, creating a dangerous time for them, and drumming up loyal squads to hurt them with pick handles. It was a hard time that got harder and gained the workers nothing. In Union Busting in the Tri-State by George G. Suggs, Jr., I learned those times are much like these, we are asked to fear the "other" and put up with less.

The Dobson Memorial Center has clear photos of the B. F. Goodrich workers in front of the plant marching a picket line seeking better working conditions and better pay during a strike held there. For all of them the companies were shut down, work stopped by the workers to make their lives better with safer working conditions and higher wages.
Essential workers in this shut down are still at work. But not the non-essential. Didn't they all think their jobs were needed?

We don't have much contact with federal employees, but we do have farmers who cannot receive all the services they are needing, we all have known people like our neighbors who have lined up for help from FEMA. We do have a superfund site that will require funding. According to Gary Morton, president of the AFGE Council 238, representing  9,000 EPA workers, state programs aren't getting their funding and enforcement actions have stopped. He calls it a nightmare since the states and community groups can't do this work on their own, reminding us that they all took an oath to serve and protect the people.

There are people in our community ready to talk to an EPA investigator about additional information on where and how toxins at B.F. Goodrich were released. To get the cleanup we deserve we need to know all the secrets not yet told. To answer questions on why the benzene plume is where it is. These "old timers" are ready to speak up and that investigator is not an essential worker.

It seems like an essential job to me. Essential to you, too. Multiply this by the number of sites around the country and it is clear we need to get America back to work serving our people.

Another example of essential? It was essential to my general well-being to have time to sit and talk with Joby Taylor and his parents during his visit this week.

It was essential to my belief in the future to get to attend the rehearsal for the reading of Mary Sue Price's play Chat Rats: Oronogo. Having time with people who are depicting our stories with Jill Micka, who I am sure has had her health impacted by this place.

It was essential to the cleanup of our superfund site to see the Quapaw Nation's trucks still at work last week while Robin Meadows was visiting looking at the Tar Creekkeeper's watershed for the Waterkeeper Alliance.

Several years ago I got to go to the National Institutes of Health in what is called the Research Triangle. I walked by rooms full of rat brains and Petri dishes stacked on trays. These government workers have spent years looking for cures to protect our health and these are not essential workers and their research is at risk, and perhaps the cure for cancer.

We rely on the people who work in the federal agencies that do the people's work and they rely on the paychecks they receive, smaller in general than the ones they would receive in the private sector, but they have chosen to work for us instead. How long can we keep the best on hold?

The EPA investigator was coming to find out more about where the pollution came from at B.F. Goodrich. but we haven't heard a peep. This is a shut down for non essential workers. Personally I feel like the health and well-being of the folks living here matters.

I think breathing clean air is essential and protecting the water that flows and lies beneath us as well. This might be a shut down, but it does not mean we have to shut up.

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim              

The director and cast for the Reading of Chat Rats: Oronogo with Rebecca Jim and Jill Micka wedged in among them

It was dark when the two bob cats crossed my path on the way home this week.   

Ga hay is the word for  wildcat in Cherokee, and they are known for always being hungry. In our world now, they seem rare. Many people have never seen them. But they help us clear away the little varmints, the mice, the rabbits and such can keep them fed but when they are scarce, chickens disappear from farmers' barnyards but fewer people keep chickens in their backyards now. And those large poultry houses filled to the brim with chickens truly have them guarded from predators. As a country dweller, the fewer mice in the field means the fewer in my house, and as a gardener, the fewer rabbits the better the garden.

These bob cats were in a hurry. It is bobcat season in Oklahoma and a hunter is allowed as many as 20. They could have been pursued, but I had the feeling they were the ones pursuing this time. But seeing two at once, the same size and coloring brought to mind during this season the 2 girls Ashley Freeman and Lauria Bible who went missing from Welch. But their missing now twenty years, and knowing the grief of the families is ongoing, I feel now for the family and friends of Mark Rogers of Miami, OK who was reported missing recently. Just gone. As the bobcats rushed by. Where do they go? And where on earth are our missing persons?

My brother Clark Frayser came to visit and brought 2 prints by Murv Jacob an artist who illustrates the culture of the Cherokees and the landscape of the southeastern United States. I love his work and have one of his rabbits rowing a canoe bedecked in fresh water pearls and carved shells hanging on the wall above my newly updated lab at the office. While Clark was there I was able to show him the beautiful turquoise his friend Steve Ray had dropped by the LEAD office as a gift. Steve and his wife were married over 50 years and had the kind of happiness he appreciated every day of their lives together and more so now since her death. Steve and Clark became friends during the production of his play, "The Panther and the Swan" as a bi-centennial project held in the Quapaw's Beaver Springs Park, and have remained friends ever since.

Anyone who has been around me as I prepare to leave a building knows that moment when I have to search for my keys, coat, even my shoes to get to the bank or the post office before they close for the day. Those moments of missing these type things pass, so very quickly, but imagining the pain of waiting, for missing the person living away, incarcerated in some manner, or those waiting for the truly disappeared people in our lives to return, our best hope, but to be found in whatever manner a peace might come. The bobcats I had seen had somehow triggered these thoughts, and reminded me of the bobcats' search for food or sanctuary.

The feelings of lost and found with the objects in our lives is so very superficial compared to the losses we experience when losing a loved one, whether that be for a 6 month period, a deployment, a job that takes one away for a season and then that deeper feeling of true loss through death, or that yet unidentified loss of never knowing what happened and where and how to make sense of it.

As human beings the extent of our feelings range but it is this ability, gift or curse as that may be, that make us human. It is experiencing these sensibilities  when we prove to the Creator we are human and the Creator's gift to us has been to show within each of us the resilience we need to proceed on undaunted though wounded or scarred.
The American Psychological Association recognizes seven basic human emotions, including joy, surprise, sadness, fear and contempt, anger and disgust are expressed throughout all cultures and considered universal.

We have our basic needs as described by Maslow in his hierarchy of needs beginning with water, food and shelter, proceeding upwards to safety, love and belonging, esteem and self-actualization. And we all are in our own ways hungry for love, enough so, we find songs with that title.

In the U.S. there are laws to ensure we can have Clean Water AND Clean Air! Our human rights for all peoples and all nations have been laid out by the United Nations in their Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

The art we have to develop is to know our own rights and then take that farther to accepting we all share those same rights and getting on board to protect ourselves and our teammates on this earth we inhabit together. Be kind, keep learning, speak out for wrongs and help us protect the precious resources that sustain us all.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
 

Cars had triangle shaped windows for the front seat that could be opened separately by the driver or the passenger. The "vent" window could direct cool air in and of course for kids in the back seat, could direct the front seat smokers' cigarette smoke out of the car.

My dad received an award from his employer for driving a million miles without an accident. Those triangular windows resulted in hearing loss in his left ear. My voice range during his audio exam was exactly the range he failed, knowing this as a witness to the exam. But the hearing loss got him what we called his Blues in the Night check from the Veterans Affairs 50 years after he got out of the Army and they caught up with him when he went in for the hearing test. Why did we call it that?

"My Momma done told me...." echoed throughout the camp he was mustering out of. From behind him, he turned to listen to the lone voice belting out the song and was marked deaf for not hearing the commands given in his quick hearing exam. My daddy worked for Shell Pipeline as an electrician and his territory was large. He covered eastern New Mexico, west Texas and the panhandle of the state. He drove for 35 years in company cars before air conditioning was standard and depended on that little vent window to direct air for some comfort and to draw some of his cigarette smoke out of the vehicle.

We believe it was the noise and air pressure that caused his hearing loss. But the Veterans Administration thought it had been caused by the war so he began receiving a small check for his disability each month, until moving to follow employment, the VA lost track of him. All the while his compensation piled up in his account. After we forced him to go for the hearing exam so he could be fitted for hearing aids and give us relief from his debilitating hearing loss in his later years. We got to communicate with him again and he got those lost years of compensation in what we called his "Blues in the Night" check.

Shell Pipeline gave out service awards, longer service the better quality.
Tie tacks were the thing for men and he received several, each in the shape of what else? a shell. Shell's logo is a shell. The original company actually sold sea shells and never forgot their origins.

I got one of the last awards he received. This one hung from a golden bow and could be pinned on a garment. Marked with the date 1963 and his initials, RCF which were also mine and my brother's initials. I have treasured it, but have actually never worn it. Me with a diamond pin attached to a bow? Then through the years I have learned more about fossil fuels and how using these fuels for energy around the world is actually causing the changes we are experiencing with our climate. Our earth's future, and our own is tied up in a bow with fossil fuels. As an environmental activist, could I wear it?

The big oil companies have had a great ride, made a lot of money for their stockholders and put a lot of people to work extracting oil and gas all around the world. Use of fossil fuels throughout the last century and into this one has put a lot of daddies to work, but the damages continue to mount to humans and our environment from our use, our overuse of them.

Only one fossil fuel has a nickname, that being Clean Coal. Sure pick up any size clump of coal with a white glove on and that glove will no longer be white. The coal industry had a great public relations guy to come up with that phrase! Coal is dirty to handle, but also dirty to burn causing green house gases that get trapped in our atmosphere and actually change it, dirty and unsafe for the miners working to extract it from deep in the ground. Many, too many continue to develop a condition that affects their lungs and causes many to die before they reach 50 years of age. If the coal industry worked cleaner, many of their lives could be saved. That is not the end of the dirty deal coal gives us. When it is burned, the smoke is carried dropping the heavy metals embedded in the coal far and near, adding to the loading of mercury in our oceans, lakes and ponds, contaminating our fish.

Fossil fuel has made extracting companies rich, but they are beginning to see the future and the future will be renewable energy sources like wind and sun. There will be other ways to generate energy and these guys will find it including using waves and gravity.

Losses to our health and the environment and lives have occurred under these energy extractors' watch. In the years from 2008 through 2017, 1,566 workers perished trying to extract oil and gas in America, that is about as many U.S. troops died fighting in Afghanistan during that period.

One of the other companies is figuring out how to use algae to make energy. We are making way too much algae, because we are allowing the factory farms to pollute our waters, it is as if they will be partnering with another polluting industry to clean up both messes and continue making money.

Shell is investing in Green Energy, low carbon emissions and looking at the wind.
My dad could have told Shell years ago that wind would be the new power, power to produce energy and powerful enough to reduce hearing for sure.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

My brother and I got to experience The Santa Claus Ranch only once and it was probably when I found out Santa Claus wasn't real and there are many ways to give.

My family left Big Spring, Texas to spend the holidays with relatives the year there was so much snow it seemed like the kind of winter people had in the movies.

We arrived at Uncle Doc and Aunt Sylvia's one mile east of Welch and drove under the gateway with The Santa Claus Ranch emblazoned on it. My Uncle Doc was Dr. J.O. Bradshaw, Sr. and he married his nurse, Sylvia Bradshaw, who was a Bradshaw before she became a Bradshaw, and Sylvia was my mother's sister.

So we were family and as such were put right to work getting ready for the visitors who would arrive each night to visit Santa. It was sort of an assembly line, filling individual paper sacks with an orange or apple, nuts that would have to be shelled and different types of that old fashion hard candy only available during the holidays.  We had no idea what would happen once it got dark. Lights all over the trees, the Live Manger, the crew of full sized metal reindeer with the one in the front decked out with a red light bulb lighting up his nose. They lined up behind the sleigh with the stuffed Santa sitting on the seat of the sleigh in front of the picture window waiting for a child to come sit on his lap. My Uncle Doc had a microphone set up in the living room so he could be Santa's voice for each child when they came to sit and talk with Santa. Can you imagine? mid 1950's how modern!

We had so many people lined up to come, it was like a tourist attraction out there! He had loud speakers and Christmas music playing, but my brother remembered the nuns came one night and actually sang.

But add to this, snow! It was magical and special for us, certainly much different than the kind of Christmas we would have had that year in Texas.

Not 18 months ago, my brother, Clark Frayser came to Miami and he and I went to the Dobson Memorial Center and there in the basement, was the very same Santa's sleigh. No reindeer, but the bright red sleigh. He and I could not resist, we climbed up on the seat, sitting in the same sleigh we had sat in as children and had dear Larry Roberts take our picture. Memories. Larry became part of ours.

I don't remember if "Santa" brought us any gifts that year, but Santa's ranch left memories for us and for many who came. I hope you all find ways to create the memories that will sustain you as our planet warms and fewer and fewer people will experience those deep snow filled holidays.

The following Christmas caused me to tell a lie. Big Spring, Texas is a town divided by "the tracks." We attended the only Catholic Church in town which happened to have been across the tracks. When I went back to Big Spring for my high school reunion, I had to go see that church, it was built out of brown sand stone, still had the beautiful stained glass windows, but out in front was a FOR SALE sign. What is that about? What other bunch of Catholics would want to buy it, that wouldn't already just prefer to continue using the one they had? That church is where we met the family who lived across the tracks and had the little girl who would become another Christmas memory. They were poor and spoke little English, and she and I were brown and immediate friends.

After the holidays we went back to school. I lied when our teacher asked each of us what we got for Christmas. What I would have gotten was a doll I really had wanted, but the family we had visited lived in a home in my town with dirt floors! And that little girl my age got my present, the doll, it was the thing I could do and a lie I will never forget and never felt guilty for telling. I look back and wonder if it really had been a lie, Mrs. Boling asked what I got for Christmas and what I got was to give my gift to someone who would love her more than me.

That lesson comes back this time of year, how gifting can be things, or how it can become the thing that makes life sweeter. My friend Jim Shine sent me a set of poetry books written by Mary Oliver, but the message he inscribed in the New and Selected Poems, Volume One was to refer to page 94 with the question that ended the poem on that page: "What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

Do your part if you are using lights, burn LED's and turn them off and lower your thermostat when you go to bed tonight. And plan to wake up in the morning and figure out what you are going to do with your one wild and precious life.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
 
 

This morning a flock of geese got mad.

They were disturbed by a pickup truck that approached too quickly. I heard them 1/2 a mile away. Hollering.

They were rerunning the bean field, finding what the combine had left behind. When I arrived at the pond in the field adjacent to them, not surprisingly there was evidence they had been there, too. But not as much evidence as the beavers had left. OH MY GOODNESS.

Beavers had been working hard making tunnels through the dam, enough so, they are bypassing the pipe set in to regulate the pond level. They had built a home over the top of the stand pipe, so much so, there was soil enough on it to grow grass, and strong enough to STAND upon. It is funny to imagine how beavers have the ability to take down real trees using their teeth. It made me feel inadequate with my useless teeth incapable of such effort. But beavers have to develop their craft.

This pond had evidence it is a training camp for young beavers. The pups, if they may be called that had their own smaller version of a sort of demonstration dam, made from smaller parts of trees and branches, partially built, as well as a small wetland still in the development stages. At the other pond, which because of the beaver work there, I have gotten a lake. They have expanded the surface water there rising the water level a couple of feet. It is enough to make one shake one's head. If you are in need of developing a wetland on your property, this team is available to take the challenge.

The Department of Agriculture meeting was held in Oklahoma City in their headquarters near the Capitol on the 11th to decide on the Emergency Rules for Poultry Feeding Operations. That meeting began at 10 o'clock and at 4 minutes till, I got one of the last seats available in the room. Many of you must have submitted your comments making sure our voices were heard and we were heard! The board voted NOT to approve the rules but did vote to continue the suspension of approving any new applications until the end of May 2019. We cannot go to sleep. We must work to get our legislators to make decisions that will be protective of our land, our water and our public health. It will be hard, we have to put our minds together as one and keep pushing.

Our new EPA is also finding ways to protect BIG AG. Comments are due on the 14th on the exemption they are going to give Agriculture on reporting air emissions from animal waste at farms so they never have to report air emissions that are hazardous, like hydrogen sulfide and ammonia, smells you know. This change would include emissions from animal waste that is mixed or commingled with bedding, compost, feed, soil, or any other material typically found with such waste. This means it would NEVER be reported, as if it had ever been measured and reported here at all. This would be a great benefit to our air emitters but also to the new poultry feeding operations.

On the same day the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture Board voted to continue the suspension of approving new poultry feeding operations, the EPA announced  a new definition for "Waters of the United States."  Last summer when J-M Farms had the release that killed the fish we didn't know were in Tar Creek and the wood ducks disappeared, the black water went into a dry weather draw or what could be called a ditch, that then flowed into Tar Creek. Because of the Clean Water Act every agency that dealt with water and fish kills responded as soon as it was reported. The new Clean Water Act would not kick in since the proposed change would limit protections only to wetlands and streams that are “physically and meaningfully connected” to larger “traditional navigable” bodies of water. With the new changes citizens would also lose our right to sue the polluter to protect a waterway. Your comments will be needed soon on this.

We got a reprieve with one issue, only to face a new challenges, right?

Another challenge is BF Goodrich. Since the Department of Agriculture meeting ended so quickly, while in Oklahoma City, I went to the Department of Environmental Quality and requested the documents they had on BF Goodrich. Hundreds of documents have arrived by email. We are reading each, taking notes, and noting questions. Former workers are needed to explain how the plant operated.

There are so many questions and there are folks here that can help make more sense out of it. We want the site cleaned up, let's make sure the investigators know where else to look. We could use your help, call LEAD Agency at 918-542-9399 or come with information or help us read these files and make sense of them.

With all these challenges we have to ask, when are we going to raise our voices like the geese can and let it be known we are mad? Oklahoma City is going to have to hear us say, "We are not going to take it anymore."

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

We should laugh more, reach out and find a way to help someone you might not know, fill your day with learning and putting what you learn into action.

And quickly determine a day is just not long enough. These are my days. Many filled with facts that cannot be changed, no matter how positive a person's attitude may be and how sure the change can occur in this lifetime.

There have been times this year that have found me knocking on the door of strangers and leaving having made a friend. It happened again this week and I wish you this experience and these results. We don't put ourselves out there much anymore, as we hurry too quickly home to our familiar walls and ways.

Big Chicken kept me scrambling and struggling with how on earth to share information and how to challenge others to act on the chance we have to speak up, or write down our thoughts and get them turned in by December 10th. This led me here to share some thoughts and ask you for help. Imagine I am knocking on your door to tell you: We found out 3 weeks ago from the Secretary of Agriculture, James Reese that he would work with his board to establish some Emergency Rules to strengthen the weak rules we have now on where new poultry facilities can be built in relation to neighbors, private or public wells, highways, public schools and city limits. These proposed rules have been released and we need to celebrate the beginning of the process but the rules will not be as protective of our environment, our water and our health as we need them to be. So??

WE TELL THEM right now, do it later and you will forget, since as you know we fill our days to the brim, wedge this moment into your day to send your comment on The Emergency Rule for New or expanding poultry feeding operations and how close they can be to the following:

(1 ) Occupied residences:(A)More than 30,000 birds shall be ¼ mile; and (B)  30,000 or fewer birds shall be 1000 feet.
(C) All distances between occupied residences and poultry feeding operations shall be measured from the closest corner of the walls of the occupied residence to the closest point of the poultry feeding operation, excluding land application sites;
(2)  Public school shall be ½ mile;
(3)  Incorporated city limits shall be ½ mile;
(4)  Public highways shall be 150 feet;
(5)  Property line shall be 150 feet;
(6)  Streams as identified on a current USGS 7.5 minute topographic map shall be 200 feet;
(7)  Private wells not owned or used for the poultry feeding operation shall be 100 feet;
(8)  Public wells shall be 500 feet; and
(9)  The 100-year flood plain as designated by FEMA

Read it all on the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Food website.

Submit comments about the proposed rule until 8:00 a.m. December 10 to andrea.bair@ag.ok.gov.

In your mind imagine your house in the country suddenly with a new neighbor with lots of chickens living in houses that are 600 feet long... buildings as long as 2 football fields, but six of them in a row, each full of as many as 50,000 chickens. Help us out on this. Have an attitude, want your well protected? want the value of your home diminished? How close to the city limits? is one half mile enough? Is 200 feet from a stream going to protect that stream? Show the Department of Agriculture we are not asleep, show your country cousins we stand with them. We SHOULD do this.

December 11 is another BIG day for the Department of Agriculture, decision day on the Emergency Rules and the public can attend that meeting in Oklahoma City. Are you saying back at me, "You SHOULD attend that meeting!" I think we all SHOULD.

But back to what we hope to all be able to do during the holiday season: we should laugh more. Two nights ago I read an email that had come in and as I read it that is exactly what happened. I was laughing out loud and now just thinking about it makes me smile. It was a message from Lauren Pelaia and her 2 friends who are theatrical types in New York City.

They have been studying and learning ALL about Picher, Oklahoma and our issues, this place and they are writing a MUSICAL. Now that is what we need! The serious work of environmental damages and hard times might be hard to rhyme, but boy do we have characters who could be represented in a musical! Musicals are rarely sad and serious through and through. They deal with issues but they SING about them, lots of times ALL TOGETHER.

We could benefit from being together more, imagine that we burst into song and maybe even DANCED! I was laughing because I could not believe they had discovered my weakness, my love for musicals. We have to help these folks tell our stories and we have to hope they will include the Picher Parade and how we moved on over to the Quapaw Parade and then later to the Miami Parade.

I smiled all Saturday, so many people lined up, and SO MANY PEOPLE IN THE PARADES. There has to be a song about them at least there SHOULD be.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Ken Wagner came to Miami OK last February on what would have been my mother's 100th birthday. He was sent by Albert Kelly who was another one of then EPA Administrator, Scott Pruitt's senior advisors at EPA headquarters. Ken Wagner has been chosen to be Oklahoma's Secretary of Energy and the Environment come January.
 
When Mr. Wagner came in February LEAD filled the 2 hours he and Erin Chancellor spent with us with people who spoke of the issues citizens face in the Tar Creek Superfund site. As many as we could schedule got to meet him, and in this environmentally challenged county in Oklahoma, won't it be in our best interest to know he knows us, had sat with us and listened to our stories, our points of view, our fears and our hopes for the future.
 
Take some time, write a card to our Ken Wagner. We will stamp your welcome home or congratulation cards to him if you drop them by before mid-January. Won't it be great if he had a stack of them on his desk when he cracked the door open and sat himself down in his Oklahoma City office?
 
We are going to need a friend in state government who has been seen to have the ability to sit and listen. What made me think he did connect with us?  It was after listening to our Ottawa County Health Department nurse and lead prevention specialist and the mother of a lead poisoned 2 year old child with developmental delays who had lost his ability to speak whole words  and is now speaking only the first syllable of the words he used to know.
 
Before Ken Wagner left us he asked to know the name of that 2-year old lead poisoned child he met at the table with his mother. Mr. Wagner may not remember any of the rest of our names, but that child's, but he met us, sat and listened.
 
Elections have consequences and we have got to put our hopes in the hands of the folks with the keys to power, that they will use that power to protect our citizens, our environment and our precious little ones.
 
Now we have to hope that our new Governor will hand pick someone with heart, someone who knows Ottawa County, loved northeast Oklahoma, fishes our rivers and swims in Grand Lake and LIKES US to be head of Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Food.
 
As we all sat together with Secretary Jim Reese, our current head of ODAFF recently at the Afton Senior Citizen Center, lined up on the front row were the Grand Lake Water Protectors and many others who will be affected by the lack of regulations our state has put on the expanding poultry industry.
 
Every person who spoke had the attention of Mr. Reese, who admitted the Department of Ag had been "caught off guard" with over 200 requests for permits for new larger than life barns that flooded the agency over the last 2 years. What we saw was a person in a position listening and himself faced with the fact our state, our people and our water is sitting out here unprotected from this invasion.
 
But for the next month, he has the keys, and as he listened, I had hope he would use what power he has to cease, stall or in some way inhibit the expansion. I have that hope because people came, spoke up, shared their feelings and filled every chair in that facility, and were treated with respect. That is the least we can ever hope for, but the bigger hope is he will take that back and do what he can now in his remaining days. The other hope is the person who fills that seat next might be chosen carefully.
 
I grew up in West Texas, but my dad was from Vinita, had land in Craig County and knew when he retired he would return to live. I remember his 2 brothers taking turns calling him on the single phone in the hallway, telling him to hurry up and move back because all their friends were "dying like flies" and they needed his help attending all the funerals.
 
I am at the same age he was when he got those calls, and it is happening to me now, too, people dying like flies. But my regrets lie more for the fact many of those dying remind me that we must be an affected people, lately I am losing former students and even the children of former students. What affects us? our habits, our choices, but the wider environment we can do little to control, but if it could be making us sick, we must do what we can to make those who could improve it, DO IT.
 
We can learn from these senior officials the art of listening. We can reach out this season, let another person into your circle. Go to parades, breathe cold air deeply, enjoy the life you have, fight for another day even better than this one.
 
LEAD will be entering the parades this year, watch for the Jeep with the kayaks on top and the message: We Want Clean Water! That's what we want for Christmas!
 
Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim
 

You might have met her. If you experienced damages from the 2007 flood in Miami, or if you had lived in Picher and had damages from the tornado that hit almost a year later, you might have had to deal with FEMA. Joan Lewin was here, working with FEMA, helping us get through the disasters that had hit Ottawa County, too quickly.

Last week the news coverage of the Camp Fire that had burned down the town, of Paradise, California, didn't mention Joan Lewin lived there and that disaster had found her this time. She lost her town, her home, but got out with her dog and her son, when many were lost, burnt to death in the fire, a fire so hot, dental records could not be used to identify bodies and cadaver dogs are over stimulated by what they are encountering as they do their gruesome work searching for remains.

Joan Lewin waited 2 days before posting on Facebook she was ready to get to the work she knew how to do, help people in crisis find their new lives.

As we experience Thanksgiving, what can we be thankful for? We need to be thankful that there are Joan Lewins in the world, people who get their breath after tragedy and dive in to find ways to serve others in the ways they know how to do. Keggy Roark did it after the Murrah Federal Building bombing in Oklahoma City. He knew how to make some of the best barbeque you might ever be lucky enough to consume. He simply closed down all his local interests and took his equipment and started cooking barbeque for the workers there at the site in OKC.

We have much to be thankful for. When we were hurting but also numb from loss, FEMA helped bring us to our new normal by providing the assistance they could. They also helped survivors find a new source of frustration and perhaps an agency to focus it and their anger. Starting over is never easy and  red-tape helped us figure out, starting over would be hard and personally costly. The U.S. government provides assistance but not a full-fledge do over.

Our new normal is now being experienced by thousands of survivors of the largest fires in California history. Joan Lewin’s hometown is gone, a city twice the size of Miami, OK with over 70 dead in the flames or the smoke, and a thousand more still missing. Their FEMA office has the usual service representatives, Social Security, Veterans Affairs, housing, loans, but at the FEMA office for the survivors of the Camp Fire, DNA swabs are being taken to better be able to identify the remains that are otherwise unrecognizable.

During the FEMA sessions we had in Ottawa County in 2007-8, I got to serve as a counselor through Grand Lake Mental Health, walking neighborhoods and listening, offering what listening eases and sharing information, since facts and services can be tangible service, too. During those times, I got to know Joan Lewin.
 
It was later that year, she picked me up in Sacramento, California and we drove to Chico for a Sustainability Conference hosted by California State University, Chico. We were scheduled to speak together for a session entitled, ‘Learning from the Tar Creek Superfund Site: Land Restoration and Community Recovery after Natural and Man-Made Disasters that contaminate the land and water—and how you can help your own community recover."
 
Yes, it was Joan Lewin who helped me understand the other disaster we had and continue to face is the man-made disaster left by mining companies after the lead and zinc played out here leaving us the toxic mess we are enduring.
The Oxford Dictionary has announced TOXIC as their 2018 word of the year, since toxic "seems to reflect a growing sense of how extreme, and at times radioactive, we feel aspects of modern life have become,” Oxford released in a statement recently.

The Tar Creek Superfund site and use of the word toxic perhaps helped propel the word to be chosen, as the choice is made by the number of searches for its meaning on the Oxford website.

Joan drove me through her Paradise, since it was only 12 miles from Chico, our destination. Earlier that same year, there had been fires that burnt the hillsides and were evident as we drove through what remained of the forest that November on the curving roads. I can visualize how driving those roads with thousands of people fleeing from this fire clogged the escape route, seen on the news, lined with the cars that did not make it.

Chico, sitting 12 miles away is now a tent city with thousands of the former residents of Paradise in tents, campers, wondering what on earth is next. Grief would be heavy there, and I am sure the walking counselors have been deployed and hard at work, listening to the horrifying stories of escaping and the fears and sorrow for those who they fear did not.

But what else did Joan post? Of the help they are receiving, the kindnesses that abound.

Soon she will be speaking of the New Normal she and her survivors will now seek, the one we have already found.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

You might not have known this about me, but I am an optimist. It is a hard thing to carry off, optimism in a world full of toxins and their polluters. It is absolutely awesome the power of the people when they band together and raise their voices for the greater good. That is how change happens, that is how the bald eagle is no longer endangered, that is how smog is a thing we don't have to talk about anymore.

There are times when just a few voices can do magic, but to stop the invasion in the county of the mega chicken houses coming to the horizon near you sucking up the water your children could have counted on for their generation, this is not a time to be silent. One set of 6 mega houses will be near what might have used as a huge tourism draw to see the Ribbon Road and can change the esthetics of the Oklahoma they might have wanted to see "where the wind comes sweeping down the plains" when the site and the possible smell hits our tourists, our countless Route 66 bicyclists and European travelers with their convertibles and the packs of brand new motorcycles who pass through here may hurry on by.

Protect what you have while you can. Speak out and loudly, together if you can and it will sound like Ron Stowell's Chorus Class: pure beauty. If you did that as a community and demanded clean air, clean water, you might get them. But I will promise you it is easy to lose when you are already loosing by accepting what you already have. It is amazing what can happen and has been shown to happen when the gears start working here.

How did the Coleman Theater get restored? How did the Quapaw Nation get the first contract to cleanup a superfund site, their own? How did the towns of Picher and Cardin get a federal buy-out? Power to the people. I rest my case. We can win them all. BF Goodrich could be first made safe and then cleaned up, the lead levels in our children can be zero like other communities around the country, the infiltration of mega-poultry houses can be stopped now. We don't have to let corporate goals be empowered by our local or state leaders and your silent acceptance.

The term fence-line neighbors defines a group of your country friends who are calling themselves Grand Lake Water Protectors who will be sitting on the front row at a meeting Monday evening Nov.19 at 6:30 p.m. in Afton at the Senior Citizens' Center in order to ask questions of Jim Reese, with the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry about the mega-chicken house expansion coming to Ottawa County and about to be their fence-line neighbor. They could use your help, attend that meeting and the ones that follow as this group grows their power to protect our future.

Nettie Detherage organized the first meetings, pulling in the Cherokee Nation, the county commissioners and GRDA and now she is bringing us together in Afton for this opportunity to speak with the man who signs the permits for these facilities. There will be more meetings and they will need your support.

A man who identified himself as Peter called last week just as Lois Lively and I were attaching the shower curtain rings onto the banners Academy students had created demanding cleanup of the BF Goodrich site. He asked if he could get copies of all the documents we had concerning BF Goodrich. It was one of those moments you might have had when you actually look at the phone in disbelief that that question could have been asked at a more remarkable moment.

Before answering I asked, "who are you with?" He was the attorney representing both BF Goodrich and Michelin Tire Companies, while we were on the floor attaching messages we very much hoped he would be able to see because he was coming to Miami this week. We practiced putting the banners up on the fence, got photos and saved the banners for reuse.

Wouldn't it have been great if he was coming to let us know those companies had decided to offer our community closure, compensation and a trail to reparations? to listen to the people who were made sick from exposures, those who live over the benzene plume, those who have buried relatives who had worked at the plant and given their lives for the livelihood the work provided their families. He could consider the lost property values and the utter mess that does nothing to inspire the youth of the community who go to school just yards from the abandoned, demolished mess it currently is.

The attorney did not want to consider the "pond" north of the plant where all the liquids from the plant were discharged  or the "dump" because DEQ had closed it years ago with clay and BFG's benzene is simply "mineral spirits." He dismissed every concern any citizen would have listed but apologized for coming a day early because he had forgotten he had to be in court AGAINST OUR FRIENDS representing the companies the following day.
That visit was disappointing. My spirits dampened by corporate America, but as Friedrich Nietzsche said, "Music heals all forms of misery."

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

We might have thought of BF Goodrich as the rich man who built a plant that put your daddies to work and made sure a lot of their children got to get educations so they never had to work a dirty job like they did. That happened, but BFG built other plants just like ours in other places near rivers, made messes that got left behind and eyesored their neighborhoods, too. But the sites are also landmarks like Akron, Ohio where they were forced to remove the upper parts of the iconic smokestacks since the bricks were no longer stable. 

The Toxics Release Inventory had not been invented when our BF Goodrich plant was operating, but the his sister site in Tuscaloosa, Alabama listed #s released into the atmosphere last year, letting us imagine how many tons of emissions belched out of ours all those years of operation. Many families who lived in the neighborhood remember the carbon black if they did laundry and hung it out to dry, or had a car they doted over. But anyone who was in Miami remembered that smell. Where there is smell there are emissions and we must have been recipients of a lot of what came out.

One sister site in Calvert City, Kentucky is a superfund site and the site in California is damaged, too. The site in Thomaston, Georgia had what we have, "liquid" and asbestos and it was deemed a removal only site, which sounds like a quick and easy-fix  for those Contaminants of Concern which are determined to be concentrated and may cause harm to humans if exposed.

Benjamin Franklin Goodrich made it big with rubber and when Akron, Ohio residents raised $13,600 dollars to encourage him to choose their site, he made it the Rubber Capital of the World for a time. He made real money when he made tires that could be inflated with air, air is cheaper than rubber, first for bicycles, then for cars.

The City of Miami supplied the land for our BF Goodrich plant. And the City waits patiently for the land to be returned to it. With renewed ownership the city could pursue cleanup through a Brownfields program EPA offers, a way to make wasted land reusable. But ownership has been hard to come from out of state owners who hold firm to titles. But the guy with the cape in this story is a humble official who works for EPA and has worked in our county years back on the Tar Creek Superfund site. He knows us. He knows we have issues and that this is an environmental justice site, a place where it has been piled higher and deeper on us and our health and wealth has suffered from our exposure and damaged unusable lands.

Manufacturing plants like to be built near rivers, generally so their products can ship easily but I wonder if it might also be easier for discharges to go unnoticed into water. But a much easier way might be to let it seep into the ground, in our case creating a plume of benzene some 8 to 12 feet below the surface under part of the abandoned plant and stretching into the neighborhood receiving some treatment and monitored periodically. At the Goodrich site in Kentucky it was required to pump and treat contaminated groundwater to prevent its discharge to their river, that would be their Tennessee River.

Say lead, think Tar Creek Superfund site and chat piles, but the BF Goodrich plant in Tuscaloosa up until 2010  was admitting they were emitting lead in their air emissions which also included 109,277 pounds of other chemicals according to the Toxics Release Inventory.

We know there are health concerns with our Goodrich site, asbestos and the benzene, but is that all there really is? Has the site really been assessed fully? We want asbestos and benzene removed, the debris cleared off, the deep pits secured. But what about the rest of the site? the oozing discolored water, the dumps many workers say are north of the site, and off site closer to the river, our Neosho.

If our caped EPA man is coming he will need to convince our PRP's, our real Potentially Responsible Parties to come and do what is right, to enter into an agreement for clean up for that piece of land and return it repaired to the city who gave it 75 years ago. That would be one of the honorable things that could be done to help this community end this relationship on the good faith it began.

In a 2016 Joplin Globe story the Dobson Memorial Center hosted a get-together for BF Goodrich former workers 30 years since the plant closed, there is a photo of 3 former workers inside the fence with one holding a brick. We know you served your families well, dear former workers, don't cross those fences and take souvenirs anymore, the gates are posted with warnings about the asbestos, not to enter without a respirator. Let's let the man with our future in his hands take it from here. Be ready to show him where the dumps are, let me know if you are willing.

Miami Academy students and their faculty are broadcasting our hope, "Get IT Done, ASAP" with banners, letters and much more will follow.

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim

My son drove me and Martin Lively to Bonne Terre, Missouri to see the lead mine which is open for tourists and we got to be them one recent afternoon. I rode in the back seat reading Union Busting in the Tri-State, The Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri Metal Workers’ Strike of 1935, by George G. Suggs, Jr., a book my son had bought for 10 cents at a book sale in the library in the town Will Rogers was born near.

Reading the book got me in the mood for the venture to Bonne Terre and provided appropriate questions to ask upon arrival about the history of the mine and their experience as a superfund site. The guide denied any need for a strike at their mine, as the miners were paid living wages. Garrett Couch, a resident of Bonne Terre had told me about the mine last summer and how perplexed he was that “buy-out” was never an option for their city built on top of their mine, with much of the city undermined as Picher and Cardin had been.

As we entered we saw what our miners might have seen when they arrived to work. We experienced the wonder of the space, the moisture of a deep lead mine whose upper level is used for tours  while lower levels are flooded with clear water used by scuba divers. Even Jacques Cousteau spent 5 days there exploring. Lead was found not too far below the surface in the town, but several things were different than the mining in our Tri-State District. In Bonne Terre, had a fellow running the mine, who wanted to live there. What we saw beneath the surface were the random pillars in the mined caverns, but they were in their traditional shapes, not carved and chiseled to create subsidence risk. We also learned the wages provided a living for the miners, well enough they were able to purchase livable homes in their town just above the lead mine they hollowed out beneath.

At this mine, they walked in and they walked out to their main street. But it was still a lead mine and much like us, became a superfund site. Their home's yards were contaminated with lead and remediated like many of ours have been and still need to be. But their town is undermined, a town of 7,000 people. Buyout didn't come up as an option for them because no study was done to predict the subsidence risk, so cleanup happened and the chat they had in yards and playgrounds became a huge mound right in town that grass doesn't thrive on, but a cover of rocks, clay and some soil cover it all. It is a chat pile you cannot miss made of the waste from their mine.

My face felt wet like a mist that forms slowly on a windshield. The miners would have had hard hats and would not have felt the drips coming from the roof of the mine that we felt hit our uncovered heads suddenly as the rain water filtered through that stone ceiling above us.

As we walked through the man-made caverns their work was evident everywhere, shovels left leaning here and there. But up high in the rooms scaffolding was left strapped near the roof and guy wires pounded to the pillars for miners to work. They would have heard the sound of the attack made by man to the earth, the very structure of the earth beneath their homes.

We always heard of the random pillar technique used in the Tri-state district mining field. But at Bonne Terre, we saw the pillars are big like legs of monster elephants, but they were much closer together than I imagined, as if they cared about the land above their heads, or the company cared about the men's lives below. We felt small in those rooms we wandered through and felt sensations of true awe to see the earth's ribs showing all around us. Local mining lore tells when a new “room” was blasted open and light hit it, the newly exposed faces of the minerals and metals shone like a fairyland. Our guide had heard about the Tri-State District and Picher’s mines and the unique specimens of metals and minerals which have ended up on display in museums around the country.

Honorable hard working men spent their youth and their health in those mines and in our local mines.  When our mines played out, many moved on to factory labor with the BF Goodrich Tire plant in Miami. They labored there and were followed by their sons who carried on that tradition just as sons had followed fathers to the mines. Today many may live in the neighborhood near the abandoned plant and see it in ruins and live with fear of the benzene that lies beneath and the asbestos that has been left behind in the deep and in the power house might still find ways to harm their health.

Bonne Terre is proof a superfund site could be cleaned up. Ours will take longer because of its size. 
BF Goodrich isn’t a superfund site but it's a mess that needs a cleanup that is long overdue. Say it like you mean it, make it Bonne Terre, Good soil.

Through the years there have been casual comments generating some tinge of laughter when Tar Creek comes up, with the quip about the Tar Creek Monster. Art students have depicted the monster in various ways. One of my all time favorites, was Meredith MacQueeney's done simply with pen and ink. But I saw him for real the other day myself. He can be found not far after leaving the Neosho River upon entering the mouth of Tar Creek. He doesn't greet you as you enter, he is more the sentry for those who leave.

As the Tar Creekkeeper, and using my vessel, the kayak bearing its name, I went down the ramp at Riverview Park to find the confluence of the creek from the Neosho River. Butch Flick, who had recently returned from being a fishing guide in Alaska agreed to accompany. The ramp was muddy but the launch easy, witnessed by the folks visiting in separate vehicles. The Neosho is a brown river but easy mover. It is a lot farther to the train trestle than it looks, but just before the bridge over the highway, turn left and there you are in the slow to sluggish for sure "Tire Creek," the tire always visible along this stream, Tar Creek. There is little evidence it is ever found. It is wide and slow. The big trees bare the orange stains of the past floods.

The Blue Heron complained along our route for the intrusion. And a big fish or his brothers leaped for joy to have us there. Quiet and slow. Both sides of the creek's wild spaces were slowly joined by tree stands back from the water indicating some people join the site during certain seasons. What we found was the makings of a treasure, a wildlife refuge, practically untouched. We came upon 2 fellows standing on the bank, one owned 30 acres with 300 pecan trees he had just listed for sale. Land is a hard thing to give up, didn't Will Rogers say, "they ain't making any more of it?"

But this land this creek will get a brand new start, once EPA is funded enough to get to it. It is complicated, first fix it in Kansas, then follow it, keep chat from the big piles from getting into it, dreg what bad is in it and then figure out how to deal with the mine water discharge, keep dredging it all the way to the other train trestle, the one past Twin Bridges. With funding this could already be over and Luke could get that land sold, or be glad, very glad he kept it as its value increases with the clean stream he would have on both sides of him.

We have to think about this stream and figure out how we keep it clean, and then we have to consider all those sister streams and those unnamed streams that feed into streams that must be protected. That means we have to think hard about choices we make now that may impact our neighbors. Each of us with portions of land must think hard about holding on to it or making restrictions on our deeds that will end up protecting our heirs and their neighbors. What we do to the land we do to the water. And we all need water and all the future generations must have it too.

When we consider the future, we must think big. It is heavy the responsibility we have. Do we protect the land owners right to pollute your air, your water, your land? How right is that?

The Tar Creek Monster is really there, it is the choices made many years ago to fail to spend the money to keep pumping out that aquifer so water would not hang out long enough to become toxic and taint us for the rest of our lives. The monster is the choice humans make that create the monsters that will haunt us, poison our children and make our lives intolerable.

My homework is to study the Oklahoma Agriculture Statutes. This section looks out for Agriculture, not our land, our water or our people. Ag is for Ag. Those pages indicate a lot of laws have been repealed, sections of our anti-corporate farming laws, because our early Oklahoma lawmakers already knew about corporate farming and put protections for us and those laws have been degraded since 1992 when Big-Ag started seeing our plains as gains for their companies.

Kent Ryals, an attorney in Vinita said that can be changed. I agreed and legislators need help in making the laws protective of what is important, our future. What we also need are people who want the laws changed, not to infringe on farmers, which there aren't that many of anymore. But to help farmers make good choices and the state's future. We need no more monsters, no more degradation.   

My other homework can be shared. Pick up a pen and write your letters now. Have an opinion. With the election coming up soon, write to those running for governor, since the winner will be appointing people who will serve in positions of power in every department of our state government. Elections have consequences and we must give the right to protect us seriously when we vote.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

I grew up with parents who enjoyed time together. But every so often they would Rooster Fight. Each would pull a bent arm up close to their body and then flap it a time or two before the "fight" began. It never seemed like a real fight because they both began to laugh and it was over practically before it began. It was my kind of chicken fight.

But what we have happening right now is a Chicken Fight on a much larger scale and no one is laughing. It is just now reaching Ottawa and Craig County, but our sister counties are covered with trouble already.

It is time to join the Oklahoma Chicken Fight for Water and our Future. You can begin right away. No one has to know you have joined. You can start in your very own house, or on your break at work. Make a decision to do something. That phrase, see something, say something, that was made for us. Go in your kitchen, turn on the tap, see the water? Want to keep seeing water you can drink? Then, yes, say something about it.

Who will you tell? You can start with your household members and they can pass it on. We can inform the people we know that water and a healthy future is at stake.

Then what? Tell every local elected official you are concerned and you want them to speak up. Every local tribal elected leader. They all respect our Mother Earth and know Water is Life. Call the next layer of elected officials, the Governor and everyone running for Governor. Call the Secretary of Agriculture and Forestry James Reese and each of his board members. Good start. Then call every other agency that has something to do with water in the State of Oklahoma, and by all means call the Oklahoma Water Resources Board.

Many of us learned to write letters while we were in 5th grade and because of email and texting, we probably haven't written one since, but this would be a great time to start. Write all of those folks you called, as a follow up. Just like in texting, use ALL CAPS SO THEY KNOW YOU ARE SERIOUS. And you really could TEXT most of them too, without a stamp.

The dirt is being moved on new chicken houses south of Miami and north of Vinita. Each of these BIG ones are 3 football fields long. Some of us can't even walk that far without getting winded. But once they come in getting winded could happen quick for folks you know who already have asthma and COPD. We could care about them and the air we breathe. We could protect the air quality and speak up for it to all those folks you contacted about the water quality.

Ottawa County has paid her dues, providing the lead for both World Wars and having the land left like it was the war zone. She dutifully provided jobs for breadwinners with BF Goodrich which now sits abandoned like a second warzone with fears of asbestos and Benzene beneath the ground nearby. Ottawa Countians have had generations of our youth lead poisoned and their potential and our communities' hopes for their futures dampened. All that heavy metal dust has fairy dusted all of us ensuring many lives have been lost years before their expected expiration dates. Tar Creek got hit in 1979 and has been the blight we want to forget as she runs silently past us and dumps her load of metals into the Neosho out of sight, just past the boat ramp in Riverview Park.

We are a Superfund Site with her name. We are a damaged place. Every resident in the county can have the soil they live upon tested for lead because it could have been spread and been long forgotten. But lead does not sleep, it will not cease having the power to harm children, no matter how long it lays there. It must be removed.

Craig County for the most part has protected herself all these years. We are not a superfund site, we did not grow with the influx of workers to a polluting plant like BF Goodrich. We have good people who breathe good air. Your neighbors need your support now. Your neighboring counties need your support now.

Vinita and the Rural Water District #2 drink Grand Lake. For an 18 month period ending last year we were all drinking water with HAAs which can cause cancer and other illnesses especially for our most vulnerable. That was because the lake water needed more chlorine added to kill what was in the lake water before you drank it. The chlorine changed our water. More chicken houses produce more litter and that litter can lie in the Grand Lake watershed and add to its burden which will cause it to be treated and that treatment can harm us. More chicken houses = more waste that will be distributed on the land, harming our Grand Lake or her sister lakes downstream.

We pay with our health, we pay for treatment and we pay for corporate farming. This is an industrial disaster come upon this land and her people that can harm our environment and suck water right out from under us. Chickens love water, just like you do. And when you have 300,000 chickens per house and 6 going in right away, you might want to add in your message that you want our Roubidoux to remain drinkable, the tap water you drink is at risk. Why?

It goes back to mining days, when they mined the Boone aquifer, and when they quit, water filled those abandoned caverns where it brewed into a Toxic Tea, not like J-M Farms Toxic Tea compost nutrient rich water that got loose and ran into Tar Creek this summer and killed fish. No this Toxic Tea is loaded with heavy metals, and when the caverns got full it has flowed down Tar Creek ever since.  The Roubidoux lies beneath the Boone and if lots of water is pulled from the Roubidoux, the Boone will try to fill it, and if it does, it can contaminate that tap water you like. You might not drink the Roubidoux but your Bluejacket and Ottawa County neighbors do.

Lots of chickens can drink lots of water millions of gallons per house quickly. So be quick with your letters, calls, texts. Very quick. It's your chicken fight now. My parents would be all over this one.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Our 20th National Environmental Conference began with environmental justice and ended with water. Trevor Hammons, the Supervising Attorney for Environmental Complaints with the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality had presented at our annual conference and explained that there was water protecting us from being exposed to another dangerous substance, asbestos.  We were told water covers all of the asbestos that is left at BF Goodrich. One of our volunteers without our knowledge took a walk around that site -and came back with a flat light-weight fiber-covered item stuffed into a baggie.

DEQ was called immediately asking for the man in charge of asbestos sites in Oklahoma familiar with BFG, but he had retired and the new guy didn't know about the site, would look it up and get back with us. Our volunteer has left the state, but the site is here and a tempting place to take a walk about.

From our knowledge the only way left to be exposed to asbestos was to fall into the uncovered flooded basements, swim down a couple of levels grab some stuck to something, pry it off and bring it out of the water and dry it out. We remain concerned about the potential to cause harm left as it is.  The current owner left the state,  pays the taxes on the property to avoid the $10,000 a day fines that should be accumulating with DEQ.

There ought to be a way to be able to protect the public, clean up the site, deal with the benzene plume and rename the street after the other long standing building: Will Rogers, named after the man who never met the man who left that mess or the company that abandoned the town.

Waterkeeper Alliance asked all of their members to do a Clean Up in their watersheds in September. We listed it as an option for the Conference last week,  A Walk to Tar Creek and Clean Up, but no one signed up for it. We were going to walk to the creek that runs through the NEO campus right to the spot Jason Miller loves and not clean up the creek. Because number 1, we don't have the multiple millions it would take Number 2, we are regular  people and this is not a regular cleanup, this is a superfund site contaminated with heavy metals that are hazardous to people and obviously the environment. This will take a federal agency with big bucks to fund this, an agency and a program within it made special to handle this.

Even if we wanted to do a "regular cleanup" along the creek banks, pulling out debris and trash, should we? Every item would be covered with the superfund site metals and get all over us as we lift it and turn it to bag it. And where should the bag go? It would basically be toxic waste. Put it in the "regular" trash pickup?

How do we clean this place up? with power washers to the debris covered rocks? What about the fish eggs, the start of new life by the ones already taking up residences in our creek? Do we humans destroy other life to make our space look like we think "good" is?

We didn't have to explain this by the creek last week because no one signed up for the walk and cleanup. But imagine this creek gets her REAL CLEANUP and the metals are dealt with by the EPA through the Superfund Program created to be funded by fees placed on companies that manufacture substances that can pollute. So while we are imagining, we would include Congress re-authorizing that provision in the law so it is funded enough to do this cleanup with those fees and not be done with taxpayer funding from US.

THEN, we use the fire circle, Jason Miller brings his guitar, we have the cleanup and spend some time along the Tar Creek old timers remember singing the old songs and the news ones like the Tar Creek Anthem written by Jim Stricklan.

 This week brought some time to rediscover our Community Garden and a young woman in it getting  a couple of our home grown tomatoes who exclaimed they were the best birthday gift she had ever had.

She was a happy young woman vibrant active and as we pulled tomatoes and talked in the last light of the day, she told me I had been the woman who knocked on her door last year and found her beat up. But she got out of that relationship got a new life, a job and was totally unrecognizable now with her brand new life and tomatoes.

We can take the time to knock on a door, we can ask the big question, are you alright? Thousands of woman received help through the Community Crisis Center led by DeeDee Cox. Think of all the brand new lives she has been able to start.

I am hoping she in her retirement and they all get a garden going to share what they grow with the folks who wander by, and doing so ask those questions, are you alright? are you safe? Do you need help?

Our conference is available on the LEAD Agency Facebook page. Catch up and watch Channel 8 for the expansion of chicken houses in northeast Oklahoma series. Craig and Ottawa need to be concerned.
We care about water and all our efforts are needed to protect it. We require it for life.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
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We had many speakers at the 20th National Environmental Conference at Tar Creek but it was the "Ted Talk" that did what our conferences were designed to do. Twenty years ago our federal and state agencies did not communicate with each other about our environmental issues. Our conferences brought citizens together with the agencies and hoped they would begin discussions. A few years later EPA announced their Memoranda of Understanding allowing but actually mandated agencies to work together. This year the public got to see what that looks like.

First Lori Yearout, epidemiologist with the Oklahoma State Department of Health revealed bad news:  the number of lead poisoned children in state designated Tar Creek zip codes is DOUBLE the percentage of lead poisoned children in the state and even higher in 2015 and 2016. Our kids are still being poisoned. If you have not had your yard tested, do it now, do it for your neighbors' kids and your own. More calls, more funding comes to get more done, call 1-800-522-0206 to have your yard tested. Our kids are lead poisoned TWICE the STATE OF OKLAHOMA's average.

What else can we do? Dr. Emily Moody from Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City told us the very best thing we can do is wet mop. That would include wet dusting as well. Fine particles in OUR dust can contain lead and other harmful metals and you don't want to scatter them, you want to capture them so they will not be inhaled or land on items that go into your mouth or your child's. Dr. Moody explained no matter our age, we want to limit our exposure to lead, eat healthy foods and get this, lower our stressors.  

Back to Ted. Ted Schlueter with the Oklahoma Area Indian Health Service revealed startling news. He had tested wells of tribal members and was shocked to find lead in a private water well 3 times higher than the standard acceptable by EPA for municipal wells. He was able to find funding to connect some homes to rural water but he had found another one and knew all of the tribal wells in the northeast Ottawa County should be tested.
He presented tables, Google maps, addresses, amounts of lead in each well and then showed the Google map of the other tribal homes that still needed to be checked. It got quiet and then the magic of pulling us all together as one happened.

First the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality Project Manager spoke up and asked some questions, then Tim Kent with the Quapaw Tribe said a sister county in our Tri-State Mining District had connected ALL private wells in their county to rural water so no one was using a private water well in the Boone aquifer and EPA was able to do that and that there ought to be a way for EPA to do this work for Ottawa County.

Ted had showed the Google map indicating where the household was with the high levels of lead in the well water. LEAD Agency passed on PUR water filters for the homeowner to use in the interim to provide safe drinking water to the household. PUR donated 50 filters this year to help our community.  

Water connects us and our hope is that we protect our people by providing good water, but we have to be watchful to protect this drinking water source as we know there are intrusions of bad water to the Roubidoux that still need to be found and corrected.

We connected back to an earlier session on the expansion of poultry farms in northeast Oklahoma, all of which will be pulling massive amounts of water from the Roubidoux, this precious resource, this lake below this region we are counting on to be there as the water resource for our future.

1994 was a pivotal year. President Clinton signed Executive Order requiring fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations and policies. Our keynote speaker Charles Lee was a key player in the environmental justice movement and we like to believe our conferences have been aimed at making sure environmental justice was included on our agendas.

In a 1994 letter from Don Acherman to EPA on display in my office he documented his concern that 34% of Indian children were found to be lead poisoned by the Indian Clinic in Miami. This letter caused EPA to respond with follow-up testing random kids proving children in our mining towns and Miami were too. EPA responded targeting high access areas first where children played then began yard remediation that is still in effect now for all of Ottawa County to protect children from lead poisoning.  All these years later, IHS got EPA's attention again with shocking numbers that will have to be responded to. Don Acherman and Ted Schlueter worked for the same agency, in the same position doing the same kind of work. Both spoke out seeking to share information to bring awareness to a public health emergency both deserve our gratitude.

If you missed the conference you will be able to see it and Michael Woodruff's skills on LEAD Agency's facebook page.

Respectfully Submitted with hope all are provided Safe Drinking Water,
Rebecca Jim

At a house near Tar Creek last week, I rang the doorbell only once not knowing if anyone would answer, as many people are gone during the day.  I stood and waited when I finally heard the question, who's there? from the other side of the door. I answered with my name only to hear from the inside, "Rebecca Jim, the infamous woman?!"
The woman opened the door and welcomed me inside. We stood and talked nearly an hour and she had read my columns and quoted one of them to me. It is really an honor to have the opportunity to share thoughts, experiences and really to be allowed to know someone new.  

A professor of Geology and her colleague from Emporia State University were bringing two students to recreate a USGS study completed in 2008 by William Andrews. He had been interested in learning more about the historic metal loading of the stream banks along Tar Creek. They hoped to learn what had happened in the ten years since his study was completed and with her permission the academic team would be able to walk to the creek on her property to collect samples and she agreed.

But she wanted to know more about the Man on the Log who had been in a previous column and where his place was and looking out  the window getting my bearings, he was really only a few blocks from her home. I told her she needed to have a log, too. Imagine all the folks along the creek could become Tar Creek Watchers! She like many of us feed the birds, but birds can be an indicator species, like the "canaries in the coal mines" of old. Two recent studies of the birds of Tar Creek will be discussed at this year's conference on the 2nd day and our pollution can harm our birds, come find out how.

The researchers came that day and were working the other side of the creek when the 3 volunteers and I found them. Dr. Schulmeister began immediately teaching about soil and the metals they would find just as my phone rang, there in the wilderness along the creek. It was Sharon Learner who is a journalist researching the connection between exposure to lead and criminal behavior. I stepped away to talk with her, found a big rock and checked for snakes before sitting on it. The soil lesson was continuing, everyone engaged either teaching or learning, just as the frog leaped by 3 feet high and reaching wayout with his frog arms after each jump. She was jumping for her life because a SNAKE was pursuing her aggressively with his head extended a foot off the ground, LIKE A COBRA. I hollered "SNAKE" because the frog was leaping toward the soil lesson. It took two more "SNAKES!" before they heard me and scattered, with allowed the frog to get away and the snake to give up.

Dr. Schulmeister will be speaking at our conference next Tuesday as one of the educators who have been using the Tar Creek Superfund site as her outdoor classroom for years. Sharon Learner will be in the audience and is interested in meeting people who have or have relatives who want to help her better understand the relationship between lead and criminal or aggressive behavior. Ms Learner has met numerous death row inmates who had nothing else in common but the fact they grew up in places near Superfund Sites, like ours that had lead as the "contaminate of concern" EPA had identified for cleanup.

Community Science is a new term, replacing Citizen Science and Luz Guel, the Community Engagement coordinator at  the Mount Sinai Transdisciplinary Center on Early Environmental Exposures in New York City will be addressing us Wednesday right before noon. We are all about collaborating with health professionals who know how to get a message out there so people find it interesting and act on it. This type of help is welcome from all sources.
Each year we wonder what will be on the cover of the Tar Creek Conference Program. This year both the front and the back images are woodcut prints from Dawn Hill's Miami High School art students, Trinity Smith's Stinky Fish and Fish Surviving by Tashauna Miles.

We think of the cover as our Winter Count image, the event each year that marks it in our collective memory of the "thing" that happened that year. We believe these young people nailed it, with the dead fish we saw in Tar Creek last summer and the image on the back: our hope for healthy fish in the future.

You can get your copy at the 20th National Environmental Conference at Tar Creek next week September 25-26 at NEO in the Ballroom. Pick it up, stay and learn, become engaged or enraged, have some time with infamous people, state officials and activists. For more information and a schedule of events check www.leadagency.org.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim