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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

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