I have been thinking a lot about bicycles lately, since the Recycle Tar Creek Bike Ride is coming up on April 23 at 10 Saturday morning. It is easy to register early by calling 918-542-9399 or on-line www.leadagency.org. As a fundraiser for LEAD Agency we hope many people will cycle in for the event. But for the very fact Miami was built between Tar Creek and the Neosho River, we hope to start seeing Tar Creek as an important asset to the community, as the creek runs through it, cleaner in the future.

LEAD has been gathering resources to provide bikes to our youngest artists. Some of Terri Riley's early elementary art students will be taking new bikes and helmets home soon thanks to the Seneca-Cayuga Nation, Integris Baptist Regional Health Center and Sachs Associates.

In the future the hope held by some of the most considerate people in the area is that old bikes can be made new again, so even more people are up and riding in our community. Wouldn't that be just the best? Recycling bikes on future rides as the future of our creek improves.

This year's Recycle Tar Creek happens on the same day as the spring clean-up for residents of Ottawa County District #1 according to Commissioner John Clarke. The riders will have an opportunity to meet an elected leader actively involved on Earth Day. Riders will meet site interpreters along their route to learn more history of this area.
People are paying more attention to lead since learning the public drinking water in Flint, Michigan lead poisoned many children. Lead in our area can be found in the older homes on the walls or in the lead pipes, but also in the legacy mine waste used in neighborhoods, alleys and playgrounds.

Recycling the message of lead poisoning got easier this week with an article about Rick Eades, president of the Mississippi Home Inspectors Association, who believes it is overwhelming to think how old lead paint is slowly releasing tiny amounts of lead to the air, food and water, exposing the dwellers and also the neighborhood every time the yard is mowed with lead being spread as far as one mile away. Howard Hu explains, "The real argument is how does society control the totality of known lead exposures and ensure they remain as low as possible." Dr. Hu, formerly with Harvard, has been here and when he speaks about the totality of our exposures I can imagine him remembering the mountains of chat he saw here, knowing they were loaded with lead and other heavy metals.
The National Center for Healthy Housing reported lead-poisoned children have a higher chance of ADHD, antisocial disorder, criminal activity and drug abuse, not to mention decreased IQ, increased blood pressure, anemia, gastrointestinal issues, stunted growth, seizures, coma, and—at very high levels—death.

We rarely had high levels of lead in our area children, but years of chronic low-level exposure. Lead does accumulate in the body, and the principle place where it accumulates is the skeleton.

Dr.Hu said lead in adults contributes to kidney issues, including premature failure, and hypertension, a major risk factor for heart attack and stroke. "A third domain of problems is that lead clearly accelerates declines in mental functioning in adults," Hu said, including loss of "short-term memory and verbal memory and visual-spatial function and coordination."

"It might be just that every time lead goes into your brain, it does a little bit of damage, then it leaves and goes into bone," Hu said. "And that continues, that process continues, over years, and then what do you have left? You have a damaged brain."

After reading Howard's conclusion, my damaged brain believes there is more work to be done. Before losing my coordination, I am getting back on my bike and do that ride next week. And I will be thankful for each person who calls in to get their yard tested for lead and for every child who has their blood lead tested.

As we ride the long route we will be passing chat piles, but we will also be passing remediated yards and whole acreages of chat the Quapaw Tribe and the State with EPA funding have made disappear. It all will be better. I can see it coming as we Recycle Tar Creek.

We have the Right to Farm but do we have the right to harm? Isn’t this what Cesar Chavez asked? Isn’t this why he went on a Hunger Strike during the 1960’s when he was in his 60’s? At that time he was speaking up for the treatment of the farm workers in the fields and now almost 60 years later we are still asking farm questions. In Oklahoma it will even be on the ballot in the fall as SQ 777. It is a State Question. Consider your answer. Think it through.

I live on a farm. I am a farmer. I also garden at home and am preparing the ground for the 3rd season of the LEAD Agency Community Garden. I know farmers and gardeners.  We already have the right to farm, or someone would have come and told us we needed a license to pick up a hoe or a package of seeds.

The State Question 777 may need to be questioned before you vote for The Right to Farm. What else happens when we give the Right to Farm by saying yes? Permission to farm? What other permission does this give?
This Question changes the state constitution and gives farmers rights to do anything to the land, crops or livestock they choose to do. It takes away the right to clean air or clean water for neighbors or those downstream or downwind. It takes away the right to regulate farming practices including the humane treatment of animals by any agency or the legislators for the protection of health or welfare in the future. It also retroactively takes away all the regulations that were put in place to somewhat protect humans and the environment from the most egregious practices of the large confined animal feeding operations.

Thinking about farming and the farm workers’ greatest organizer led me to learn about Fred Ross, who taught many including Cesar Chavez. Ross said, “A good organizer is a social arsonist who goes around setting people on fire” and “who does not lead but gets behind the people and pushes.” He spent his life pushing people to lead—in migrant camps, in living rooms, on picket lines—and was so effective that he pushed himself right out of most history books. I love that. In California he got half a million Latinos registered to vote and imagine this in this day and age, as they say, he got statewide legislation to grant pensions to 50,000 non-citizen farmworkers.

In 1985, Ross told an interviewer, “All my life I’ve been looking to go to work with people who are in trouble of some kind. My goal was to help the people do away with fear— to speak up and demand their rights.” You bet he became my newest role model!

I spent a morning with Fredas Cook as he pulled and dug surely a good shady-eighty plants from his yard for mine. Earlier I read through the LEAD Garden Binder Kelda Lorax had prepared for us with composting, planting and clearing land tasks, with lists of what to do’s for the volunteer gardeners who could wander through our garden. Not a thing at Fredas’ or nowhere in Kelda’s guide were there hints I needed a Right to Farm measure passed before reading or setting the volunteers loose in the garden.

We would like to invite the public to a free screening of a documentary, Owners of the Water, Conflict and Collaboration Over Rivers which will be shown Sunday April 10 at 4 pm at the Commons Hall on the NEO campus.  The film is short but will leave the viewers understanding the power people can have when motivated to protect their homelands and the water that sustains them from large corporate farming operations which must have been given the Right to Farm. The filmmakers David Hernandez Palmar (Wayuu) from Venezuela and anthropologist Laura R. Graham will be present with OU Geography Associate Professor Laurel Smith for questions and answers following this viewing.

There are between 1 and 3 million migrant farm workers with 61 percent falling below the poverty level. As Chavez reminded us, “The fight is never about the grapes or lettuce. It is always about people.” With this in mind ORO is collecting clean long sleeved shirts which can be taken to the Work Force Oklahoma in downtown Miami, OK, for our people, our local farm workers.

Each year on March 31 – we ought to light a candle to remember the efforts of Cesar Chavez who as a civil rights activist took the farm workers’ struggle and was able to turn it into a moral cause and gain nationwide support. I am just betting he and Fred Ross would want any voter to think hard about that state question on whose rights will be protected if it passed and who would benefit from those lucky sevens.

Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim