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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blackberrily Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim