I grew up in a house with a long hallway with one wall shelved with books all the way to the ceiling. They were my mother's books, novels, history and all of her medical textbooks. She was an Osteopath who gave up her practice after marrying my dad and having children.

I always loved to read and some of those books became my best friends through long lazy summer days. Since my mother was a doctor and my dad's father was a doctor, and we had all those medical books in the hallway. I took to picking them up and reading. Bones and tissue, organs and systems, all good. But it was the textbooks full of diseases that got to me. They were interesting, lots of then black and white photos of disease organs, distorted faces and limbs. But it was the text, the symptoms, always the symptoms that got to me.

I would read them, and it would be almost as the words were processed, my body began to have and feel the symptoms. It would have been amazing, if it had not ruined my possibilities of pursuing a career in the medical field. But once symptoms were mentioned, I began to feel them, pain, swelling, but it was finally the hydrophobia that got me when I began to drool not able to swallow anymore. I closed the book and the drooling stopped. I walked away never to open another medical text again.

I have purposely kept my distance all these years. Until this week. There were some berries out in our community garden that were interesting. Beautiful, round dark blue berries, like blueberries out of season. With the change of weather and the threat of frost, I called Martin Lively out to witness these plants and the berries. We had been talking about native chefs using native plants, so it felt all natural to reach over while showing him the berries to pluck one off and sample it. It tasted bland, but sweet, a berry that might make wine but not a good juicer. I spit it out and kept spitting to get all the bits of it out of my mouth.

Martin retrieved a water bottle with several warnings on the label. One was not the eat the RED BERRIES. But the berry was not red. But something about the leaves reminded me of tomato leaves and made me think of the nightshade family and all the warnings about "deadly nightshade" poisoning in old plays and early novels. I hadn't ever seen it in the wild or even pictures of it, but googled it and there it was, the plant in our garden fully outfitted with the berries and blooms. Just like in the picture, deadly nightshade. 

The description matched, but then the reading of symptoms and how many berries were needed for the deadly to set in. About that time I began to tell Martin about the books in the hallway in the house I grew up in and then I began not to feel good. My heart began to race and I grabbed my key and took out with the decision to take myself on over to the hospital emergency room. I checked myself in saying "Deadly Nightshade" and yes there is an antidote, I need it.

As it turned out they never gave me the antidote, they called Poison Control and monitored my heart rate for an hour and it steadily calmed and they released me. The nurse practitioner told me not to put things in my mouth I wasn't sure of. But the message I knew even better was, DON'T READ THE SYMPTOMS unless close to an ER who has someone there to counsel me to well and let me walk out alive.

Deadly doesn't mean dead. Don't swallow the berries. It takes only 4 to kill an adult. Glad I stopped with one and didn't like it and didn't gather the rest to make that wine.

With the threat of frost, perhaps these nightshade relatives will all have a quick lights out soon and not  be found in another community garden anytime next season! Charles Gourd's team of native plant specialists are needed up this way in the Cherokee Nation. None too soon!

The diagnosis on the discharge paper simply listed Ingestion of toxic substance. Basing back to our culture, living off the land, grazing on the wild things, we had learned by watching the animals and learning from our elders how to use the plants growing in our territory, what to eat, what to avoid. This was a wake-up call for me and a new campaign. Parents go outside, take a walk and see if you find these berries, shiny plump inviting berries and get them pulled out of the ground, leave not a leaf or berry behind, do not add them to your compost pile, but solid waste them.

My campaign has been to have every yard sampled for lead and I have been on it for the last 20 years and I won't let up on it, since we still have LOTS more properties left to have DEQ sample, but my second campaign will be something you can do yourself. Look for those plants with the dark shiny berries, long after the blueberry season has ended and get them dug up and removed just like DEQ will do if they end up finding lead in your yard.

Finally something a regular person can do to protect our children and ourselves!

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

This week I had the honor, perhaps the responsibility to speak from an environmental viewpoint with a distinguished group of energy and economists from Brazil. Each of the members of the group had high ranking positions with industry or with the agencies involved with the economy of growth in their country and they came to learn more about the energy sector in our country.

I had peaked at what's happening with the mining industry and they are hunting for some of the metals associated with the Tar Creek Superfund site like manganese but others like bauxite and uranium. We have learned that manganese can harm children much like lead does. Brazilian mining companies are  finding lots of iron, so of course they have lots of water that has that familiar "look" of bad water we are used to finding.

I didn't cry about how our children have been lead poisoned and how the other heavy metals are creating their own health impacts, but it causes me a deep sadness and pushes me to speak out. I didn't take them to the damage uranium mining had caused to the Navajos and men who left our mines to work there, too which has caused much sorrow there and with our returning miners and their families.

Last week their Congress voted to protect large portions of the Amazon which left the mining ministry complaining that “Brazil needs to grow and create jobs, attract mining investment and even tap the economic potential of the region." The Jobs vs. the environment seems to be a universal dilemma. 

So far the Amazon has so much diversity no single insect has done to the lungs of the southern hemisphere, what the pine bark beetle has done for ours.

The loss of our pine trees has been caused by climate change and its driving force is the continued use of fossil fuels' and the warming that results, allowing the beetles to reproduce many more times a season in great hungry numbers.  The Brazilian group was committed to investigating best practices in overall energy sector management, particularly with respect to transitioning from traditional to renewable sources; and issues related to generation and distribution of electricity.  

They lit up when Ariel Ross began to talk about her efforts as a regular woman in an Oklahoma town to stand up and get the city she lived in to attempt to regulate fracking inside their city limits to protect their property and their citizens' health.

They wanted to hear about earthquakes and Ariel had worked with Stop Fracking Payne County, an organization Earl Hatley, LEAD Agency's Grand Riverkeeper helped form, because as a land owner in Payne County, still owning a homestead where frack central was just around the country corner. A great question from one of the group was why did they concentrate on the fracking and injection wells, didn't they care about what was IN THE WATER that was being injected?

She explained the reasoning. Environment in Oklahoma is a dirty word, goes against progress and who would want to stop the industry where their daddy worked? So they strategically chose to focus early on the fracking that caused EARTHQUAKES because that was really a dirty word everybody could get behind and want to STOP. We all learned as the effort continued that the real earthquakes were linked to the high pressure waste water injection.

As it went on, she calmly talked about the organizing and the success, in the short run. Her winning a seat on the planning commission for Stillwater, how she was perceived in her neighborhood and the BIG ONE, the 5.8 earthquake and then she cried.

My mind wandered. The next earthquake worries me and what might happen to the fragile caverns that make up the Tar Creek Superfund site. Earthquakes are unpredictable and if that whole thing collapses what could be the repercussions?

My driveway is covered with layers of pine needles. The forest I planted 37 years ago is dying. I didn't cry but I did plead with the Brazilian delegation to take care of the Amazon since the North American boreal forest covering 15% of the earth and has been called "a poor person's Amazon," because it produces lots of oxygen and is a carbon storage "sink."

Billions of trees have died from Alaska to New Mexico, Minnesota to Mississippi the beetle is taking our trees, our forests. We should be crying, but before we left that room at the University of Tulsa,

I did plead for them to take better care of their Amazon, that we will all be dependent on that oxygen.

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim