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

Lois Lively helped remove the poison ivy patch last week from LEAD's Community Garden and made sure it will not be part of anyone's experience there. We took precautions, but not enough.

Poison ivy can cause rashes and blisters and Poison Ivy Blaster the magic elixir created by Miami, Oklahoma's own usually works for me and I will go nowhere without it.  But when my eyes almost swelled shut, I sought medical care this week from a little splat of exposure. The doctor asked about my airways and breathing, explaining the reaction had gone systemic which for some sensitive people can be life-threatening.

I often hear people say they are immune to poison ivy. That can change at any time, then the immunity to the allergy is lost.

I am finding out Poison ivy today isn't your mother's poison ivy. Climate change is making it more potent. Rising carbon dioxide, CO2, levels feed plants and poison ivy is effectively using it to grow bigger and produce more urushiol, the oil causing rashes. Evidence shows the urushiol gets more concentrated, in each part of the leaf, and the plants produce more leaves, stems and berries.

You surely were taught, "leaves of three let it be," to help remember what poison ivy looks like. 80% of us react to poison ivy and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have figured out how much of that oil it takes and it is 50 micrograms which is less than a grain of table salt!

We are understanding Climate Change is responsible for the early snowmelts, according to the National Climate Assessment because the planet is warming. Add to that all the heavy downpours this season in the Midwest and the resulting flooding.

To take a look locally Earl Hatley, LEAD Agency's Grand Riverkeeper will be the guide on a LightHawk flight beginning with Tar Creek to document the width of the Grand Lake watershed. LightHawk, an international non-profit based in Colorado uses aircraft and volunteer pilots to "accelerate conservation success through flight." Photographer J. Pat Carter, will document where our Tar Creek width and metals have gone,  and how she joins the Neosho and drops a load and proceeds on with more of them to Twin Bridges and helps the Neosho fill our lake with Kansas soils and her precious metals. We and of course the Spring River have been sending our sediment loads into the bathtub our lake is for decades. Waterkeeper Alliance made the flight arrangements for LEAD Agency's Grand Riverkeeper and Tar Creekkeeper.

The water loading can pass right through the dam, but we are filling the lake as all man-made lakes do, they fill and become more shallow, but GRDA is in the business of generating energy from the discharge of the water and in order to continue doing this, the lake has to have the power and the power comes from the height of the lake. So the Grand Lake watershed continues to grow, to be enlarged and as it does, more lands, homes and lives are affected.

We know that every Oklahoma County is under a State of Emergency and along the Arkansas River: Every large community will see major flooding within a week or less according to the National Weather Service. We are not alone with this slow motion disaster. Once the flash flooding subsides, the rest comes often slow enough to watch the worms "run for their lives."

Before my grandfather married my grandmother, he had been married to another Cherokee woman from Fort Smith and when she died, was buried there, but during a serious flood, her grave was washed away. Fort Smith is flooding this year which reminded me of the endless list of losses floods can cause.

The Illinois, the Missouri, the Arkansas and the Mississippi Rivers are all at risk of spilling over in the coming days. We are not alone, but joined in the newest worst flooding for many states  since 1927. That year, the Arkansas River was 80 miles wide in Arkansas. According to Christopher Burt that flood "was the seminal event that led to the federal flood-control program and gave the Army Corps of Engineers the job of controlling the nation's rivers via the erection of dams, dikes and other measures of flood abatement."

Tulsa and Sand Springs are closely watching 70-year-old levee systems for signs of a potentially catastrophic failure and have asked whole neighborhoods to evacuate for safety. Some levees in Arkansas have failed already causing flooding. We are all watching the lake levels and the amount of water allowed to be discharged.

We know the Army Corps of Engineers very well as they GRDA, and FERC are intimately involved with Miami's future. Perhaps at times we might sometimes know them as our other "Leaves of Three."

Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

Another night watching colored screens with tornados on the ground and listening to the weatherman dance from one to another, enough so, his team expanded and 3 others take on the other cells throughout the state.

Tonight, the smell of wood took us all off guard. None of us had heard of that. But this week, I traveled through Peggs, OK and slowed. Downed trees, broken uprooted lined the highway, but also along the side roads, large trees that had made summers shadier, more tolerable for the heat we all endure in Oklahoma. But the trees were cut in sections, segments removed so roads were accessible for the residents. Trees down for miles through the countryside and white trucks working on restoring power  and knowing they had miles more to accomplish.

But all along there, I was only looking, I failed to notice, to follow the smell of wood, as the weatherman had mentioned I know it would have been there, had to have been. The fresh woods were only taken down 2 days before, just as tonight more of the shady woods were going down again, as a series of tornados were being tracked by the colors of the wrapped around features throughout the state.

We wait and watch and wonder whose lives are changing as they and we settle in with the weather as it comes upon us. Others wait for the all clear signal, still others wonder how much closer the water will come as it rises, higher so very slowly.

Weather watchers we all used to be, when that was the way we determined what was coming at us. We watched the color of the clouds, the temperature, the wind and the hail we knew would be coming. At night we sat on the porch and watched the lightning as it lit up the sky and counted until we heard the thunder to determine how many miles the storm was from reaching us. We were good at it, but somehow we turned it all over to the “weathermen” and the colored screens and radar. And days like we have had lately and endless nights, I am grateful they have the stamina to keep it going, keeping ever ready to be our fulltime weather-watchers.

But what we have done to amplify our own weather? What ways are we all complicit in the changing climate we are experiencing? Each of us can do better. Changing can be satisfying, and each of us can become members of a grateful nation as we each make those decisions.

I read the coal miners chapter in Hidden America by Jeanne Marie Laskas and what their work was like and how the world beneath us is for them and why they toile to help keep the lights on. And it made me want to simply turn the light off and give them a break.

And then just that suddenly the lights, all of them and the colored screen with the multiple colors indicated headed this way and that way went off. The wind died down and the rains have stopped. I stepped outside to not listen but to smell for the new broken wood and am pleased not to find it.

Out on the prairie, the only sound is the water rushing in the gully. No wind. No rain. Just dark upon us all. And in my mind are the people in shelters coming out, those others up and wondering what has happened to neighbors, towns, the country roads that connect us. And wait for daylight for news of who have been affected, lost lives, or property.

Not even the birds can be heard, what a night they have experienced, nights in a row for them. They who are left with us also wait for the daylight and wish for one more moment of the power of coal to light up the screens and bring back the weatherman to assure us of what we are assessing. The storm has passed.

The first bird is speaking, sending that message out she has survived. The crickets made it, the wind still, the gully water rushing and then just for a moment the moon, the only light.

Peaceful it is, and peace be upon you all as we learn the rain has returned and filled the whole sky wet  yet again.
Just how much can the gully hold? When will it breech the mudroom and fill the floor? Why keep the lake level so high? How do we begin the work of clean up when more keeps coming? Homes filling with water, the water filled with what all we have left to change it from the life-giving water to the toxic waste of the blends of what we left in the garage, what was spread on our lawns, all the dog poop left in the yards all the cow manure stacked up in feed lots and chicken waste, at the edge of poultry houses.

Here in the dark, the questions keep coming and the resolve to do the small things tomorrow to help others and respond to ways I contribute to the bigger picture.

Reflectively yours ~ Rebecca Jim

It was summer vacation after the Cherokee Volunteers had started their Tar Creek Project. They were learning everything Tar Creek and all things associated with the superfund site when I called Rokho Kim about his research.

He had conducted a study predicting lead exposure by examining baby teeth in 1995 that linked extreme obesity to early exposures. A high school student asked me a simple question while riding in my car one night after an EPA meeting held in Picher. Did I think she might have been lead poisoned as a child?

She explained she had grown up in Quapaw, with a chat pile in her yard that she climbed, but also played in the sandbox her dad had built and filled with, not rough sand, but the softest sand ever, sand we know now was loaded with 10 times more lead than the regular chat sand he might have used. Dr. Kim suggested bringing her to Boston for a bone lead scan by an instrument I learned later he had a hand in developing, but later explained a baby tooth is like a "Time Capsule" and perhaps I could send one of her baby teeth. Knowing as an only child, her mother would have saved her baby teeth, I asked if he could analyze hers and other teeth from additional residents and... be our Tooth Fairy? 

He didn’t laugh because he was a serious student, a medical doctor and a Korean activist in his home country, risking his life for freedom and justice and had never heard of the Tooth Fairy. But he did agree.It is because she asked that question, we got answers. It isn’t always quick to get answers, as we learned, but the answers did come. All of the teeth we sent had lead in them, but the girl’s, the girl who asked the question, could she have been lead poisoned?

She got her answer, but the Harvard School of Public Health found many more questions to ask about exposures to metals our babies and the health and behavioral consequences that may follow. Harvard sent their brightest to ask many more questions and seek answers for our community.

I think looking back on these years since meeting Kim on the phone and know that the years may change many things about us, but they have not changed my quest and yours for answers. Is our environment making us sick? Are there long term effects from our exposures? If those questions are answered with YES, then my next question is: Can we make our environment safer? And the next question is to you: will you help by asking your questions?

I met Kim a number of years later. He was working with the World Health Organization, based in  Geneva, Switzerland and was back in Boston visiting his Harvard colleagues.

There was a lot I never knew about Dr. Kim. But I marched with him and 10,000 other people in the streets of  Boston March 16, 2003, while millions of others were marching around the world for peace and no war with Iraq.  He marched with other Koreans and I marched with Earl Hatley, wearing our Cherokee Volunteer jackets with Ghandi's message on the back: You must be the change you wish to see in the world. And 3 days later the Iraq War began.

It seems like war is edging closer to us again, all these years later, another old man’s war where young men and women do the dying.

There was a lot I didn’t know about Rokho Kim back then, and why laughing about the Tooth Fairy” I had asked him to be for us wouldn’t be funny to him then, and probably with his life experiences might still not bring a smile of recognition now.

When Rokho graduated from Harvard shortly after our phone conversation in 1995, he was awarded the Albert Switzer Humanitarian Award, For his "reverence for life" for his devotion to the Korean workers suffering from occupational diseases.  He was a founding member of Korean Physicians for Humanitarian Actions in 1987.  He was a leader in the Great Labor Uprising, the democratization of 1987 when millions filled the streets to end authoritarian rule. He is known for untiring activities promoting "health as a human right" and advocating for the workers and the urban poor since then in South Korea.

I am thinking they knew a lot more about his struggles and work in Korea under the authoritarian regime than I did, but what he has done since touches my heart as well.

We know climate is changing and the polar ice is melting at such a rate, there will be a northern passage open for shipping. The oceans are rising and Rokho’s latest work with the WHO has been in Figi and other Pacific Island nations most at risk from shrinking land base, infectious and non-transmittable diseases.

Ottawa County's island residents from Micronesia, may never be able to go back to their island homes due to climate change and its health impacts there. I stand with Dr. Kim and I invite you to do so as well for Health as a Human Right, as is peace and our right to ask the serious questions.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim 

Elizabeth Elliot from Natural Resource Conservation Service sent me a link to the Plants of the Monarch Butterfly, Southern Great Plains Staff Guide. I spent an hour looking through it and pondering which plants are living in my yard and the surrounding fields. The guide shows the flower, the stem, leaves and get this: the back of the flower.
 
All these years, I never peaked behind or under the flower, never really paid attention to the unique features of the leaves and how they attach to the stems. But as I looked through the pages, my wildflowers are exactly what the butterflies need.

It got dark too quickly, but morning will come so my camera can fully see these most admired flowers more clearly. An old rose is blooming on the LEAD Agency office fence but the wild roses are blooming in the field and the fence rows. The milkweed by the backdoor and the one near the walnut tree are cousins with unique differences.
 
The Audubon Society recommends native plants for their resilience and identifies the favorite trees of a number of birds though not all birds nest in trees. Not the barn owls who actually have lived in my barn for perhaps an owl generation or two. The phoebe at my mother's house made a mud nest over the front door that we haven't been able to use in at least 10 years because she or her little ones return and use it again each year. A fellow painted her house and said it was the only time he ever painted around a bird nest since we wouldn't let him remove it!
 
Birds are getting a lot thrown at them right now as the climate changes and insect species they depend on go extinct and their territorial boundaries shift.  Oklahoma University Master's student Heather LePage is doing a study on the swallows nesting in the chat piles. Those birds are dealing with silica and heavy metals found in the chat as well as the water they drink there. All of us can learn more about her study at the National Environmental Conference at Tar Creek  September 17-18 at NEO A&M College.
 
Humans are changing the environment. What we use, what it's made of and how long it lasts. Things I used to do to "Help" birds included putting the dryer lint out along with strings and bits of fabric for birds to pad their nest and maybe even add a bit of color to their surroundings. I don't add dryer lint to their nesting materials any more since understanding the clothes we wear made with polyester or other man-made synthetic fibers breakdown in the washer and go down the drain unrestrained at waste water treatment facilities and become 35% of the micro plastics found in the oceans!
 
35% of the micro-plastics are from our CLOTHING/Textiles. That is our pollution out there. Straws, plastic bottles and those white plastic sacks are there of course, but what you don't see is there, too and fish are consuming our micro-plastics and we consume the fish.
 
No one would indulge scoops of plastic by choice and no one knows for sure how what we are consuming will ultimately affect us. The on-going research done both by consumer advocates and by industry oddly give differing opinions. But the little ones, the insects, birds and the fishes may all be the canaries for us on this subject. They can do nothing, but we can make decisions on what we purchase and certainly be more mindful of how we ultimately discard it.
 
Rain, we have surely had some and the LEAD Agency Community Garden is way behind where we thought we would be by now. But the rains will cease and it will flourish and our Garden Parties will begin on June 6 with Grant Smith performing during his hometown visit.
Rain has my own garden way behind too. But intense rainfall damages crops throughout the Midwest when the flood water recedes the soil may be washed away. As the climate changes the models predict the region will experience even more frequent and intense precipitation events in the coming decades.
We have been treating our soil like dirt. Our gardens and cropland don't need dirt, they require soil which is alive with microorganisms. Soil grows 95% of all the food we eat, so we better start respecting it and quit taking it for granted since it has always been there. Grow your own compost and your garden will thank you. Feed your soil and it will feed you. But mind what you add, the OSU Extension Office can analyze your garden soil and give you a prescription for what you need to add before you over apply and get it loaded with too much phosphorus, which has occurred here in Ottawa County.
 
I never met Louis Armstrong, but I got to hear him sing What a Wonderful World, and isn't it?
 
I see trees of green
Red roses too
I see them bloom
For me and you
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world
 
Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim

Grumble. Then fuss about a wrong, or a right, maybe cuss out loud in your kitchen or in your car. Allow a person to hear you. Then say it in the grocery line or at the big store at the edge of town. Complaining is actually great practice for a budding activist.

What pushes some to the next step? A personal experience or a longing can do it.
I have a friend a year older than me who said while at college he watched from his dorm window  protesters rallying to end the war in Viet Nam and his greatest regret was not walking down the stairs and joining them. He waited all his life and one of his proudest moments has been joining the teacher demonstrations at the State Capitol years later, asking for education funding.

There are a couple of songs that get in your head but could have been written for budding activists. Remember that song by Aaron Tippin: You have to Stand for Something or you'll fall for anything? It is the standing for something that can work for you.The other song demands a story. Years ago at the Little Mr. Cherokee Contest for the 4&5 year olds, three little boys sat on the step in the Cherokee Council Chambers in their ribbon shirts with finger-woven sashes when one of them suddenly began a verse of Lee Greenwood's Proud to be an American and just as quickly the other two covered their ears with their hands so as not to hear it!

That's how I feel lots of times when a friend asks me what issue I am working on at a particular time, and I burst out practically in song quickly telling it. It's as if the hands virtually cover the ears of some, but demonstrating clearly: "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction."

Who will speak up once I go home and stay on the farm? Land that lies ready for attention without toxic waste or bad water. It needs exploring, butterfly watching and wildflower walks. Fish to catch and clay to dig, process and charm into form. So in preparation for that day, come by the LEAD Agency for private lessons on activism. Sign your kids and grandchildren up for the Youth Activist Trainings that will be held monthly beginning this summer. The pecan tree Janet Humphrey brought for the orchard I am starting there was symbolic. “If your plan is for one year plant rice. If your plan is for ten years plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years educate children. ” ― Confucius

Learn how to be brave enough to speak up.

How do you become brave? Try something new, even a recipe, learn what wrongs need righting and how much this community and others deserve justice. Start with the Declaration of Independence, the right to pursue happiness and focus on the phrase in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag "justice for all."

Activists from the 60's went quiet. We knew how to change the world. Stop wars, clean up the environment, desegregate schools, big stuff like PEACE. But once we accomplished these huge goals and stopped the DRAFT, we got jobs, became our parents and what I say, went to sleep. To replace them or wake up who's left of them, coffee's on at LEAD Agency.

People power can change the world and save sacred and natural areas by speaking up, standing up until the impossible happens.

Chaco Canyon in New Mexico is magic and ancient. I went there once and walked through the canyon with a group of Native 8th graders. The Navajo lived there for several centuries and within the canyon grew peach orchards that helped sustain them. When the Army forced  them to leave, Kit Carson and his men cut down the trees and signed the wall in the canyon claiming their work.

100 years later, my son as a 16 year old carried out a service project with the 8th graders, planting a peach tree to begin rebuilding the orchard of the Navajo in the canyon.

This sacred space will be protected from oil and gas extraction because that was banned this week. Protection can come slowly, slower much slower than the river when it rises with flood waters. But it can come.

Two years ago an astonishing event occurred in New Zealand when the government granted the Whanganui River legal personhood—a status in keeping with the Maori worldview that the river is a living entity and conferred on it “all the rights, powers, duties, and liabilities” of an individual. The Maori say:“I am the river, and the river is me.” An activist involved in this movement pointed out, "It wasn't the politicians who toppled the Berlin Wall, it was the people."

It can take a movement and you can join it. We have mountains of chat, we have Tar Creek, we have our rivers and what was once the Grandest Lake ever. We have benzene and asbestos at BF Goodrich bordered by a neighborhood, schools and soccer fields and we have children to protect from lead poisoning. And air issues.
Imagine you standing up, taking on our issues, it just takes the people.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

I saw Nancy Gee early Monday morning standing in line for jury duty along with surely another 100 people waiting to get into the courthouse. They allowed me to get into the County Commissioner's Monday morning meeting to make sure they had the information on the Tar Creek Strategic Plan and know that the deadline for comments had been extended to May 10.

When Kindergarten classes were held in what was called Lincoln Elementary School a couple of decades ago, I remember seeing Nancy Gee taking her students out to meet their community. They kept together, minded and always returned knowing more about the town where they lived.  This week that sort of happened again. It was a joy to see a whole covey of students emerge out of what is now Miami's Academy and begin their walk into the community. I saw it all. For me it takes 380 steps to go from their front door to the front door of the LEAD Agency which was my lookout.

LEAD had invited the students and their teachers to come over to begin a partnership for the future. We are not sure what it will look like, but it starts with that first step (and finishes 380 steps later!). What a great beginning with the teamwork effort they demonstrated when constructing a new raised bed donated from the Miami Public Library Community Gardening project to our organization.

The Academy students had already performed some incredible work this year on what we are calling their BF Goodrich Project. When we informed them about the asbestos that was discovered this year at the abandoned tire plant, they used their personal skills to develop ways to educate themselves about the dangers present there, the known benzene, but the newly discovered risk of exposure to asbestos left on site.

The state of Oklahoma might try to stop towns and cities from banning this or that, but the students at the Academy will take it on, they will educate themselves and figure out ways to educate the public.

Everyone at the Academy wrote letters that we made available to the City, the DEQ and the EPA, not asking for much, just for the cleanup to make this town safer to live in. They took a stand and they can do more. If you have a club or organization and want to learn more bet you could book the students, or we will share their presentation and short movie with you. If you teach and need a good way to interest your students these last weeks of school, think about this lesson.

Asbestos was widely used at the BF Goodrich plant during the 40 years it operated and lots of it was left behind. Asbestos can take almost that long to ruin a person's lungs and cause Mesothelioma, "a rare, aggressive form of cancer that develops in the linings of the lungs, abdomen, heart or testes. The only known cause of malignant mesothelioma is asbestos."

We don't need any more people exposed and these young people have been our best hope out in their circles of friends, letting them know for months, the risk that lay just inside the fence surrounding the BF Goodrich plant, and warning them to STAY OUT.  The chain-link fence is a barrier that can keep some folks out of the site, but the fence continues to be breached and anyone entering can bring out these deadly fibers on their clothes and share them with family and friends. Spread the word there are now cameras watching!

There will be actions occurring on the site very soon, but if EPA, the City and the DEQ thought there were really people concerned, there could be quicker actions. It is worth the effort to ask for more, even to have our status as a Superfund site reassessed since it sits there on the list with many more like ours that "do not qualify based on existing information" all over the nation. There are already BF Goodrich Superfund sites and our mess is not new to their corporate ways. Remember, companies believe it is cheaper to pollute than the fines would be.

The State of Oklahoma has some new laws that will go into effect this year. People in towns don't have to worry about organizing and attempting to curtail pollution, our state just took your rights away.

But Nancy Gee and others who have followed her have led our children out into the world, wide-eyed to see how their community works, and more will wake up soon and really get what she was showing, that they would be those leaders stepping into those roles and taking on the future we will live through, and wouldn't she be proud to know there are still young people walking out of that old Lincoln school, stepping out and standing in the street with the message, this is our world now and we want it better!

It was like the Wizard of Oz  how Nancy Gee came into this story and how this came together. God bless her!

Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

Last Saturday I rode with internationally known geologists James and Susan Aber, retired Emporia State University professors on a field trip. A group of students followed with their instructor Marcia Schulmeister to the Flint Hills to discover the beauty, but also to learn about the Cottonwood Limestone formation.

There it lay exposed because of what is known as "Kansas Burning" the annual burning of the tall grass prairie. And exposed it lay. As if the rocks were the back bones, perhaps the ribs of the earth, starkly white against the green of the new emerging grasses. To determine these were the Cottonwood limestone in yet another way, one could strike it with some vigor with your hammer, and it has a tone that almost rings! (In my mind, I wondered if a series of the stones could be struck to create a tune of some sort out there on the prairie?)

We paid attention and found evidence of the Neva, the geological formation beneath the Cottonwood, which for some reason was James Aber's favorite, unusual because of its different "look" caused by its relationship with exposure to groundwater. The Permian era strata laid together throughout time and though exposed on the ridges of the Flint Hills, their presence and durability have kept the hills from change the ages might have brought.

The Abers are really a pair, and James looks at the BIG PICTURE, but Susie was reminding us all day to look down and notice the rock samples we might find. I found a doosie! It looked like an arrowhead on one side and a vertebrate on the other, with each side a perfect worry stone to develop. When I was a teenager, I gave my dad his first "worry stone" and he wore it plum through worrying about me.

To get to Emporia, means driving 3 hours through Kansas and seeing the burnt or burning fields, the greening grasses and evidence of oil and gas production. I asked the Abers about fracking and they promptly stated, it isn't the fracking, which by the way was introduced in Kansas, it is the injection wells that cause earthquakes. James explained in 1912 people were looking for domes and anticlines in the quest for oil in the Mississippian and hit granite and gave up. But it looked like they had found it now.

Lots of the middle of the United States were shallow seas and all the marine life through the ages are what later became the Cottonwood formation we studied all that day with the students.

That shallow sea made me think of Great Lakes and that brought me to thinking about how Toledo, Ohio as a city made a decision that may change the way we think about our current water bodies. That city passed a law giving Lake Erie Personhood status. This allows Toledo citizens to act as legal guardians for Lake Erie, and make polluters pay for cleanup costs.

Imagine this for a minute. I am. First thing I will do is bring a resolution to the LEAD Agency Board of Directors at our next meeting, always the last Thursday of the month, which is open to the public, and ask if they would vote on declaring personhood status to Tar Creek. She has had a really hard time, and although she has a Tar Creekkeeper, wouldn't she fair better if she got more respect and our organization, even if the city of Miami, or the town of Commerce might not want to give her personhood status, LEAD Agency could.

Why not?

We will start with Tar Creek, then we will look at Grand River next. What goes down Tar Creek ends up in our dammed up Grand River doesn't it? AND don't the Spring River and the Neosho when they join form the Grand River? Well on this trip to Kansas, right in the middle of the valley we were following observing the Cottonwood Formation, was the Cottonwood River, which the Abers explained was actually the headwaters for the Neosho River.
After the students gave it up that day, we traveled on to a special place few people get to see, the Kaw Nation's, Memorial, the "People of the Wind" who by treaty left Kansas in 1873 for present day Oklahoma.

The colorful circular memorial reads,
“Wiblaha Wakanda. Bless all who walk here. May we know and respect all your creation and what you have taught our people.”
We looked on quietly with respect and felt the presence of the Kaw as the wind joined and chilled us.

It is wind that was my first introduction to the Abers when they came to NEO several years ago and taught Kite aerial photography (KAP), a form of remote sensing—collecting information about an object from a distance. We took pictures of NEO football stadium with using aerial photography that day. We have one of the fanciest kites ever and can use it to take photos when drones are not allowed.

The wind and the water and people who bring them together remind us to walk gently on this Earth, her bones are showing as we eek more out of her and pollute her streams and foul her air.

For us all Everyday must now be Earth Day.

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim

This State of mine allows mine water to roll down Tar Creek 40 years without outrage into a drinking water reservoir understanding that at this rate another 30 years may pass before it runs clean. This state of mine will find a way to allow runoff from passive treatment systems in the Tar Creek Superfund site to be loaded with nutrients and celebrate it as a success, replacing metals with nutrients. This state of mine puts up with decades to complete the cleanup of the once largest superfund site and celebrates success because it will be deemed smaller.

This state of mine passes bills to give polluters rights so quickly and quietly no one knows it is happening.
This state of mine could pass rules to protect children from living in housing that is known to contain lead paint. It could pass legislation to protect children and teams of people could be taught how to renovate, repair and paint safely and be protective of the young. State-wide and individual towns might seek funding opportunities to address the issue of the OLD housing stock we have in Oklahoma. Homes which were built before 1950 almost always have been painted and that OLD paint was probably loaded with lead and poison children living in them.

This state of mine protects oil and gas by not allowing towns to ban plastics bags while 59 countries like France, Greece, Mexico AND India, the largest democracy in the world has. 6 US states including New York  have, too. But this state of mine stands tall with Alabama to not allow a ban of any sort for plastic bags. Goodness, we must stand with our state's real blood, oil.

Oklahoma won't be able to keep oil and gas alive all by ourselves. the world is waking up, and someday Oklahoma will too. The choice does not have to be a state's choice. Each individual can walk into any store in the state and BRING THIER OWN reusable sack or vessel to carry your goods home. You and I have choices each time we make purchases. Forget the styrene food containers, too. Bring your own take home containers, have them filled or use a bit of aluminum foil. This state won't say a peep against these personal efforts until they find out it is a movement and then they will attempt to ban personal choices somehow.

This state of mine is an example of what can go wrong very wrong. But as a land owner and Tar Creekkeeper I will not remain silent. But this state of mine could use new thinking not "stinking thinking" as Albert Ellis the Behavioral Therapist would call it. The great land run taking place now will place more fertile ground under roofs of chicken barns and more fracked land ruined and the water underground tainted with chemicals we can't even pronounce, should we be privy to be given their names.

The great land run will take all our water this time, too and the old lead paint and Tar Creek's chat will leave ever more children too dumb to know better.

This all sounds so dire and negative because sometimes we have to face where we live and the choices being made here are looking dire.

But the look on the faces of the children living in the home in Commerce, OK where a couple of gentle old souls spent some time sealing the lead paint on their front porch, made all the difference. Why bother and fret over what the state does or doesn't do, when we as individuals can lift our own selves up and make someone else's life better.

That is what Jennifer Lunsford did every time she got up in the morning, she brightened the lives she encountered, ones she went to school with, worked with and spent her life loving. She came into my life when I first went to work in Miami at Will Rogers and Indian Education agreed to let us start an Indian Club and start assisting our students in designing and making their tribal dance clothing. Barbara, her mother was set on making sure Jennifer could dance in her Apache dress and made it. I remember the color and weight of the skins that were used.

I do have to admit, some years back I prepared photo albums, so looking through them, there she was as a 7th grader doing the Lord's Prayer in sign language. So many people have seen her perform. She was such a young child. And really that was how I felt again, seeing her in her Apache dress in her coffin, she was so young, a gift and bright light now gone.

        So be good to your kids, go gently upon this earth, think about your garden because:
                       "To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow."- Audrey Hepburn

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

UN Messenger of Peace, Jane Goodall turned 85 this week. Some other things happened this week that made listening to her message extremely relevant. She said, "What is important is hope. If we don't have hope we give up. We do nothing. and in this world we must have hope for a better future."

She went on to say what I have been feeling lately and that is, "It is you young people who give me the most hope. When you understand the problems and are empowered to take action what you are doing around the world is unbelievable." Two of the most remarkable young people allowed me to join them at the Fairland Schools' Denim and Diamonds fundraiser. When the two were Cherokee Volunteers at Miami High School after their study of our environmental and political issues faced at Tar Creek they stood up, took on all the members of then Governor Keating's Task Force on Tar Creek in an exemplary demonstration of empowered youth. Moments such as this are embedded in my memory especially after reading Jane Goodall's reminder of the hope she has for the future because of the indomitable human spirit she has seen with people overcoming seemingly insurmountable problems around the world.

I was on a panel this week at the University of Central Oklahoma with degreed and credentialed people to discuss Environmental Justice and Inclusive Sustainability at the student organized  Summit, and after listening to the higher level approaches to the questions posed, I simply said environmental justice happens in places to people who are exposed to environmental toxins where they live and gave the invitation to come and see ours and meet us.

This week the EPA took the Tar Creek Superfund Site off the Administrator's Emphasis List of Superfund sites. Not yet a month ago the Strategic Plan was issued which we have until April 12 to submit comments. Remembering Jane's message, on hope, my hope is our comments will be considered.

We are grateful for the commitment of $16 million a year, but at this rate, their own plan states it will take decades to complete the cleanup. That does not seem accelerated to me. Chat piles will be trucked this way and that way, sold or stacked on site and while we will have thousands of residential yards not yet even sampled. The sampling is voluntary, and the EPA funding is keeping up with demand, because few people are calling the DEQ number 800-522-0206. I am eternally optimistic, but hope is hard to hold on to when a county full of thoughtful people do not seem to want to ensure the future generations won't have to deal with lead in their yards. Because so few children are having their blood lead checked, our percentage of children lead poisoned is really low, but we have no way of knowing if there are more who have yet to be found. I do have hope but what did Ronald Reagan say, trust but verify? Shouldn't we verify our kids are not silently being lead poisoned? If they are, the source can be removed and the child's future can be protected since lead poisoning is a totally preventable disease.

Another EPA deadline next week is for your comments on the change to the Clean Water Act which would change the definition of Waters of the US. Streams, creeks and rivers fill when it rains and dry creek beds, ditches and wetlands fill and flow into them. Sometimes these can transport pollution and cause harm. This happened here last summer with the J-M Farms spill that ended up in Tar Creek killing thousands of fish. Because of the Clean Water Act as it is now, J-M cleaned it up and paid their fines. We have until April 15 to let EPA know we want our water to continue to be protected, whether it is our Tar Creek or the Neosho or all the other water bodies you care about. We want the Clean Water Act to protect our water, not be changed to protect polluters.

Jane Goodall has the hope we need right now, "When you understand the problems and are empowered to take action what you are doing around the world is unbelievable," she said. I want to have hope you will make some comments about how you want the cleanup to happen in Ottawa County at the Tar Creek Superfund site, that you want it cleaned up before the decades pass your kids by. AND find out if your children are lead poisoned and where it is coming from so the lead can be removed. I have a great deal of hope just like Jane and know that, "we will only gain our human potential when head and heart work in harmony."

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
 
Comments can be made until April 12 by emailing R6_Tar-Creek_Site@epa.gov
To review the proposal, go to https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0601269 and click on Tar Creek Strategic Plan.
Read the proposed rule change to the Clean Water Act here: https://www.federalregister.gov/…
By April 15 Submit your comments,  identified by Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OW-2018-0149, at https://www.regulations.gov

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

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