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
 

Cars had triangle shaped windows for the front seat that could be opened separately by the driver or the passenger. The "vent" window could direct cool air in and of course for kids in the back seat, could direct the front seat smokers' cigarette smoke out of the car.

My dad received an award from his employer for driving a million miles without an accident. Those triangular windows resulted in hearing loss in his left ear. My voice range during his audio exam was exactly the range he failed, knowing this as a witness to the exam. But the hearing loss got him what we called his Blues in the Night check from the Veterans Affairs 50 years after he got out of the Army and they caught up with him when he went in for the hearing test. Why did we call it that?

"My Momma done told me...." echoed throughout the camp he was mustering out of. From behind him, he turned to listen to the lone voice belting out the song and was marked deaf for not hearing the commands given in his quick hearing exam. My daddy worked for Shell Pipeline as an electrician and his territory was large. He covered eastern New Mexico, west Texas and the panhandle of the state. He drove for 35 years in company cars before air conditioning was standard and depended on that little vent window to direct air for some comfort and to draw some of his cigarette smoke out of the vehicle.

We believe it was the noise and air pressure that caused his hearing loss. But the Veterans Administration thought it had been caused by the war so he began receiving a small check for his disability each month, until moving to follow employment, the VA lost track of him. All the while his compensation piled up in his account. After we forced him to go for the hearing exam so he could be fitted for hearing aids and give us relief from his debilitating hearing loss in his later years. We got to communicate with him again and he got those lost years of compensation in what we called his "Blues in the Night" check.

Shell Pipeline gave out service awards, longer service the better quality.
Tie tacks were the thing for men and he received several, each in the shape of what else? a shell. Shell's logo is a shell. The original company actually sold sea shells and never forgot their origins.

I got one of the last awards he received. This one hung from a golden bow and could be pinned on a garment. Marked with the date 1963 and his initials, RCF which were also mine and my brother's initials. I have treasured it, but have actually never worn it. Me with a diamond pin attached to a bow? Then through the years I have learned more about fossil fuels and how using these fuels for energy around the world is actually causing the changes we are experiencing with our climate. Our earth's future, and our own is tied up in a bow with fossil fuels. As an environmental activist, could I wear it?

The big oil companies have had a great ride, made a lot of money for their stockholders and put a lot of people to work extracting oil and gas all around the world. Use of fossil fuels throughout the last century and into this one has put a lot of daddies to work, but the damages continue to mount to humans and our environment from our use, our overuse of them.

Only one fossil fuel has a nickname, that being Clean Coal. Sure pick up any size clump of coal with a white glove on and that glove will no longer be white. The coal industry had a great public relations guy to come up with that phrase! Coal is dirty to handle, but also dirty to burn causing green house gases that get trapped in our atmosphere and actually change it, dirty and unsafe for the miners working to extract it from deep in the ground. Many, too many continue to develop a condition that affects their lungs and causes many to die before they reach 50 years of age. If the coal industry worked cleaner, many of their lives could be saved. That is not the end of the dirty deal coal gives us. When it is burned, the smoke is carried dropping the heavy metals embedded in the coal far and near, adding to the loading of mercury in our oceans, lakes and ponds, contaminating our fish.

Fossil fuel has made extracting companies rich, but they are beginning to see the future and the future will be renewable energy sources like wind and sun. There will be other ways to generate energy and these guys will find it including using waves and gravity.

Losses to our health and the environment and lives have occurred under these energy extractors' watch. In the years from 2008 through 2017, 1,566 workers perished trying to extract oil and gas in America, that is about as many U.S. troops died fighting in Afghanistan during that period.

One of the other companies is figuring out how to use algae to make energy. We are making way too much algae, because we are allowing the factory farms to pollute our waters, it is as if they will be partnering with another polluting industry to clean up both messes and continue making money.

Shell is investing in Green Energy, low carbon emissions and looking at the wind.
My dad could have told Shell years ago that wind would be the new power, power to produce energy and powerful enough to reduce hearing for sure.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

My brother and I got to experience The Santa Claus Ranch only once and it was probably when I found out Santa Claus wasn't real and there are many ways to give.

My family left Big Spring, Texas to spend the holidays with relatives the year there was so much snow it seemed like the kind of winter people had in the movies.

We arrived at Uncle Doc and Aunt Sylvia's one mile east of Welch and drove under the gateway with The Santa Claus Ranch emblazoned on it. My Uncle Doc was Dr. J.O. Bradshaw, Sr. and he married his nurse, Sylvia Bradshaw, who was a Bradshaw before she became a Bradshaw, and Sylvia was my mother's sister.

So we were family and as such were put right to work getting ready for the visitors who would arrive each night to visit Santa. It was sort of an assembly line, filling individual paper sacks with an orange or apple, nuts that would have to be shelled and different types of that old fashion hard candy only available during the holidays.  We had no idea what would happen once it got dark. Lights all over the trees, the Live Manger, the crew of full sized metal reindeer with the one in the front decked out with a red light bulb lighting up his nose. They lined up behind the sleigh with the stuffed Santa sitting on the seat of the sleigh in front of the picture window waiting for a child to come sit on his lap. My Uncle Doc had a microphone set up in the living room so he could be Santa's voice for each child when they came to sit and talk with Santa. Can you imagine? mid 1950's how modern!

We had so many people lined up to come, it was like a tourist attraction out there! He had loud speakers and Christmas music playing, but my brother remembered the nuns came one night and actually sang.

But add to this, snow! It was magical and special for us, certainly much different than the kind of Christmas we would have had that year in Texas.

Not 18 months ago, my brother, Clark Frayser came to Miami and he and I went to the Dobson Memorial Center and there in the basement, was the very same Santa's sleigh. No reindeer, but the bright red sleigh. He and I could not resist, we climbed up on the seat, sitting in the same sleigh we had sat in as children and had dear Larry Roberts take our picture. Memories. Larry became part of ours.

I don't remember if "Santa" brought us any gifts that year, but Santa's ranch left memories for us and for many who came. I hope you all find ways to create the memories that will sustain you as our planet warms and fewer and fewer people will experience those deep snow filled holidays.

The following Christmas caused me to tell a lie. Big Spring, Texas is a town divided by "the tracks." We attended the only Catholic Church in town which happened to have been across the tracks. When I went back to Big Spring for my high school reunion, I had to go see that church, it was built out of brown sand stone, still had the beautiful stained glass windows, but out in front was a FOR SALE sign. What is that about? What other bunch of Catholics would want to buy it, that wouldn't already just prefer to continue using the one they had? That church is where we met the family who lived across the tracks and had the little girl who would become another Christmas memory. They were poor and spoke little English, and she and I were brown and immediate friends.

After the holidays we went back to school. I lied when our teacher asked each of us what we got for Christmas. What I would have gotten was a doll I really had wanted, but the family we had visited lived in a home in my town with dirt floors! And that little girl my age got my present, the doll, it was the thing I could do and a lie I will never forget and never felt guilty for telling. I look back and wonder if it really had been a lie, Mrs. Boling asked what I got for Christmas and what I got was to give my gift to someone who would love her more than me.

That lesson comes back this time of year, how gifting can be things, or how it can become the thing that makes life sweeter. My friend Jim Shine sent me a set of poetry books written by Mary Oliver, but the message he inscribed in the New and Selected Poems, Volume One was to refer to page 94 with the question that ended the poem on that page: "What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

Do your part if you are using lights, burn LED's and turn them off and lower your thermostat when you go to bed tonight. And plan to wake up in the morning and figure out what you are going to do with your one wild and precious life.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
 
 

This morning a flock of geese got mad.

They were disturbed by a pickup truck that approached too quickly. I heard them 1/2 a mile away. Hollering.

They were rerunning the bean field, finding what the combine had left behind. When I arrived at the pond in the field adjacent to them, not surprisingly there was evidence they had been there, too. But not as much evidence as the beavers had left. OH MY GOODNESS.

Beavers had been working hard making tunnels through the dam, enough so, they are bypassing the pipe set in to regulate the pond level. They had built a home over the top of the stand pipe, so much so, there was soil enough on it to grow grass, and strong enough to STAND upon. It is funny to imagine how beavers have the ability to take down real trees using their teeth. It made me feel inadequate with my useless teeth incapable of such effort. But beavers have to develop their craft.

This pond had evidence it is a training camp for young beavers. The pups, if they may be called that had their own smaller version of a sort of demonstration dam, made from smaller parts of trees and branches, partially built, as well as a small wetland still in the development stages. At the other pond, which because of the beaver work there, I have gotten a lake. They have expanded the surface water there rising the water level a couple of feet. It is enough to make one shake one's head. If you are in need of developing a wetland on your property, this team is available to take the challenge.

The Department of Agriculture meeting was held in Oklahoma City in their headquarters near the Capitol on the 11th to decide on the Emergency Rules for Poultry Feeding Operations. That meeting began at 10 o'clock and at 4 minutes till, I got one of the last seats available in the room. Many of you must have submitted your comments making sure our voices were heard and we were heard! The board voted NOT to approve the rules but did vote to continue the suspension of approving any new applications until the end of May 2019. We cannot go to sleep. We must work to get our legislators to make decisions that will be protective of our land, our water and our public health. It will be hard, we have to put our minds together as one and keep pushing.

Our new EPA is also finding ways to protect BIG AG. Comments are due on the 14th on the exemption they are going to give Agriculture on reporting air emissions from animal waste at farms so they never have to report air emissions that are hazardous, like hydrogen sulfide and ammonia, smells you know. This change would include emissions from animal waste that is mixed or commingled with bedding, compost, feed, soil, or any other material typically found with such waste. This means it would NEVER be reported, as if it had ever been measured and reported here at all. This would be a great benefit to our air emitters but also to the new poultry feeding operations.

On the same day the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture Board voted to continue the suspension of approving new poultry feeding operations, the EPA announced  a new definition for "Waters of the United States."  Last summer when J-M Farms had the release that killed the fish we didn't know were in Tar Creek and the wood ducks disappeared, the black water went into a dry weather draw or what could be called a ditch, that then flowed into Tar Creek. Because of the Clean Water Act every agency that dealt with water and fish kills responded as soon as it was reported. The new Clean Water Act would not kick in since the proposed change would limit protections only to wetlands and streams that are “physically and meaningfully connected” to larger “traditional navigable” bodies of water. With the new changes citizens would also lose our right to sue the polluter to protect a waterway. Your comments will be needed soon on this.

We got a reprieve with one issue, only to face a new challenges, right?

Another challenge is BF Goodrich. Since the Department of Agriculture meeting ended so quickly, while in Oklahoma City, I went to the Department of Environmental Quality and requested the documents they had on BF Goodrich. Hundreds of documents have arrived by email. We are reading each, taking notes, and noting questions. Former workers are needed to explain how the plant operated.

There are so many questions and there are folks here that can help make more sense out of it. We want the site cleaned up, let's make sure the investigators know where else to look. We could use your help, call LEAD Agency at 918-542-9399 or come with information or help us read these files and make sense of them.

With all these challenges we have to ask, when are we going to raise our voices like the geese can and let it be known we are mad? Oklahoma City is going to have to hear us say, "We are not going to take it anymore."

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

We should laugh more, reach out and find a way to help someone you might not know, fill your day with learning and putting what you learn into action.

And quickly determine a day is just not long enough. These are my days. Many filled with facts that cannot be changed, no matter how positive a person's attitude may be and how sure the change can occur in this lifetime.

There have been times this year that have found me knocking on the door of strangers and leaving having made a friend. It happened again this week and I wish you this experience and these results. We don't put ourselves out there much anymore, as we hurry too quickly home to our familiar walls and ways.

Big Chicken kept me scrambling and struggling with how on earth to share information and how to challenge others to act on the chance we have to speak up, or write down our thoughts and get them turned in by December 10th. This led me here to share some thoughts and ask you for help. Imagine I am knocking on your door to tell you: We found out 3 weeks ago from the Secretary of Agriculture, James Reese that he would work with his board to establish some Emergency Rules to strengthen the weak rules we have now on where new poultry facilities can be built in relation to neighbors, private or public wells, highways, public schools and city limits. These proposed rules have been released and we need to celebrate the beginning of the process but the rules will not be as protective of our environment, our water and our health as we need them to be. So??

WE TELL THEM right now, do it later and you will forget, since as you know we fill our days to the brim, wedge this moment into your day to send your comment on The Emergency Rule for New or expanding poultry feeding operations and how close they can be to the following:

(1 ) Occupied residences:(A)More than 30,000 birds shall be ¼ mile; and (B)  30,000 or fewer birds shall be 1000 feet.
(C) All distances between occupied residences and poultry feeding operations shall be measured from the closest corner of the walls of the occupied residence to the closest point of the poultry feeding operation, excluding land application sites;
(2)  Public school shall be ½ mile;
(3)  Incorporated city limits shall be ½ mile;
(4)  Public highways shall be 150 feet;
(5)  Property line shall be 150 feet;
(6)  Streams as identified on a current USGS 7.5 minute topographic map shall be 200 feet;
(7)  Private wells not owned or used for the poultry feeding operation shall be 100 feet;
(8)  Public wells shall be 500 feet; and
(9)  The 100-year flood plain as designated by FEMA

Read it all on the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Food website.

Submit comments about the proposed rule until 8:00 a.m. December 10 to andrea.bair@ag.ok.gov.

In your mind imagine your house in the country suddenly with a new neighbor with lots of chickens living in houses that are 600 feet long... buildings as long as 2 football fields, but six of them in a row, each full of as many as 50,000 chickens. Help us out on this. Have an attitude, want your well protected? want the value of your home diminished? How close to the city limits? is one half mile enough? Is 200 feet from a stream going to protect that stream? Show the Department of Agriculture we are not asleep, show your country cousins we stand with them. We SHOULD do this.

December 11 is another BIG day for the Department of Agriculture, decision day on the Emergency Rules and the public can attend that meeting in Oklahoma City. Are you saying back at me, "You SHOULD attend that meeting!" I think we all SHOULD.

But back to what we hope to all be able to do during the holiday season: we should laugh more. Two nights ago I read an email that had come in and as I read it that is exactly what happened. I was laughing out loud and now just thinking about it makes me smile. It was a message from Lauren Pelaia and her 2 friends who are theatrical types in New York City.

They have been studying and learning ALL about Picher, Oklahoma and our issues, this place and they are writing a MUSICAL. Now that is what we need! The serious work of environmental damages and hard times might be hard to rhyme, but boy do we have characters who could be represented in a musical! Musicals are rarely sad and serious through and through. They deal with issues but they SING about them, lots of times ALL TOGETHER.

We could benefit from being together more, imagine that we burst into song and maybe even DANCED! I was laughing because I could not believe they had discovered my weakness, my love for musicals. We have to help these folks tell our stories and we have to hope they will include the Picher Parade and how we moved on over to the Quapaw Parade and then later to the Miami Parade.

I smiled all Saturday, so many people lined up, and SO MANY PEOPLE IN THE PARADES. There has to be a song about them at least there SHOULD be.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Ken Wagner came to Miami OK last February on what would have been my mother's 100th birthday. He was sent by Albert Kelly who was another one of then EPA Administrator, Scott Pruitt's senior advisors at EPA headquarters. Ken Wagner has been chosen to be Oklahoma's Secretary of Energy and the Environment come January.
 
When Mr. Wagner came in February LEAD filled the 2 hours he and Erin Chancellor spent with us with people who spoke of the issues citizens face in the Tar Creek Superfund site. As many as we could schedule got to meet him, and in this environmentally challenged county in Oklahoma, won't it be in our best interest to know he knows us, had sat with us and listened to our stories, our points of view, our fears and our hopes for the future.
 
Take some time, write a card to our Ken Wagner. We will stamp your welcome home or congratulation cards to him if you drop them by before mid-January. Won't it be great if he had a stack of them on his desk when he cracked the door open and sat himself down in his Oklahoma City office?
 
We are going to need a friend in state government who has been seen to have the ability to sit and listen. What made me think he did connect with us?  It was after listening to our Ottawa County Health Department nurse and lead prevention specialist and the mother of a lead poisoned 2 year old child with developmental delays who had lost his ability to speak whole words  and is now speaking only the first syllable of the words he used to know.
 
Before Ken Wagner left us he asked to know the name of that 2-year old lead poisoned child he met at the table with his mother. Mr. Wagner may not remember any of the rest of our names, but that child's, but he met us, sat and listened.
 
Elections have consequences and we have got to put our hopes in the hands of the folks with the keys to power, that they will use that power to protect our citizens, our environment and our precious little ones.
 
Now we have to hope that our new Governor will hand pick someone with heart, someone who knows Ottawa County, loved northeast Oklahoma, fishes our rivers and swims in Grand Lake and LIKES US to be head of Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Food.
 
As we all sat together with Secretary Jim Reese, our current head of ODAFF recently at the Afton Senior Citizen Center, lined up on the front row were the Grand Lake Water Protectors and many others who will be affected by the lack of regulations our state has put on the expanding poultry industry.
 
Every person who spoke had the attention of Mr. Reese, who admitted the Department of Ag had been "caught off guard" with over 200 requests for permits for new larger than life barns that flooded the agency over the last 2 years. What we saw was a person in a position listening and himself faced with the fact our state, our people and our water is sitting out here unprotected from this invasion.
 
But for the next month, he has the keys, and as he listened, I had hope he would use what power he has to cease, stall or in some way inhibit the expansion. I have that hope because people came, spoke up, shared their feelings and filled every chair in that facility, and were treated with respect. That is the least we can ever hope for, but the bigger hope is he will take that back and do what he can now in his remaining days. The other hope is the person who fills that seat next might be chosen carefully.
 
I grew up in West Texas, but my dad was from Vinita, had land in Craig County and knew when he retired he would return to live. I remember his 2 brothers taking turns calling him on the single phone in the hallway, telling him to hurry up and move back because all their friends were "dying like flies" and they needed his help attending all the funerals.
 
I am at the same age he was when he got those calls, and it is happening to me now, too, people dying like flies. But my regrets lie more for the fact many of those dying remind me that we must be an affected people, lately I am losing former students and even the children of former students. What affects us? our habits, our choices, but the wider environment we can do little to control, but if it could be making us sick, we must do what we can to make those who could improve it, DO IT.
 
We can learn from these senior officials the art of listening. We can reach out this season, let another person into your circle. Go to parades, breathe cold air deeply, enjoy the life you have, fight for another day even better than this one.
 
LEAD will be entering the parades this year, watch for the Jeep with the kayaks on top and the message: We Want Clean Water! That's what we want for Christmas!
 
Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim
 

You might have met her. If you experienced damages from the 2007 flood in Miami, or if you had lived in Picher and had damages from the tornado that hit almost a year later, you might have had to deal with FEMA. Joan Lewin was here, working with FEMA, helping us get through the disasters that had hit Ottawa County, too quickly.

Last week the news coverage of the Camp Fire that had burned down the town, of Paradise, California, didn't mention Joan Lewin lived there and that disaster had found her this time. She lost her town, her home, but got out with her dog and her son, when many were lost, burnt to death in the fire, a fire so hot, dental records could not be used to identify bodies and cadaver dogs are over stimulated by what they are encountering as they do their gruesome work searching for remains.

Joan Lewin waited 2 days before posting on Facebook she was ready to get to the work she knew how to do, help people in crisis find their new lives.

As we experience Thanksgiving, what can we be thankful for? We need to be thankful that there are Joan Lewins in the world, people who get their breath after tragedy and dive in to find ways to serve others in the ways they know how to do. Keggy Roark did it after the Murrah Federal Building bombing in Oklahoma City. He knew how to make some of the best barbeque you might ever be lucky enough to consume. He simply closed down all his local interests and took his equipment and started cooking barbeque for the workers there at the site in OKC.

We have much to be thankful for. When we were hurting but also numb from loss, FEMA helped bring us to our new normal by providing the assistance they could. They also helped survivors find a new source of frustration and perhaps an agency to focus it and their anger. Starting over is never easy and  red-tape helped us figure out, starting over would be hard and personally costly. The U.S. government provides assistance but not a full-fledge do over.

Our new normal is now being experienced by thousands of survivors of the largest fires in California history. Joan Lewin’s hometown is gone, a city twice the size of Miami, OK with over 70 dead in the flames or the smoke, and a thousand more still missing. Their FEMA office has the usual service representatives, Social Security, Veterans Affairs, housing, loans, but at the FEMA office for the survivors of the Camp Fire, DNA swabs are being taken to better be able to identify the remains that are otherwise unrecognizable.

During the FEMA sessions we had in Ottawa County in 2007-8, I got to serve as a counselor through Grand Lake Mental Health, walking neighborhoods and listening, offering what listening eases and sharing information, since facts and services can be tangible service, too. During those times, I got to know Joan Lewin.
 
It was later that year, she picked me up in Sacramento, California and we drove to Chico for a Sustainability Conference hosted by California State University, Chico. We were scheduled to speak together for a session entitled, ‘Learning from the Tar Creek Superfund Site: Land Restoration and Community Recovery after Natural and Man-Made Disasters that contaminate the land and water—and how you can help your own community recover."
 
Yes, it was Joan Lewin who helped me understand the other disaster we had and continue to face is the man-made disaster left by mining companies after the lead and zinc played out here leaving us the toxic mess we are enduring.
The Oxford Dictionary has announced TOXIC as their 2018 word of the year, since toxic "seems to reflect a growing sense of how extreme, and at times radioactive, we feel aspects of modern life have become,” Oxford released in a statement recently.

The Tar Creek Superfund site and use of the word toxic perhaps helped propel the word to be chosen, as the choice is made by the number of searches for its meaning on the Oxford website.

Joan drove me through her Paradise, since it was only 12 miles from Chico, our destination. Earlier that same year, there had been fires that burnt the hillsides and were evident as we drove through what remained of the forest that November on the curving roads. I can visualize how driving those roads with thousands of people fleeing from this fire clogged the escape route, seen on the news, lined with the cars that did not make it.

Chico, sitting 12 miles away is now a tent city with thousands of the former residents of Paradise in tents, campers, wondering what on earth is next. Grief would be heavy there, and I am sure the walking counselors have been deployed and hard at work, listening to the horrifying stories of escaping and the fears and sorrow for those who they fear did not.

But what else did Joan post? Of the help they are receiving, the kindnesses that abound.

Soon she will be speaking of the New Normal she and her survivors will now seek, the one we have already found.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

You might not have known this about me, but I am an optimist. It is a hard thing to carry off, optimism in a world full of toxins and their polluters. It is absolutely awesome the power of the people when they band together and raise their voices for the greater good. That is how change happens, that is how the bald eagle is no longer endangered, that is how smog is a thing we don't have to talk about anymore.

There are times when just a few voices can do magic, but to stop the invasion in the county of the mega chicken houses coming to the horizon near you sucking up the water your children could have counted on for their generation, this is not a time to be silent. One set of 6 mega houses will be near what might have used as a huge tourism draw to see the Ribbon Road and can change the esthetics of the Oklahoma they might have wanted to see "where the wind comes sweeping down the plains" when the site and the possible smell hits our tourists, our countless Route 66 bicyclists and European travelers with their convertibles and the packs of brand new motorcycles who pass through here may hurry on by.

Protect what you have while you can. Speak out and loudly, together if you can and it will sound like Ron Stowell's Chorus Class: pure beauty. If you did that as a community and demanded clean air, clean water, you might get them. But I will promise you it is easy to lose when you are already loosing by accepting what you already have. It is amazing what can happen and has been shown to happen when the gears start working here.

How did the Coleman Theater get restored? How did the Quapaw Nation get the first contract to cleanup a superfund site, their own? How did the towns of Picher and Cardin get a federal buy-out? Power to the people. I rest my case. We can win them all. BF Goodrich could be first made safe and then cleaned up, the lead levels in our children can be zero like other communities around the country, the infiltration of mega-poultry houses can be stopped now. We don't have to let corporate goals be empowered by our local or state leaders and your silent acceptance.

The term fence-line neighbors defines a group of your country friends who are calling themselves Grand Lake Water Protectors who will be sitting on the front row at a meeting Monday evening Nov.19 at 6:30 p.m. in Afton at the Senior Citizens' Center in order to ask questions of Jim Reese, with the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry about the mega-chicken house expansion coming to Ottawa County and about to be their fence-line neighbor. They could use your help, attend that meeting and the ones that follow as this group grows their power to protect our future.

Nettie Detherage organized the first meetings, pulling in the Cherokee Nation, the county commissioners and GRDA and now she is bringing us together in Afton for this opportunity to speak with the man who signs the permits for these facilities. There will be more meetings and they will need your support.

A man who identified himself as Peter called last week just as Lois Lively and I were attaching the shower curtain rings onto the banners Academy students had created demanding cleanup of the BF Goodrich site. He asked if he could get copies of all the documents we had concerning BF Goodrich. It was one of those moments you might have had when you actually look at the phone in disbelief that that question could have been asked at a more remarkable moment.

Before answering I asked, "who are you with?" He was the attorney representing both BF Goodrich and Michelin Tire Companies, while we were on the floor attaching messages we very much hoped he would be able to see because he was coming to Miami this week. We practiced putting the banners up on the fence, got photos and saved the banners for reuse.

Wouldn't it have been great if he was coming to let us know those companies had decided to offer our community closure, compensation and a trail to reparations? to listen to the people who were made sick from exposures, those who live over the benzene plume, those who have buried relatives who had worked at the plant and given their lives for the livelihood the work provided their families. He could consider the lost property values and the utter mess that does nothing to inspire the youth of the community who go to school just yards from the abandoned, demolished mess it currently is.

The attorney did not want to consider the "pond" north of the plant where all the liquids from the plant were discharged  or the "dump" because DEQ had closed it years ago with clay and BFG's benzene is simply "mineral spirits." He dismissed every concern any citizen would have listed but apologized for coming a day early because he had forgotten he had to be in court AGAINST OUR FRIENDS representing the companies the following day.
That visit was disappointing. My spirits dampened by corporate America, but as Friedrich Nietzsche said, "Music heals all forms of misery."

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

We might have thought of BF Goodrich as the rich man who built a plant that put your daddies to work and made sure a lot of their children got to get educations so they never had to work a dirty job like they did. That happened, but BFG built other plants just like ours in other places near rivers, made messes that got left behind and eyesored their neighborhoods, too. But the sites are also landmarks like Akron, Ohio where they were forced to remove the upper parts of the iconic smokestacks since the bricks were no longer stable. 

The Toxics Release Inventory had not been invented when our BF Goodrich plant was operating, but the his sister site in Tuscaloosa, Alabama listed #s released into the atmosphere last year, letting us imagine how many tons of emissions belched out of ours all those years of operation. Many families who lived in the neighborhood remember the carbon black if they did laundry and hung it out to dry, or had a car they doted over. But anyone who was in Miami remembered that smell. Where there is smell there are emissions and we must have been recipients of a lot of what came out.

One sister site in Calvert City, Kentucky is a superfund site and the site in California is damaged, too. The site in Thomaston, Georgia had what we have, "liquid" and asbestos and it was deemed a removal only site, which sounds like a quick and easy-fix  for those Contaminants of Concern which are determined to be concentrated and may cause harm to humans if exposed.

Benjamin Franklin Goodrich made it big with rubber and when Akron, Ohio residents raised $13,600 dollars to encourage him to choose their site, he made it the Rubber Capital of the World for a time. He made real money when he made tires that could be inflated with air, air is cheaper than rubber, first for bicycles, then for cars.

The City of Miami supplied the land for our BF Goodrich plant. And the City waits patiently for the land to be returned to it. With renewed ownership the city could pursue cleanup through a Brownfields program EPA offers, a way to make wasted land reusable. But ownership has been hard to come from out of state owners who hold firm to titles. But the guy with the cape in this story is a humble official who works for EPA and has worked in our county years back on the Tar Creek Superfund site. He knows us. He knows we have issues and that this is an environmental justice site, a place where it has been piled higher and deeper on us and our health and wealth has suffered from our exposure and damaged unusable lands.

Manufacturing plants like to be built near rivers, generally so their products can ship easily but I wonder if it might also be easier for discharges to go unnoticed into water. But a much easier way might be to let it seep into the ground, in our case creating a plume of benzene some 8 to 12 feet below the surface under part of the abandoned plant and stretching into the neighborhood receiving some treatment and monitored periodically. At the Goodrich site in Kentucky it was required to pump and treat contaminated groundwater to prevent its discharge to their river, that would be their Tennessee River.

Say lead, think Tar Creek Superfund site and chat piles, but the BF Goodrich plant in Tuscaloosa up until 2010  was admitting they were emitting lead in their air emissions which also included 109,277 pounds of other chemicals according to the Toxics Release Inventory.

We know there are health concerns with our Goodrich site, asbestos and the benzene, but is that all there really is? Has the site really been assessed fully? We want asbestos and benzene removed, the debris cleared off, the deep pits secured. But what about the rest of the site? the oozing discolored water, the dumps many workers say are north of the site, and off site closer to the river, our Neosho.

If our caped EPA man is coming he will need to convince our PRP's, our real Potentially Responsible Parties to come and do what is right, to enter into an agreement for clean up for that piece of land and return it repaired to the city who gave it 75 years ago. That would be one of the honorable things that could be done to help this community end this relationship on the good faith it began.

In a 2016 Joplin Globe story the Dobson Memorial Center hosted a get-together for BF Goodrich former workers 30 years since the plant closed, there is a photo of 3 former workers inside the fence with one holding a brick. We know you served your families well, dear former workers, don't cross those fences and take souvenirs anymore, the gates are posted with warnings about the asbestos, not to enter without a respirator. Let's let the man with our future in his hands take it from here. Be ready to show him where the dumps are, let me know if you are willing.

Miami Academy students and their faculty are broadcasting our hope, "Get IT Done, ASAP" with banners, letters and much more will follow.

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim