As a group we walked a long curved hallway through the building, then we settled down at the table across from the people who can make our lives, our land, our water safer, at Tar Creek, and at other damaged places around the country.

What your vote means becomes real when looking across the table at the current administration’s pick to head the only federal agency with PROTECTION as a middle name. Political appointees to important agencies have power. And with power comes responsibility, And for the head of the EPA and his pick for the program that manages the most toxic sites in our country, the responsibility for the protection of the environment gets broader, since those sites are ranked by the dangers they pose to human health. And that means your health. And that is why voting gets personal.

The Washington, DC meeting was arranged by Lois Gibbs, who with her 2 children lived in a neighborhood that had been built on a toxic waste dump and people were getting sick from it. She organized her neighbors. Her efforts to get EPA to buyout 800 families at Love Canal earned her the unofficial title in the environmental movement as the “mother of superfund.”

Lois had reached out and asked interested groups to send representatives to this meeting and ten of us had come to speak not for the trees as the Lorax did, but we went to speak for you and every other person at our sites and quite honestly for every single American who one day wakes up to find they too are living near a superfund site.

As we filled the room and were finding our seats, Albert Kelly walked around the table to greet each one of us before we began to tell our stories of the places we come from and the state our superfund sites are in.

Lois asked me to begin since Albert Kelly overseeing EPA’s Superfund Program is from Oklahoma as is the new administrator, Scott Pruitt. A big gulp, and 5 minutes later we move on to Minden, West Virginia; Columbus, Mississippi; Hoosick Falls, New York; Houston, Texas; Arden, North Carolina.

There are not a lot of happy stories when talking toxics, the subjects our heavy: metals, PCB’s, chemicals re-entering the environment with Hurricane Harvey and yet, when Lee Ann Smith from Arden, North Carolina asked as the last speaker if she would be allowed to stand as she spoke about the doctor who told her that her 11 year old son had cancer and how she had to figure out why that happened. And she did, just as Lois Gibbs had decades earlier. Chemicals dumped years before had done it. She brought his picture and left it lying across the table. After the meeting, the official asked if he could have Gabe’s picture. He had remembered her son’s name.

If you have a chance to experience something as powerful as power to the people to the powers that be, take time afterwards to reflect with each other about your experiences. As we went around the circle, standing outside the EPA building and not yet noticing that the entrance to the Trump Hotel was facing us, each of us spoke up, but Lee Ann Smith’s comment is the one I will share with you. She didn’t know if anything any of us said would make a difference, but what if it did?

We never really know what works to change the future. But we can try and maybe years from now a conversation comes back to us, an image we cannot get out of our minds. In my mind, I was thinking of the picture of her son Gabe she left on the table, and how his cancer might have made superfund more real to that EPA official and that may be what saves the lives of countless children in a current or future toxic site that gets the cleanup that works.

Back in the early 1980’s after Tar Creek had turned orange and everybody here thought the new EPA would do something and do it fast, Lois Gibbs went on morning TV shows with her 2 children and they held up a poster that had hearts all over it with words like “Clean up my Home – Love Canal.” After those shared reflections, I got to verify that memory with Lois, since I had watched one of those random mornings all those years ago.   

Memories can stay with you, they did for me. And understanding how media impacts us does too. The country’s major newspapers were posting Tar Creek headlines, covering our story, but they left us suddenly and just as quickly “Love Canal” was making the news, and almost as suddenly EPA disappeared in a big way and left us. We didn’t have a single mom talking about her children to the press, because back then we still didn’t know our children were being lead poisoned. We just had orange water and dead fish. Back then those chat piles were not recognized as dangerous. They just were the way locally we put the FUN into Superfun-d because they were everyone’s playground.

While I had the opportunity, I gave copies of our book, Making a Difference at Tar Creek to those officials. In that book the people who helped lower the lead levels in our children get to tell their stories. Packed and woven into the 5 minutes I had to speak were the messages many had offered as suggestions. Thanks to Jill Micka, JoAnn Walkup, our new intern Bhavana, Martin Lively, Dr’s Rosaline Wright, Robert Wright and Edward Gustvason, Ami Zota, Jim Shine, Eric Ferrell and surely others from our past since John Mott, George Mayer, John Micka who were speaking out so loudly in the beginning.

The moments that connect us to the past may not be ones we can be proud of and on this trip I was reminded of a time I made a person cry by correcting a young woman who had come as a researcher to our site. She was bright but it had been reported to me that she needed a “talking to” as the Navajo call it, and boy did I give it to her.

She is now a professor at George Washington University in Washington, DC and invited me to dinner in her home after our meetings had been completed. I rode the METRO and walked to her home. After dinner she walked me part way back to my hotel and on the way we talked about the people she remembered at Tar Creek and then she remembered me and the first time I met her and chewed her out. I made her cry and we almost lost one of the best researchers environmental justice communities could ever hope to have because of it she told me, she tried to quit the project but carried on with us and has proven to be the shining star we all hope to know.

All this to say, in my life I can think of only 2 times I spoke to anyone like that. So be watchful of your words, think them through because they may be remembered years later and you may be given the opportunity to make them right.

Make a sign, say something, someone may be moved by it and our lives be made better. We never know what makes a difference.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

My mother was born February 28, 1917. My dad always said she was born in a leap year on the 29th, so we figured her age in our heads much differently than real calendar years. He was well known to "boof" us kids, since he knew we never fact-checked him. Sure enough it hadn't been a leap year, but it was quite a year since a few months later the United States joined forces in the War to End All Wars.

That year in New Jersey girls 14  and older were getting hired at a new company at wages high enough they could buy nice clothes and the most stylish hats. Many of them lived nearby and walked to and from work. Some were sisters, some friends already, and most ended up friends for life.

There was laughter while they worked at their desks as they dipped their Japanese brushes in a powder, then put the brush in their mouth and fit their lips around it to make the sharpest point to paint with. They were painting high end watch and clock dials, with a new luminance substance that made the numbers show up in the dark.

The dry powder could be seen around the rooms where they worked, it dusted the girls' skin, their hair and landed on their clothes. When the girls walked home that fall, they glowed as it got dark. Sometimes girls would wear their party clothes to work so they would be especially striking at the dances they attended those nights. Some used a bit on their faces.

These gleaming girls were some of the first to use radium in an industrial setting. Radium had been discovered in 1898 in France by Marie Currie and her husband. She called it, "my beautiful radium." They had produced a material that was 300 times more radioactive than uranium.

The girls worked at the United States Radium Corporation in Newark and Orange, New Jersey and Ottawa, Illinois, earning the name as the Radium Girls and later were known as the Shining Women. They were being poisoned as they chatted merrily at their work on each number using luminous paint.

Radium had become an unstoppable craze in the US, with it used in face cream, soap and powder, and toothpaste -- brighter with every brushing! The liquid sunshine was touted as a cure-all known to restore vitality. But these young women worked with radium, with a half life of 1,600 years. It could take its time affecting these workers. Radium is like lead, a bone-seeker with the body believing both are calcium and storing them in bones. Some of the girls got sick quickly, loosing first a tooth, then more and even the jaw bones breaking and falling out of their mouths. They suffered one at a time. Some died before they would come to understand that the sparkling particles were not only "undark" but deadly.

Perhaps because women had begun to claim their place in America, by gaining the right to vote in 1920, as they came to learn their work had harmed them, they took the company to court and won a time or two and brought national attention to the hazard they worked with and how it had poisoned them. They spoke up as one after another died, with many of those friends living such short lives.

Their legacy of awareness of radiation poisoning saved lives when World War II began and more luminous dials were needed. Safety standards protected a whole new generation of dial painters who went to work.

Atomic-bomb making involved widespread use of radioactive plutonium, which is very similar to radium as it settles in the bones. During the Manhattan Project a chemist was determined not to have workers  harmed like the dial-painters had been and issued nonnegotiable safety guidelines based directly on the radium safety standards.

Radium harmed these girls and oddly the residue left from radium extraction looked like seaside sand, and much like our "chat" from the lead and zinc waste, the industrial waste was sold to schools and playgrounds and used in children's sandboxes. Toxic waste made the companies money at the expense of the exposed, just like it had here. When they tore down Radium Dial in Ottawa, Illinois the damage went deep in the earth and like here will take EPA decades to clean-up the mess.

Those weakened, toothless young Shining women put on their best hats, stood tall and walked into courtrooms and testified against all odds to find justice, and found national respect and a place in history. Their case ultimately led to the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

In their honor and for the legacy at the Tar Creek Superfund site, I will join the Women's March on Tulsa for positive and just futures for all and to celebrate the spirit of resistance Americans have shown throughout our history. I will be standing up for women's rights, environmental justice and the right for jobs that don't kill or leave waste generations grow up exposed to so companies can prosper.

Setting an alarm but not that Westclox Big Ben with the luminous dial still shining 100 years later.

Recommending the Radium Girls, the Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore.

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim



 

It was one hundred years ago this week, the right for women to vote didn't pass, the front page Miami Newsrecord article Cheryl Franklin illustrated. The topic for the emancipated at the Miami Women in Business luncheon presented by Northeast Tech's Sara Stephens was the Myers Briggs Type Indicator MBTI Self Assessment.  Carl Jung inspired the mother and daughter who developed the instrument to help people understand and I believe to value their own preferences by using Jung's theory of psychological types.

While sitting with the women at the round tables, I was remembering back to those books in the long hallway in the house where I grew up and how those books had influenced my life. The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud but more so The Human Mind by Karl A. Menninger because handwritten in the front and back pages were lines composed by Kahlil Gibran, the philosopher from Lebanon. The blend of both psychology and philosophy would influence me more than I ever dreamed, leading me to major for a time in each at different colleges.

And there we were linking back to Carl Jung who through his lifetime became such a well known and quotable psychologist who said, "The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are." While with Menninger: "Hope is an adventure, a going forward, a confident search for a rewarding life." As the session proceeded our group members moved across the room to settle in with people who admitted their preferences and got more comfortable in knowing themselves.

Two of LEAD's Lay Health Advisors who are friends from another life came by this week to pick up one of the PUR water filters, since one was recovering from congestive heart failure. I made a batch of cookies for them, actually a batch of 5 cookies. It is my new way of resisting temptation, and living a healthier life by just cooking a few and a few more another time.

My father had a diagnosis of diabetes when he was my age, so I am trying to change my ways.Some researchers are finding a couple of other links to diabetes that have nothing to do with food. Something I had no idea about was the relationship with social isolation and diabetes. Dr. Carla Perissinotto, a geriatrics researcher at the University of California, San Francisco expressed, "One theory is that too much time alone might lead to increased stress and inflammatory reactions in the body. Stress hormones are thought to influence how the body processes glucose, or sugars, and may contribute to the development of diabetes."

Could it also be that stress can also come as, “Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you.” - C.G. Jung

People who have many close relationships with friends and family members may be more motivated to be socially engaged, physically active and follow a healthy lifestyle, according to Dawn C. Carr, a researcher at Florida State University.

By contrast, people who live alone may have less motivation to cook healthy meals, get out and exercise or do other things that can keep us healthy.

“We need to nurture important relationships and be sure that we take our social health as seriously as our physical and psychological health,” Carr advised. “This is something we need to cultivate throughout our lives.”

We all know that the Tar Creek Superfund site's contaminate of concern is lead, but where there is lead there is also often arsenic in our environment. A new study reports that chronic exposure to arsenic interferes with insulin secretion in the pancreas, which may increase the risk of diabetes.

Long-term exposure to higher levels of environmental arsenic has been linked to cancer, heart disease, and other health problems and ingestion of large doses can be lethal. While sub-toxic levels of arsenic may not be fatal, they can still be dangerous, and researchers suggest "the metabolic risk imposed by arsenic is likely underestimated."

Learning how arsenic changes the signaling for insulin secretion is important to exploring future strategies for reducing diabetes risk, the research team explained. Furthermore, these findings suggest that arsenic-induced diabetes risk may be reversible if policies are enacted to reduce environmental exposure. All the more reason to push EPA to clean up this site!

The Spiva Center for the Arts in Joplin is a treasure of an art museum, but until March 3 it has a unique exhibit of Native American Contemporary art, featuring pottery by Richard Zane Smith and 17 others. Linda Sue Warner, Jill Micka, Wanonia Schmidt and I attended the opening reception. The show will amaze you as it did us.

Take a ride, take some friends and discuss those pieces on the way home and way in the night as the images return continuing to impact you. Friendship is always a sweet responsibility never an opportunity. Khalil Gibran

Widen your circle, it is good for you and will help prevent diabetes, who would have known?
The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward, and we want to sit in their radius. Karl A. Menninger

Adding you to my circle.

Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

People have the right to know.

People living near superfund sites all around the country have been organizing to get the attention of the EPA administrator so their sites can get the answer to when they get cleaned up.

I have been on conference calls this fall with citizen groups like LEAD Agency clamoring to make the hit parade with Scott Pruitt. We all thought he would choose 10 sites to get immediate and aggressive attention. And nobody on those calls wanted their sites to be number 11. As it turned out, the list got longer and our Tar Creek Superfund Site got on it. Our site made the original 1983 list. And now we made it to the final round. Who wouldn't want to be excited? WE MADE IT! But what will making it mean to us?

All those other environmental groups wanting attention for their sites are planning to visit Washington, D. C. later this month to lobby Congress and attempt to see the EPA Administrator to fight for cleanups. While Republican members of the House Committee for Energy and Commerce are asking Scott Pruitt how creating an additional list of 21 toxic sites, without any additional funding, would help those sites get cleaned up faster.

Those members are giving the EPA until Jan. 8 to tell the committee how the agency chose those sites, who was consulted: the state, the responsible parties, the Community Advisory Groups associated with the sites and how Pruitt thinks his influence on the sites will improve cleanup efforts. LEAD Agency is the Community Advisory group EPA has associated the Tar Creek Superfund site with since 2000 and we will be glad to allow Congressional members to know EPA did not consult with us about The List.

EPA funding has been slashed, and the Superfund Program is getting cut, others are fighting to have clean water, clean air, and clean soil so they have healthy communities and futures to believe will be healthier for their grandchildren. Northeast Oklahoma, Ottawa County and those living downstream waiting for the big cleanup need to begin to get the urgency to seek the big answer, when will this place, these streams be clean? People have the right to know, but we have the responsibility to ask. And Scott Pruitt is learning that Congress has the right to know as well.

Years ago we wondered if the fish were safe to eat. Dr. Edward Gustavson, a Developmental Pediatrician treated "Multiple small children with acute lead (Pb) toxicity with levels over 50 requiring acute cardiorespiratory support and chelation following Tar Creek fish ingestion." What we learned at the latest TASC meeting was EPA has figured out how many fish from the waters of the perennial streams, rivers and the headwaters of the Grand Lake tribal members and the general public are eating. They also have figured out how many days per year we spend in these waters, and how many days our children enjoy them. The figures they have derived will guide EPA cleanup standards for this site.

Now I want you to think and if you are old enough, remember how many fish you used to eat from these streams, rivers and lake and how many days you used to spend in those waters yourself. And now knowing what you know about our waters and our fish, have you pulled fewer fish to shore, and eaten fewer, and spent less time in and about these waters? Is this the way you want the future?  I am banking on the big cleanup. I got my kayak ready for the Tar Creekkeeper to patrol the deeper parts of Tar Creek and head on down the Neosho and make it to Twin Bridges. I am believing in the future to be better and will take my fishing pole with me and hope to see you out there, too.

We are still asking are the fish safe to eat? but also when will they be? and now with a familiar cadence "How much fish would a fisherman eat if a fisherman could eat our fish?"

If we knew our fish were safe to eat, how much would we eat? If that answer could help EPA plan a cleanup that ultimately made our fish safe to eat, then how much would we eat? Be specific. The better EPA understands us helps show how seriously they need to be with their cleanup plan.

There is still time to make a comment to EPA about the Risk Assessment Guidance for Superfund Tables, and their Exposure Assumptions. Won't hurt to share your comments on what fish and how much you and each of your family members eat, where it is caught. Be specific. If you are spending time somehow in contact with mine water discharges, add how many days a year, how many hours. If you or your children get in any of the streams, creeks, rivers, or the Twin Bridges area mention number of days per year and how many of those days you or they came in contact with the sediment.

EPA has the right to know and has the responsibility to protect our health and the environment and Congress is asking how that can be done with less money.

Comments can be sent to Janetta Coats:  coats.janetta@epa.gov before January 17.

Respectfully submitting my comments ~ Rebecca Jim