There is a whole ‘nuther’ language we will be tuned into next Thursday evening at 5:30 at the Miami Civic Center. We will learn about the EPA’s OU5 Data Gaps.

We will learn from Terri Boguski, the technical advisor provided through the Technical Assistance Services for Communities (TASC) how the Superfund process works. Terrie will explain what’s been done so far at this site and where we are in the planning of the next phase, or Operable Unit.

What’s the Plan for the meeting? The public is invited to come and bring a friend. Spend some time with your kids this week and make up some signs that show you care… about the environment, clean water, clean air and getting polluters to clean up their mess and about the agency that can make that all happen.

At Thursday’s meeting there will be time to ask questions and give suggestions. Act like you care about the watershed, because I know you do. People don’t live in a water town and not care. Remind your friends who live on the banks of these streams, creeks and rivers that this piece of the Tar Creek Superfund site work will be for you. 

I have stood on Tony Booth’s overlook of the river with his Statue of Liberty and know he cares dearly about it, as do his neighbors. Your friends who live in the neighborhoods along Tar Creek and also those who live along the Neosho River will want to come, because they care about their watershed. Land owners on the Spring River and folks living on the lake care, too. Help me to remind them to attend this short and informative meeting to share what they know with EPA. What you know may make this plan be the best it can.

Make a banner and carry it in with messages about how water is life. That would be cool to see. Our Tar Creek has lost the city signs that identify her, so mention her on a sign and bring it to the meeting.
A sign for the Neosho River featuring her Spoonbill would be a hit.

State Department of Environmental Quality, EPA, Fish and Wildlife representatives and environmental department staff from the local Tribes including the Cherokee Nation have been meeting for quite some time about what to do about the sediments and the surface water in the watershed. They have met and studied, they have collected samples, analyzed them and shared the data. EPA has had that data compiled and they have decided there are some gaps. Some things have yet to be sampled.

The meeting you will attend this week at the Miami Civic Center will catch you up on the Superfund Process here at the Tar Creek Superfund Site, but will give you a chance way before they make their final decisions on what the cleanup will be. You may have answers EPA needs to make the plan better for the local environment and for those who reside downstream.

When LEAD Agency partnered with the Harvard School of Public Health and the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center on the Grand Lake Mercury Study, we met people who fish and eat our local fish. Everyone of them and every other person who eats local fish should come to this meeting because they care about this watershed because this watershed provides for them.

EPA knows this watershed has been damaged by the legacy lead and zinc mining that occurred in Kansas and Missouri and ends up coming down the Spring River to the Grand Lake o’ the Cherokees. Mining that occurred in Oklahoma appears in the mine water discharges and the chat loaded with metals that enters the Neosho River and flows to meet up with the Spring River at the Twin Bridges. So far this Operable Unit 5 is set to go to the “train trestle” just as the two rivers meet.

Sampling has been done and what has been sampled will be listed at the meeting you will attend. But most of the people who work at the state and federal agencies don’t know what you know. They don’t know what parts of a duck you eat, they don’t know if any of you ever eat any other water fowl and don’t have a clue how you might prepare it. This could matter because the plan to clean up this site so it protects the environment but also importantly, that human health is protected depends on exposure.

And your input is needed at this stage in the plan. Knowing what you are consuming and where it is caught, where it has lived could change their workplan to make it be more protective.

I am all about that and you would be too. We are only going to get one shot at a cleanup, it better be as good as it can be. We better hope we get the cleanup we deserve. It has been a long time in the making.

Having you attend this meeting would be a sign, the best sign I could ever wish to see, and your presence would read, “You Care.”
 

Hope is one of my go-tos. I hope people who have the flu get better soon. I hope we have just a bit of winter before spring arrives. I hope no clouds blocked your view of the lunar eclipse and that you remembered to look up that night and see what you could see.

I never give up and it has been hope that has gotten me through some bad times. Hope is sure getting a work out lately. But hope can’t do it all. When simply living our lives we have every day stress, some more intense some less, but we are also surrounded by waste from the largest superfund site. Dr. Bob Wright told me years ago that stress is also toxic and can make you literally sick. His wife Dr. Rosalind Wright spoke at one of the Tar Creek Conferences on stress of living in a superfund site.

The contaminated waste here should be dealt with in a safe, consistent manner. We cannot will it away, there are tons of it. We need help and the agency created to help and protect our citizens is the EPA.

There is a great effort a foot to de-power the EPA, since regulations have become a dirty word and they set regulations and enforce rules. Most rule-breakers are not you or me, the rules are broken by polluting companies. Some pay fines and never correct their actions to protect human health and the environment with it cheaper to violate rules and pay the fines. But the push to demonize the only federal agency with "Protection" in its name is working. And we may lose our protectors, flawed as they have been.

Life in America was really toxic before the Environmental Protection Agency was put in place and that may be where we go again for a time before the pendulum swings back to protecting us and not business profits. All that to say, fear is one of my stressors and hope my go-to, modifies some of it.

Hoping EPA is around to do its work to protect the future we all hope to have in Ottawa County and the country, hoping community members, young and old will want to get trained to be lay health advisors helping make sure our kids and their parents know how to be protected from our local lead exposures. Hoping the tribes continue to receive their funding to keep their valuable environmental departments operating to help protect their members.

There are different kinds of stress, some positive that push us to get things done. Tolerable stress we can muster through and be ok, maybe even better for it but we can be derailed by excessive or prolonged stress on the body and brain. Stress can have damaging effects on learning, behavior, and health across the lifespan when it disrupts the development of brain and other organ systems, and increases the risk for cognitive impairment and developmental delays, and stress related problems later in life like heart disease, diabetes, substance abuse, and depression.

Toxic stress increases the risks for smoking,  suicide, teen pregnancy, STD’s, and domestic violence. It seemed like the stresses we experience in childhood we can carry on to stress our own children. These toxic stresses can reduce children’s ongoing chances of success in school, holding jobs and maintaining stable relationships.

Childhood exposure to “toxic stress” can have a cumulative toll on a person’s well-being and happiness for a lifetime.
Children can be shielded from the most damaging effects of stress and effects reversed if their parents are taught how to respond appropriately.  When a child feels loved and valued by a parent, it buffers the circumstances and that can buffer the stresses.

Understanding the science of Adverse Childhood Experiences and toxic stress gives us a powerful tool for not only addressing health disparities, but for improving the lives of all Americans. The effects of ACEs are well known and there are implications for all those who deal with children, youth and adults with behavior problems.

Jim Wikel, a therapist with Grand Lake Mental Health talked recently about the questions we ask: "What's wrong with the person?" needs to be changed to: "What happened to the person?" When we change the question Robert Anda believes it would be the most important opportunity for the prevention of health and social problems and disease and disability that has ever been seen. AND THAT SOUNDS LIKE HOPE TO ME.

There is a common biology with every child in America who is experiencing adversity. Our future and the future of any society depends on its ability to foster the healthy development of the next generation. We do this and we can learn to do it even better. Delight in your child's amazements and be there as their shield, you are my hope and they are ours.

Knowing Hope is the thing with feathers ...  Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
 
                'Hope' is the thing with feathers--
                That perches in the soul--
                And sings the tune without the words--
                And never stops—at all--

                And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard--
                And sore must be the storm--
                That could abash the little Bird
                That kept so many warm--

                I've heard it in the chillest land--
                And on the strangest Sea--
                Yet, never, in Extremity,
                It asked a crumb—of Me.
                       -Emily Dickinson

I blew it all this week. Didn't send out cards, get flowers delivered, nothing. The day snuck up on me. There wasn't a single ad on TV this year to remind me to get with it. The only official  nationally observed DAY for a single animal wasn't celebrated in classrooms, no children's pictures drawn depicting the groundhog were hanging in the windows I drove by. With this in mind I decided to learn more about groundhogs and why they got their own DAY, and how what happens that morning can affect us for 6 weeks.

One day at the Tribal Adventures R.O.P.E.S. course Tom Payton and I looked out at the end of the Tecumseh Park and saw an animal that puzzled us. He stood up proud to be in such a beautiful place right near Lost Creek on Eastern Shawnee Tribal land. He stood and we wondered for quite awhile what exactly he could be. He didn't have a long tail, so he was not a beaver. He was much more substantial than a squirrel. Was he a badger? a woodchuck? We decided neither of us had seen a badger or as for myself, never a groundhog or a woodchuck, not understanding then they were one in the same. We decided on the spot that he must be a groundhog.

We were used to seeing animals on that property especially on the hill. There were chipmunks up on the course, but they were small. I remember resting one morning up on the course on the swinging log. The ground was covered with piles of leaves that fall and out in front of the log suddenly one at a time chipmunks popped their heads up only to hide again, rather like Jack-in-the-Box animals. We had had red foxes come up in the evenings as we were putting away ropes and harnesses. One day Tom took a teenager who had never been in the country up on the course to help set up for a group that was arriving later. They walked up quietly and startled a group of deer, Tom had to laugh when the boy exclaimed, “Look BIG DOGS!” But the Groundhog was a one time visitor and I was determined to learn more about them since there weren’t observance days for chipmunks, red foxes or deer, other than official legal HUNTING days!

After looking up pictures of groundhogs, it had been a confirmed sighting that day, he was right where he should have been where the woodland met the open space.  Groundhogs are the largest in the squirrel family and are sometimes referred as a type of badger(thickwood) but got their “Indian name” wuchak from the Algonquian or the Narragansett languages.

The groundhog is a marmot, or a rodent and one of the only animals that actually hibernates during the winter. It is the hibernation that spun off the popular custom in America of Groundhog Day when he sees his shadow it is forecast six more weeks of winter.

That day is always February second and the famous Punxsutawney Phil did see his shadow this week and as such predicted six more weeks of winter. (Funny thing: no matter what in six weeks winter will be over and it will be officially Spring!)

 I wonder if anyone was out in Tecumseh Park to see if their groundhog saw his shadow, and if no one was there to view the shadow, what kind of forecast do we have?

People my age remember the tongue-twister: How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? And the second line, which I never got to: A woodchuck would chuck all the wood he could if a woodchuck could chuck wood. And thinking back to tongue-twisters, wonder why we thought that was fun to challenge each other to say?

In times past nature worship helped guide beliefs in the area where Germany is now. Farmers watched the badger to predict spring planting time. When Germans immigrated to Pennsylvania they brought that belief but without badgers, began watching the groundhog for guidance on when to plant their gardens. For 130 years the Punxsutawney Phils have been forecasting the coming of spring, and about 30% of the time, correctly.

The Lost Creek groundhog might be getting it right and we are blowing it by not gathering to find out. With climate change all bets may soon be off for both the groundhogs and badgers around the world. Hope these guys survive extinction, we will need our own guidance from them on how to garden in the decades to come.

But the woodchuck still won't be chucking wood.

Respectfully submitted ~  Rebecca Jim