In the last few days MTV, 60 Minutes, and a filmcrew from London are either starting dialog about coming to Tar Creek or have committed dates of their arrival set. We have talked about elevator speeches, but it looks like it is imminent for you to start practicing yours.

What do you want to say? What do you want to happen? Do you want this place better or do you want to repeat the stories of the great mistakes that have been made here, money spent that quite honestly cannot be unspent.

Let's think about this together. Consider your voice will be heard, across the nation. Can we turn the page and start looking at what we want for our future and the future of the communities full of people who will follow us? What do we want? I will tell you what I want.

I want it all better. I want no more lead poisoned children. I want to know that the lead in the dust in the homes we reside within is gone. I want every residential yard tested for lead and I want the amount allowable changed to reflect the change in the lowered blood lead level of concern.  I want the chat piles gone, so no more dust will be blown from them into these homes. I want the owners of the chat waste to be compensated for it.  I want the water in the Boone Aquifer treated with a state of the art water treatment facility built and the water clean enough to drink after treatment. I want people who are currently still on Boone Aquifer water to have their wells tested frequently to make sure they are not drinking tainted water.

I want continued efforts to ensure the Roubidoux is protected from the Boone. I want Tar Creek, Spring River and the Neosho Rivers dredged down to Twin Bridges and the metals in the sediments removed and continue down the Grand River into the lake until all the metals are removed. I want the watershed soils checked and if not dealt with, the lands marked with warning signs on what plants should not be eaten and where the plants are safe. Of course the work in Oklahoma must be done knowing all the work in Missouri and Kansas has been done too.

The children who have been lead poisoned should receive the extra help that may be required in school and our state should understand they did nothing wrong to deserve the poisoning they have been dealt.

Mothers with lead poisoned children did nothing wrong, and I want each of our mothers to understand they are not responsible. Living in the heart of the largest superfund site in the nation with lead the element of concern did it.

Patients sitting in doctors' offices, hospitals and in dialysis centers did nothing wrong. They are living in the largest superfund site in the nation with lead the element of concern, but the other metals that went to bed with lead, arsenic, manganese and cadmium have health consequences as well. I want this cleaned up and the health of our people on track to be better in the decades to come.

I want the EPA, FERC and the Grand River Dam Authority to work together to make this happen to protect the environment and human health. This can help our communities and the people who will be living here for generations to come. This can help deal with the flooding that occurs and we are threatened with each time the rains come.

Our current EPA administrator has announced a War on Lead and our superfund site should get some attention from that new WAR. So look around you and down your street. The other obvious source of lead poisoning for children are the houses on your block, or the ones you drive by. Older homes built before 1978, there are LOTS of them in Ottawa County  and many of them still have lead based paint. Some houses may have been repainted and may be in good shape. But many need to be repainted, remodeled, to  keep from poisoning the children who abide in them.

Some houses will be demolished and all care should be taken to be sure that the dust that is generated does not poison nearby children or leave that property with the soil contaminated by that action. The health department researchers in Detroit found kids were most at risk for high lead levels if they lived within 200 feet of the demolitions during May through September. Let's pay attention to all the ways we can protect children, our future.

See you at the NEO Ballroom March 27 starting at 2:00 for a Tar Creek 101, stay and view the art show of Miami and Quapaw High School students.  There will be an Open House beginning at 4 p.m. where you can meet people who are working at this site and hear what they are doing. Take time to visit and get more answers until 7 pm.
Learn more. Ask questions and be ready to say what you want. Let's speak up. There may be a microphone clipped on you any day now.

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim
 
 https://undark.org/article/lead-testing-child-blood-levels/
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/2018/03/20/detroit-demolitions-lead-concerns/33113765/

48 years ago people of all ages stood up for change. They stood up on this precious earth on their own 2 feet and with her beneath them, they spoke up and demanded to have clean water and clean air and to protect the only earthly home we all share. Their voices and numbers made the difference and a president with many other things on his mind, established the Environmental Protection Agency to do just that: Protect the Environment that we all share equally.

This week lots of people were standing up and 2 classrooms full of Government students at NEO did too! While I had the opportunity to fill in for Martin Lively's US Government classes one day, my lesson was on how regular people in this country were able to create a demand strong enough that a brand new federal agency was born. It couldn't help but be based on the environmental history of the last century and the utter mess American companies can make and leave behind if there are no rules and no enforcers.

Rivers were catching on fire, smog in large cities made the air so dirty it could be seen, but not the sky. Chemicals left in landfills were forgotten and neighborhoods were built on top of them, causing people to get sick. And sick and tired of it forced all those folks to stand up and make those demands, and to get them met.

Every one of those Government students participated in the lessons. When asked to stand up, not a soul remained in their seats. They stood up and showed each other they know how to do it en masse.

And that is what students all over this country did this week, they walked out of their schools, stood in the halls, were silent for 17 minutes in remembrance for the last shooting victims at a school in America, or stood up and spoke out for those lost lives.

I can't believe this won't matter, their actions. But thinking about our government and what else I heard them say, they were all going to vote when they turned 18. It doesn't get any better for activism, for democracy, for power to the people than an educated electorate willing to stand up, speak out and to vote. And imagine safe schools for the students of the future, where education is the focus, not just safety. There ought to be a right to a safe school, and it looks like we are on the cusp of seeing what that may look like. While at the same time teachers around the country are speaking up, standing up, and wanting to be paid as the professionals that they are. Wow, students and teachers are who we are watching on the news. Like they matter. Because they do!

In this state the teachers and the environment are going to get tied up together soon as our state legislators have to wrestle with how they get those teachers paid without making the biggest polluting industry in the state pay more taxes. The oil and gas industry has the means to pay more, but our legislators have been denying all state agencies the funding they require and our citizens deserve, because the industry won't like being asked for more taxes.

Emporia State University Environmental Geochemistry students toured the Tar Creek Superfund Site last weekend but also the Kansas sites in the Tri-State Mining District. Marcia Schulmeister, Geology professor organized the tour to introduce college students to the impact of mining. Their tour was designed to examine science, policy and population, and was designed to prepare her students to be able to enter the workforce understanding that data-driven decisions are essential to preserving and protecting humanity and the environment. 

They learned that the Tri-state project is a multi-agency, collaborative effort, by states, EPA and the Quapaw Tribe. They met Kansas State and EPA officials and spent time with Oklahoma University professor Bob Nairn at his restoration projects in Commerce.

Students from Kansas, Missouri, Texas, Colorado, Wyoming, North Carolina, China, South Korea and Viet Nam had the opportunity of a lifetime, they camped out, many for the first time in their lives, in the LEAD Agency office. Sleeping bags all over the office and a couple on the front porch!

But the highlight for these Geochemistry students were the rocks. The rocks that were left behind all over the Tar Creek Superfund site. They examined, admired, and were awed by the rocks they discovered. As Professor Schulmeister said, "It was a field trip they will never forget."

They all came to purposefully study and learn from the land, our damaged land, appreciating each of the specimens they picked up, the rocks absolutely no other students had stopped to see in all these years of touring students. They saw the history of the origins of the earth in our rocks and could name every era and which parts of the rock were formed first and how our precious lead and zinc came to be infused in the stones and I saw real zeal as they handled the history of our earth, the one we need an agency to protect.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

https://archive.epa.gov/epa/aboutepa/guardian-origins-epa.html

Another one of my friends is silently struggling through cancer.
It makes me mad. She justified it, we are getting older. But older didn't always mean cancer, did it? My friends are the walking wounded. But do we have to accept that? Will we let our bodies crash on us? Or try doing something about it?

So today, I got a small coke and tomorrow, maybe I will just kick it. We might not be able to stop our toxic exposures, but we can change what we consume.

Emporia State students are coming this weekend to experience our outdoor science lab, the Tar Creek Superfund Site, and are using a study done by Bill Andrews as their teaching guide. I scanned that document and saw the usual suspects: lead, cadmium, arsenic and manganese, but he found high levels of aluminum in the sediments. All these years, I hadn’t noticed aluminum. Bill Andrews is a modest gentle genius and was the first person to speak up about the rare earth minerals in the mine waste. And the only person I ever heard speak about them, but aluminum got past me all these years.

My brain wants to connect dots, find the culprits making people sick and KICK them, deal with them and make sure no one is exposed again. That means all sorts of culprits, including too much water. This week a woman came into my office to bring me a copy of her letter. She is a beautiful woman, more beautiful now than she was 40 years ago, that was when she and her family moved into their first new home, the home where she continues to live. But flood after flood have occurred and she is tired of it. She brought me the letter she had written to send to FERC about her decade’s long flood impacted life in the home she loved. She spoke up and in her way she KICKED them for the hard times she has experienced. Another gentleman had spoken to me about the flood waters damages to his business, over and over again.

Our minds cannot be read but letters can be and there is just a while longer to submit them to FERC about the effects the new license for the Pensacola Dam can have on our flood prone and those who wait to see if they are next since there is a next time coming. March 13. What if just the pure weight of our letters got the attention of some regulator at the Federal Energy Regulatory Agency, or one particular letter got someone thinking, reflecting on their own mother having to wade into a family homestead and see their baby pictures floating on the dirty water or go waist deep in to retrieve their cat waiting patiently on the washing machine for a family member to rescue her.

What if we all wrote these letters and told our stories and didn’t give up until we had bushels of them? What if we kept saying how cool is would be to fix the lake and make it deep again and fix Tar Creek and stop the flow of the metals and take all our metals out of the lake and a deeper lake would mean the lake level effect would be different and safer for the flood plain people and better for the fish and the people who want to eat them and those of us who want to swim again in a beautiful clear lake again. Tie is all together. Want it all. Buy a stamp put it on your letter or wade through the FERC website and enter  your 6,000 characters and push send.

But for me, my KICK IT All is fitting into an envelope and going to the mail slot at the Miami Post Office right away because March 13 is the deadline.

March 13 is easy for me to remember, it was my parents wedding day, bet it was a Friday that year. My dad always remembered their anniversary and we have too. Now it will be another special day for all of us to remember, the day a whole pile of our letters got to the national office in Washington, D.C. and FERC gets to read these stories of struggles with water, water for energy, stacked up behind the dam waiting its turn to generate electricity, some of the 4% of energy used in the United States.

On the first page of your letter you must write: Pensacola Hydroelectric Project (P-1494-483)
Address to: Kimberly D. Bose, Secretary / Federal Energy Regulatory Commission / 888 First Street, NE,   Washington, D.C. 20426

A few hours of electricity and countless hours of work by mothers who are older now and tired, widowed and waiting knowing flood waters are coming back. So pick up a pen, go to your computer, write something. Buy a stamp and shove that message in the slot and know you have let someone somewhere know more than they did before about the real cost of electricity.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

https://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2009/5032/pdf/SIR2009-5032-web.pdf 
https://ferc.gov/docs-filing/efiling.asp
 

If you have been to Nashville you might not have noticed it but Vanderbilt University is right there, too. I love to learn so being invited to a university for any reason, puts me in a good place, being surrounded by people who are immersed in their studies, finding their way towards who they want to be and what their lives might find their life's work to be.

McKaylee Steen, a graduate of Grove High School is now a sophomore at Vanderbilt and she invited me to speak to the NATIV student organization on campus, and since I would be there anyway, her Sociology professor Joe Bandy allowed me to speak in his class on Environmental Injustice. The classroom had real chalk boards, so I wrote only a few words on it, beginning with JUST US.  Sounds like justice, but it is about us, just us, at our site, in the place we might be, needing justice for us.

When the class ended, I headed almost in a bee-line for the campus library and rode the elevator to the 8th floor and walked up and down the aisles, walking through history, stopping to read a chapter of the horrors of a work camp the Poles had to endure during WWII and how life was short for most who were brought there, but like the circles of Dante's Inferno, each section of the camp was only harsher and more deadly for those made to work there. And then I placed that volume back on the shelf and walked on through history, and on down to lower floors, discovering centuries old volumes of poets and novelists, waiting on the shelves to be touched again, opened and read. I do love libraries, and later that evening I spoke of the library, but not of these experiences there, but for it's height in relation to the chat piles we have left in our Tar Creek Superfund Site, so those attending the session could have a frame of reference. Because now really, if you were going to try to explain chat piles, it is the pile that makes one think of something very much smaller than the mountains of waste they actually are and have been. I also explained that our 26,000 acre superfund site has had only 600 acres of it remediated, which would be just twice the size of their campus had been cleaned up so far.

Just Us. I went to Vanderbilt University and I spoke about us, our place, our wounded place left over from extraction processes that made great wealth and will cost an equal amount to make her whole again.

The title of my evening session was "Roots of Resistance." The title caused me to reflect on my life's history, rooted in movements, cuttings of which became the compost breeding who I became. Those roots of resistance have bearing too, to hold on tight and push on through. In my lifetime there have been times when masses of people stood up and spoke out. They woke up and were heard and changed history, but then they went to sleep, or just went on living their lives. Standing Rock woke up a lot of people and  guns have too. I went to sleep for awhile myself, but those roots of resistance were there and have been keeping me awake for the last quarter century, or maybe longer!

 Learning and relationships, building and developing hope. Years ago I was given a Cherokee name:  u s ti   u ga ta which means "little seed." And I like to think it fits. I'd like to be part of planting those seeds of hope we all can nourish and someday enjoy. Some of those seeds are the words we share, just us.

We posed at the end of the evening session with a little sign an art student made depicting 3 letters: E P A, and the words beneath the letters stating simply: Every Person an Activist. To my recollecting, twenty three years students of all ages have been submitting art work that gives them voice about the environmental  issues we face here, lead poisoning, superfund, cave-ins, air quality and certainly bad water needing to change to good. We have piles of these creations and most of them have kept their creator's name attached to the back of the work. But  that little one with the E P A has lost her maker's name, almost to say Every Person can also be the Activist Artist who can make a statement and express an opinion.

And that is what I hoped to convey to the students at Vanderbilt, they might not have a Tar Creek and we certainly hope there are NO MORE TAR CREEKS, but they may have an impacted creek, lake, or street needing attention and when no one is speaking up,  no one will know the place needs help.

It is humbling to be invited to go to such a prestigious institution, but the next invitation can be to you. Find out what is happening here, tune in, have an opinion, want it better, and start speaking out. We need to demand JUSTICE. Just Us. We can do this.

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim