Is that something like, "Act your age?"

No, ACT50 is Waterkeeper Alliance's collective celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act. LEAD Agency's Tar Creekkeeper and Grand Riverkeeper programs will be participating and conducting actions this year you will be invited to join. For there is nothing more important to you and to all of us than water. And we deserve clean water.

The year before I was born the Federal Water Pollution Control Act was enacted.

Then after EPA was established in 1970 during what has been called the "American environmental movement" with President Nixon saying the, "70's must be the years when American pays its debt to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its water and our living environment. It is literally now or never."

Congress passed a significantly reorganized and expanded it into the Clean Water Act by themselves with a rare 2/3 majority vote because President Nixon did not sign it when it came to him, he vetoed it.

Can we afford rivers and lakes and streams and oceans which continue to make possible life on this planet? Can we afford life itself? Those questions were never asked as we destroyed the waters of our nation, and they deserve no answers as we finally move to restore and renew them. These questions answer themselves.”  ~ Edmund Muskie

It was very popular to be for clean water at that time because our water was seriously in danger with sewage, trash, oil, and even rivers catching on fire. "The object of the act is to restore and maintain the chemical, physical and biological integrity of the Nation's waters." - NRDC

This era also brought us the Clean Air Act, and the Endangered Species Act.

Our Clean Water Act will be 50 years old this year and so will my son, who was born just 2 months earlier. The Act has never been fully implemented and has never been as protective as is needed. The CWA made it unlawful to discharge any pollutant from a point source into navigable waters, unless issued a permit, but it allows these permits that do pollute our water.

ACT50 is a collective call for governments, Waterkeepers, and people like you to unite in the fight for clean water. Working together, ga-du-gi, as we say in Cherokee, can ensure that water is drinkable, fishable, and swimmable by enforcing laws, holding polluters accountable, and empowering citizens.

There are ongoing and emerging threats to the health of American waterways and with provisions in this law governments and organizations like the Waterkeeper Alliance and LEAD Agency can take action, but we need citizens paying attention and the Act gives them legal standing  to advocate for their own waterways.

This Clean Water Act actually has been watered down through the years by the very Congress that enacted it and has never been fully implements as the original Congress had intended. But because of it pollution standards have been set and American waterways have had significant protection with restoration and cleanup of serious problems.

The incredible hope that was written into this Act was the goal to see all American waterways drinkable, fishable and swimmable by 1983. As we know that hasn't happened.

Some of that is our own fault. We must elect politicians who believe this is important to their constituents and to the country as a whole, and will protect water, which is our future, and not corporations who entice them to protect their interests instead.

But the other thing we have to do is understand we are the change. We as a people made Congress take on the challenge to protect water. And for us here at Tar Creek we have to make them follow the law. The discharge going into Tar Creek for now 42 years, over 15,000 days is a violation of the Clean Water Act. A permit was never issued. You will be hearing more about this year, as it is my very own ACT50 action and you joining this effort can make that discharge be addressed as the law proposed those years ago.

Myself as Tar Creekkeeper and Martin Lively, our Grand Riverkeeper will be speaking out on clean water throughout this celebratory year and call you to join us as we ACT50.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
 
 

“You cannot do kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.” --Ralph Waldo Emerson

For a couple of years I have eaten every meal at home. Lots of people have done the same, staying safe from exposure to our very own world-wide pandemic. So when I was invited a couple of months ago to attend a potluck supper, I said, "sure." But truly not believing that type of gathering would ever really happen again, perhaps not in my lifetime.

As the weeks have passed, the vale has been lifting and the day arrived and I marched right in, as if nothing could have been more common than to go see what the folks who attended might have thought to bring to add to the long table for us all to share for dinner.

The invitation came formally to not only attend but also be the guest speaker. With it coming from both Sharon and Judge Douthitt, I knew agreeing to come would have been understood on both our parts. Since who could have turned them down?

Having not had a speaking engagement in so long, I simply picked up some of this and some of that from the LEAD Agency office and slipped it all into a bag, while also remembering to bring our membership application forms.

Along with the invitation was a slick brochure about the P.O.T.L.U.C.K. Society which meets monthly in Claremore. Think about the name which stands for: People Out to Learn Using Care and Kindness. Their mission statement: Bringing people together in heart and mind to love and support those in need, to educate all ages in both Native and American history, and to value one another's existence as sacred.

The challenge is there. Regular people put their heads together and created their own nonprofit 501c 3 charitable organization and have found ways to keep learning while also being kind.

Lots of time when talking about what LEAD Agency does and hopes to achieve for Tar Creek and our damaged environment, it is easy to be cynical, and critical about the slow nature of the cleanup, to express anger and doubt about the governmental agencies direction and question the speed of the work they are doing.

The challenge was to attempt to keep on message but to do that while using care and kindness. It got easier with the kind introduction Judge Douthitt gave me, easier again when looking over to see my long time friend, Sharon Douthitt, who had been teaching all those years ago with me at Will Rogers Junior High School. Jon had grown up in Cardin and had started school at the elementary school, Mineral Heights. His stories of his youth were filled with classic Picher-isms, saying that describing his hometown to his college classmates was often hard to do. How swimming in sinkholes and sliding down chat piles were common to him while always wondering how he made it when so many others did not.

What I was able to do, again as kindly as possible, was to explain how the difficulty teaching in our schools around here can be, how challenging to teachers, especially those new to the profession. When Sharon started teaching English to 7th graders, some were, probably at that time, perhaps 1/3 of her class might have been suffering from lead poisoning. Many exhibited learning disabilities, or acted out, found sitting still in their chairs even difficult, and staying focused all hour almost impossible. As I described the symptoms of lead poisoning, I was describing Sharon's English class. Generations of children have been lead poisoned in Ottawa County and that is exactly why EPA is spending millions of dollars every year to remove the source material so less of it will be able to poison any more children.

The POTLUCK Society was an inspiration and a challenge. LEAD Agency has taken on heralding our issues and will continue to do this. Actually we will be conducting surveys soon of the neighborhoods who have been flooded in the past. There are many, too many. But surely enough that they may, by connecting even find a need to form a wing to LEAD Agency or organize an entity to give voice to their great needs.

But think of how many others could band together and begin organizing societies to be together, thinking, learning, exploring the questions they have about life and how on earth we treat each other and the earth we all depend upon, walk upon, and the water that provides life to us all.

Man seeketh in society comfort, use, and protection.  FRANCIS BACON
 
Respectfully submitted,
Rebecca Jim
 

If you have ever been an educator, you know there is a joy seeing a student discover a thing, own it, claim it and then more deeply know it.

I saw some of that happen this week as 12 graduate students began to grasp this place. They had been studying maps, grafts and images for the last 5 weeks. They learned our average rain fall, soil types, aquifers and all the ways flood waters lay down around parts of this county and the lives the high water affects.

It is one thing to see the list of the tribes in Ottawa County but to see their lands from the state line down to the southern edge and the waters that lap and at times inundate us. These students came to know our ancestors were forced to leave homelands leaving the graves of their ancestors only to come here to mere slivers of property to begin again.

Who are these students and why are they here? Riley and Scarlet, Geli and Yubo, Jessica, Elliott, Oliver and Justin came with Chee-Ling, Rachel, Ying and Kun. While they have been here they have become a team, a tight bonded bunch of landscape architects setting about creating the designs for the future of this county. But why have they come? They are here because of a quirky selection process at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, that I would simply describe as random. Niall Kirkwood's vision last year Tar Creek Remade grew into this more expansive course: Ottawa County Remade, the audacious attempt for these 12 students to take on the future of the whole county!

In order to do this, it became my task to give them what they would need, and that with your help has been provided by the generosity of so many of you who have taken time to visit with them. They have met, sat down with, walked sidewalks, entered gardens, and farms, witnessed a water well testing, attended a city council meeting, entered a casino, eaten a KuKu burger, seen a chat pile and then another one. They have crossed all the bridges over Tar Creek and seen the mine water discharge come straight out of the ground with great, unending force. They have stood on one of the largest man-made structures in the county made totally out of discarded soil and mine waste.

They saw our landscape, from the prairies to the edges of the Ozarks and followed the Neosho to the Spring where they together form our Grand River. They walked with fishermen casting for shad at the very place that water took a fellow fisherman for keeps just a few days ago. These students learned from both the Wyandot and Quapaw Environmental staff the important roles they have in protecting our waters and our environment and with a bit more time they would have made the rounds to know even more of us.

They came to know of groundwater finding the surface in unnamed springs and the challenge it is to change and embrace the preciousness that water brings while standing back to see the lay of the stream beneath the surface. It is easy to focus on a place but after only these few days I was made to begin to understand the wider expanded view of the work landscape architects take on.

Niall Kirkwood's vision will come to life in 8 more weeks as these 12 students take back to Cambridge what they have seen, experienced and learned about this place and hone in their projects to turn their vision into projected projects. This is an educational experience, taking what they have learned in classrooms throughout their course of study, and bringing this into our real life settings where they can try on this creative responsibility, that will allow them to take their skills and logical know-how into their view of the way our land will lay and our waters flow.

They have gained confidence each day, as they also begin to know their days as students end soon and they will be taking on clients: cities and towns, tribal nations who need their skills to help them master and live more gently with the places they come to reside.

Their instructor has guided and stood as the role model throughout the course and demonstrated the power of the pen to paper they as landscape architects have and so easily can share with communities where they may spend their lives, seeing the homelands broadly as the canvas of their work. There are people who make a difference and the very best ones are those like Niall Kirkwood, who teach by example and inspire students to see the future.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

The lives of the people of this earth joined almost in total unity over the peril the people in Ukraine are experiencing each moment, as they face the dangers of war brought to them, for nothing less than believing in democracy and for their country, their homeland. Just a week ago children were playing and going to school, their parents were going to work. Their lives are changed and those who live through this are changing the world, bringing countries to stand in a way I have never seen in my lifetime. 

The United Nations were almost totally united. The national colors of Ukraine shine bright on the monuments of the greatest structures in most countries on this planet. Peace on earth, and the desire for it has grown and been a thing that even the hardest characters I know are sharing on social media.

 It saddens me to know there are people dying, people suffering through the cold, sheltering without food or water, hiding in bomb shelters, being protected from what they were built to protect them from. Huddled in basements, wondering if each moment is their last, when last week they were trying to figure out their shopping list. Regular people stayed to protect their homeland, are standing with arms in the air trying to stop, or slow down the armored tanks coming down the streets and roads of their towns and villages. The stories they will tell, or the many stories that can never be told by the dead  for the acts of courage that are occurring as we wonder when baseball season with get going or the price of a gallon of gas. There are lessons we can be learning. The value of life. The beauty a clear blue sky can bring. The peace of quiet.

I wish you that and more. I wish for the peace that ends all war. These acts of violence may invoke memories for those who have experience wars in our lifetime or for indigenous, native people who have historical trauma from the times we as tribal nations were those killed by invading forces on homelands we loved or made to leave in forced marches marked by graves and tears. No Facebook posts recorded what we endured. But our trails brought us to a new land, a fresh start, to a place with tall grass and clean water. Some of these lands held treasures and made men rich, but the lands that were left truly look  as if they too had been a war zone, not just the source of the bullets that won both of the World Wars we are now so close to finding ourselves in yet a Third World War .

We are tied emotionally with the past and the daily news is heart wrenching, and while we could be standing in the cold, shivering and wondering for what purpose, I found myself simply on zoom in another meeting. Anymore you can meet people in a zoom and begin to feel like you know them. I spent some hours with a fellow who used to be in charge of a section of a federal agency that is set up with the express purpose to deal with wounded places like we have, wronged by long gone, bad deeds, by actual people who were  good at making money and about as good as making messes for generations to come to clean up.

When people retire they take a lot of institutional knowledge with them, and because it's in their heads, they can walk right out carrying nothing but memories and perhaps regrets. There would be sites still left waiting on the guys who knew how and could have made lives longer and environments safer but who didn't get to do that work.

As you might know, I want to believe Tar Creek will get a fix way before your grandchildren get their first Social Security checks. So meeting a fellow with both know how and where it got done somewhere else and how, could help us muddle through a generation quicker on the fix we deserve.

In the meantime, I am wishing you time to reflect with me on the peace on earth I hope begins now, and that our piece of earth gets a few more possibilities made possible and gets some justice, too.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.”- Albert Camus

There is much to be said about the generosity of strangers, but the gift of time, or a skill long developed which with ease is shared is not less appreciated when it comes from a colleague, a fellow you have sat beside in meetings for years not knowing the skills he might have to offer until he does quiet out of the blue ask to do a thing.

There is what might seem like a cascade of assistance landing on our laps per se at LEAD Agency lately. It is as if we had been discovered, or uncovered in some way from the neglect this place has experienced.

You have heard me almost YELL for help with my words flying off the pages of the Miami NewsRecord over the past years through the weekly column they so generously allow me to submit.

Then suddenly the phone starts ringing and people are offering APPLE stock, and bringing by classily framed and matted art prints as a raffle item, or their used Brita filters for us to recycle.

When you operate the only environmental justice organization in the tri-state district, usually what we get on the phone are questions about the stuff that harms us, where it is detected, what could be making us sick, why the fish aren't safe to eat yet, and maybe where the crappie are biting this time of year?

But when you have the best place in town for the Community Garden and it goes to sleep, and needs a haircut or a re-tuning, the first day working this season, a generous fellow Cherokee comes by and offers and then delivers the biggest sack of pecan hulls, almost as tall as himself for us to add to the soon to be showcase Garden of Miami.

There is a lot of hope in a garden. It starts with mending and tending the soil, and removing what has moved in and for a time kept the soil busy and aerated so it didn't compact as it might have.  But there hiding are the strawberry plants with the little starter ones, the Egyptian onions, the spider wart, the Shasta daisies and the butterfly bushes. I would say the garden has good bones and calls out for team mates to join in the remake, the redo that is going to be happening in the next few weeks.

This cold snap will pass and then March will come right in behind it and we will see you gather and ask you to look in the corners of your kitchen for those potatoes that are sprouting. Before too long it will be time to plant them. We have a potato box ready to take them and rows to plant if we have more than we need to wedge in the box. Wouldn't that be a great way to start a potato salad? by growing your own.

This evening in my in-box, no potato, but an attorney who had seen Jennifer Little's dramatic photography the University of the Pacific professor had taken of our site, who is volunteering legal assistance in the fights that need to be fought here at one of the largest environmental justice sites. We say yes. We have issues to choose from air to water.

The questions we have no answers to, lay there with us, we taunt them and dangle them as bait to tempt yet unknown sources to leap at them and bring us answers and justice to those who have been harmed and wronged here. Keep asking and wondering and putting the pieces together, the map, the connections can matter in the lifetime we share and those who will follow walking where we once stood and wondered.

Or do a thing.

There is always something that needs doing at the LEAD Agency. A story that needs to be told and captured in our Air, Water and Works Stories Project, a child that has to be told not YET in that creek by his house, a petition to sign, or a rally to rally around.

When my mother was in medical school in Kirksville, MO, one snowy day a fellow walking in front of her dropped a book in the snow, she picked it up for him and his response was to gift it to her for returning it to him.  It was The Prophet by the author Khalil Gibran, the much loved book still can be found in our family library.

It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.”
― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

We give you this same opportunity. Give us your time, you are the gift.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

This week I got to show the wounds, the color of blood oozing out of the ground on each side of the road, streaming along the ditches, showing the colors we have learned to expect, but yet hope not to see.

Each time I have taken people to see those waters of our once beloved creek and step forward to look over the bridge, I long for pretty water to be flowing downstream away from us.

I was a late comer. She was tainted for fifteen years, she was a ruined teenager before I came to see her that way. I was a crosser, crossing over the bridges she ran beneath year after year, never pausing like I do now, to gaze beneath, nor stop to stand beside, to stoop to find a worry stone along the banks, or see the life that no longer lived in or along the edge as she passed/flowed along so casually most days.

Having grown up in west Texas in a town named for a spring, where water was precious, and later living in the Black Hills and the Rocky Mountains with streams so clean you could lean over and scoop a drink out of the same water the tastiest trout you ever steamed in the ashes of a fire were caught. Knowing and experiencing the rare joy fresh running water could bring, it is beyond me to understand how I blew the chance to know Tar Creek before her life was changed for what must feel like forever to her.

I came to work in Miami as the Indian Counselor in 1978, a year and a few months before the abandoned mine workings in the Picher Field which had been dug into the Boone Aquifer refilled with water because the pumps allowing the work had ceased to work. I had those months and a few more to go down for myself as a tourist in the mine people still talk about that was so close to Route 66. Missed opportunities. We all experience them, or actually we don't experience them at all, do we?

I read the newspapers when Tar Creek was a front page item, like a brutal murder makes the headlines for days on end. And big news, like the Kansas City Star, Los Angeles Times and the Dallas Morning Sun. Tar Creek was slain and people with cameras and the best writers were here watching what looked like the life's blood flowing right out of her.

People cared and we knew what was wrong would be righted because we had a brand new agency, the Environmental Protection Agency and her new program the Superfund was going to fix our problems and make quick work of it, too. We believed until we stopped believing and stopped making the front pages and EPA slipped out and would never have come back, no matter how red and orange our Tar Creek wore in public, but our kids, maybe yours, for sure the kids on your block, no matter what town you lived in: Miami and north/ our kids were being lead poisoned and hey, that meant EPA had to get their butt back in here and start doing something about it.

There are no IQ transplants. Lead can reduce our abilities and harm every organ in our bodies. But lead poisoning is totally preventable. No vaccines are needed. We are the method that protects children, we do that by eliminating the source, removing lead from homes, from our environment, our front yards and backyards.

I got off track. Yesterday I gave my last Toxic Tour. We begin by crossing one of the many bridges obscuring our shame to the public,  turned north out of Miami and quickly found chat piles, sinkholes, remnants of our abandoned towns but the last stop is the bleed. The "eternal flow of evil" that began the year after I arrived gushes out of the aquifer and has spilled out hour after hour for over 42 years.

With me on this viewing was Thomas Linzey, an attorney with the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights who was the inspiration for the Proposed Miami Clean Water Protection Ordinance to provide rights of our residents to clean water and a healthy Tar Creek and for our creek to have her own rights to be protected. It was Thomas' first visit and the water he saw he had seen before at other injured sites around the country and around the world and is the reason for his years long work for water justice. He came to offer his services to our tribal leaders to assist them as he has many other tribes in adopting the Rights Nature deserves.

Mr. Linzey then ended with a statement jarring us with his clarity "the Right to clean water is not yet provided to us in our Bill of Rights nor even in the Clean Water Act."

He left the tribes the spark that might ignite Rights to Nature legislation, perhaps a movement could begin within these elected leaders to protect what we have while restoring what has been lost. Why not with a Bill of Rights for Nature?  

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim