I got to stand for environmental justice. It wasn't that hard, just stood right up and did it.
 
For more than half my life speaking up was impossible and didn't happen. That can cause a lot of personal trouble and I experienced some of that, but actually talking in public didn't happen because I dodged it for years.
 
My teaching career? I chose counseling and learned in my training the best counselors ever are the ones that said the least. A perfect fit.
 
Growing up with an older brother who was not only gregarious but gifted in theatre arts, getting a turn to talk was rare as a child, so developing that skill didn't happen and I never found my voice.
 
But through the years, it seemed once there was a cause worth fighting for or worth standing up for the standing up was almost immediate. It was voicing the message that was painful.
 
Last week I received a call from the Tulsa Global Alliance asking for me to speak to a group from the Department of State's International Visitor Leadership Program about the dangers of fracking.
 
 I am not an expert on anything as most will tell you, but when I learned who were represented in the group it seemed as if it was an opportunity of a lifetime, a chance to try to influence policy makers from nine oil producing countries on three different continents to consider the impact fracking might bring. In the group there were some with solar and alternative energy positions, but the majority were fossil fuel related. They were coming to Oklahoma the oil and gas hub of our country, the man-made earthquake capitol.
 
The visit to Cushing, OK would be with industry and with our state officials speaking their language of oil extraction and then they would get off the bus and into my turn. Perhaps what would be said could influence a pivot away from fossil fuels and protect their countries' fortune, their people and the future of their environment, especially their water and save our climate and the future of the world!
 
One chance. One hour. I knew I would stand for environmental justice during that time, but the message must be more than one voice. We are stronger and can be heard more clearly with MORE voices. So I invited two strong women to share their stories and share the responsibility with me that day.
 
Ariel Ross is a literature professor at Oklahoma State University but she spoke as a mother and her experiences as a citizen representative at the Climate Change Meetings that were held in Paris. Her experiences with earthquakes has shaken her to the core and shook her to action. She was afraid for herself and her family and began organizing citizens in Stillwater to take action against simply having fracking inside the city limits near schools. The hydraulic fracturing and the practice of high powered injection of waste water has primarily caused the earthquakes, hundreds per year putting people at risk. In those city meetings, the oil and gas industry filled the room and threatened to sue the city if they pursued. She and others did not back down but asked state legislators to get involved and a few stood up to the industry and because of community actions throughout the state there are some regulations being enacted to curtail some of the earthquakes. 
 
Barbara VanHanken as chair of the Sierra Club in Oklahoma spoke as the daughter raised in a family with their own oil company. She found her voice and brought the National Sierra Club to action to assist in the rash of earthquakes in our state. They spoke out throughout the state educating land and home owners on their rights. Barbara brought a sign left over from the Climate March in Oklahoma: Resist/ Rise/ Survive/ Thrive/ NOW.
 
The science is coming in about the dangers of fracking and our time was short, we showed no slideshow, no graphs, just spoke about environmental justice to people in powerful positions, positions related to extraction and energy. We spoke to what comes with the oil and gas. Resistance and the future they will face as their people rise up and begin to resist so they will be able to not only survive but thrive.
 
I spoke about water and how much is ruined a day in our state 2 million gallons per well. I spoke about our need to protect our water and how a real native rule would consider the actions taken today and how it would affect the 7th generation in the future. Our grandchildren's grandchildren will need water for life. Our country is wasting ours but the hope was in their hands to protect the water for their futures.
 
We all said much more but it was only an hour we were given and we filled it to the brim as articulate women speaking truth before it was too late.
 
Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim

The National Healthy Homes and Lead Poisoning Prevention Training Sessions convened in St. Louis this week with Dave Jacobs, their Chief Scientist stating his real regret is prevention actions kick in to identify and remove lead sources when a child is already found to be lead poisoned and damaged for life.
 
His other regret is the majority of children are screened for lead when they are already too old to benefit the most and our response too late to stop the earliest damage from occurring.
 
Dave Jacobs repeated, so we would not leave without this message: lowering blood lead levels will NOT bring lasting improvement in cognition, behavior, or neuropsychological functions. Damage will still have occurred. By lowering lead levels, additional damage can be lessened.
 
There is no doubt there are fewer lead poisoned children in the U.S., but the current numbers exposed remain too high. An estimated 310,000 children in the United States have elevated blood-lead levels – and millions of people have the continuing adverse effects of prior lead poisoning. Some of these children are ours.
 
The serious and potentially lethal effects of lead poisoning are undisputed. Lead persists and accumulates in the body. While lead is potentially harmful to individuals at any age, it is particularly dangerous to children under the age of six whose brains are still developing. Their normal hand-to-mouth behavior increases exposure by ingestion. Even children who appear healthy can have dangerous levels of lead in their bodies. 
 
Lead exerts a broad array of harmful effects on multiple organ systems. It causes neurological damage, thus contributing to intellectual impairment, developmental delays, learning disabilities, memory loss, hearing problems, attention deficits, hyperactivity, and behavioral disorders.
 
Severe cases of childhood lead poisoning can result in organ failure, convulsions, coma, and death. We haven’t seen these severe cases locally but one of the other speakers in St. Louis was Mary Jean Brown, who worked at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta.  I had seen her in a tiny airport in Montana on her way to a country in Africa a few years ago. As the CDC investigator she went to determine how to stop the deaths of hundreds of children from severe lead poisoning. On arrival to that village she found mothers were working inside their traditional huts processing gold ore, by grinding it with a flour mill, to a fine dust like baby power with their very young children with them. Zamfara is a Muslim community under Sharia law, where women typically stay within family compounds, which is why the rock-grinding has been done at home. In this very poor agricultural region, ore-processing is a way for women to contribute to family income.
 
 The lead dust killed their children. Lead goes to bed with a multitude of metals, including the gold they were smelting. Mary Jean went to investigate the problem and look for ways to prevent more child deaths. I learned she was able to help them lower the actual death rate of their children by educating the mothers about exposure and moving the processing to the edge of town. Locally lead has not killed our children but the damage from any lead poisoning is irreversible.
 
Lead poisoning continues to be a major environmental health problem in the United States, although it is completely preventable. The most common source of childhood lead poisoning is lead-based paint in older homes and buildings.
 
The use of lead in residential paint became illegal in 1978 but it can be found locally deteriorating on neighborhood homes when it chips, flakes and powders into dust and lands on the floor of houses or in the soil. Lead paint is a hazard and must be eliminated, or properly maintained, using lead-safe work practices. It is important for us to deal with it so yards that are remediated of lead in the soil are not re-contaminated by old paint.
 
People attending the training cannot comprehend the additional burden we have in the Tri-State Mining District of the contaminated mine waste that has been spread throughout neighborhoods, parks and school yards. We may not have in place the safeguards and systems they have developed, but we still have the opportunity to get rid of our contaminated yards, free for simply making a phone call to DEQ at 800-522-0206.
 
The icons in lead prevention Dave Jacobs and Mary Jean Brown calmly state the facts to health educators, nurses, and our state health department officials. Dave Jacobs bought a Sherman-Williams stock so he could attend a stockholders meeting to ask the owners to stop their current lead based paint sales in overseas markets. Dave Jacobs said, "There's no financial reason for them to use lead in paint, and we know that there are substitutes readily available."We're not going away and we intend to continue this battle, not just with Sherwin-Williams but with other paint companies that continue to persist in producing a known hazard to our children."

Sherman-Williams refused to stop, but PPG Paint Company did stop their production after he spoke with the company owners.
 
Many of the states represented are light-years ahead of Oklahoma. In New York City they have investigators who go into stores and buy items and test them for lead, products loaded with lead are removed from the shelves and cannot be sold. Cities had safe houses for families to live while their homes were repaired and made lead safe, and funding for those repairs, or local laws to require property owners to repair rentals before they could be rented again to anyone.
 
“Until effective standards for the Domestic environment are devised, it is likely that children will continue to be employed as biological indicators of substandard housing,” Donald Balrltrop said that in 1974, forty three years ago and a whole lot of biological indicator kids have suffered since then.
 
Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

For many centuries chemists labored to change lead into precious gold, and eventually found that precious uranium turned to lead without any human effort at all. (After 4.5 billion years)—Isaac Asimov
 
Uranium. The woman who lives down the street from the LEAD Agency office brought us several copies of the book If You Poison Us: Uranium and Native Americans by Peter H. Eichstaedt. Not all of the miners in the 4 Corners area were Navajo, some came from Ottawa County, and Flossie's husband was one of them. These books will be used in our next reading circle. When mining lead and zinc played out here, some of the miners and their families moved to find new jobs. Mining is always dangerous, but while mining uranium, few precautions were taken to protect any of the miners from toxic exposures. Health impacts occurred soon for some later for others. The federal government was made to compensate those affected. But how much is your life worth, or your husband's?

A new study came out this week in JAMA Internal Medicine and I was mesmerized by it. If you have a chance to check out the link, you might find it interesting, too. Every county in the country is shown on a map and when you click on one you will find the life expectancy of the people in that county. Christopher Murray, at the University of Washington helped conduct the analysis, published this week.

Health experts have long known that Americans living in different parts of the country tend to have different lifespans. The research analyzed records from every U.S. county between 1980 and 2014. As I clicked on places I had lived, it became obvious there were differences. Some counties the lifespan is 20 years MORE than others. Some places are dangerous to your health!

Back to uranium, the Miami Leadership Class came to visit LEAD Agency this week, and heard the story about how Ottawa County almost became a temporary repository for nuclear waste and how young Miami School Indian Club members asked why do we want it?

Amanda McCoy and Becky Bigheart as 6th and 7th graders led a community meeting and helped change history for the county when the repository applications were withdrawn. “We have to think of the little ones,” is a phrase my son heard once from a friend of his, but in this case we have to THANK the little ones for seeing through the risks of hosting that waste.Beginning in 1943 and lasting for more than 40 years, Hanford processed uranium into plutonium for nuclear weapons, including for the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki. Now the site is run by the Department of Energy and its contractor, Washington River Protection Solutions, and is in the midst of a $110 billion cleanup of 56 million gallons of chemical and nuclear waste that is stored in 177 underground tanks.The job, which began in 1989, is expected to take at least 50 years to complete. About 8,000 people are currently working on the cleanup expected to cost more than $100 billion and last through 2060.

This week at Hanford 4800 workers had to “Take Cover” and shelter in place when a 20' by 20' tunnel subsided where radioactive waste was buried. That is the size of the subsidence in Commerce which caused a short segment of the old Route 66 to be closed recently. Emergency officials even restricted flights from passing over the Hanford nuclear reservation, a 580-square-mile area bordering the Columbia River.

"Take cover” are words no one ever wants to hear. I went back to the lifespan map to check the life expectancy for the 2 counties affected in Washington State. Stress alone must take a toll there. But it turns out Ottawa County is much worse. We should all be grateful for those little ones with their foresight on the danger adding storage of nuclear waste to our already damaged land would have been.

Waffles. I just love them and have been seeking a waffle maker for years that would be safe and easy to use. I bought a couple, only to reconsider after learning more about the safety of some materials. The red one looked great, but had Teflon coating on the cooking surfaces, so I never used it and it went to the electrical appliance recycling event, so no one would ever use it. The last one seemed perfect. Strictly 2 pieces of cast iron, not electric, small to fit over the burner on the stove. We cleaned it and treated it like the new cast iron it was.

But before whipping up the recipe for the long awaited waffles, it came to the LEAD office to be tested with the Thermo Scientific X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometer. The readout was going well. 3 Million ppm Iron, of course, but then lead showed up, but then it indicated uranium traces. We decided on pancakes. And the waffle maker? It will serve as another example of an item bought in the U.S but, made in China and why we should have inspectors on imports sold in this country to protect our health and the environment since we have to think of the little ones.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

A town built between a creek and a river has to think differently. They have to prepare for water to be part of their lives. We ourselves are half water as Margaret Atwood wrote and since water too must go around obstacles, finding dry routes is our nature. Incessant rains have consequences and rerouting a way 'cross town is one of them.

A number of years after I began working in Miami, a substantial flood occurred. With flooding imminent the culture in the community changed almost immediately. The scramble to move household appliances and furniture meant trucks of all sizes were loaded and moved through town, driving through water on some roads to get to the Miami Civic Center to store their possessions in rows in the gymnasium the city allowed for safe storage.

Years later during the 2007 flood, people found storage on front porches, in garages and barns throughout the community, so loaded trucks were going every direction. After the flood I worked with Grand Lake Mental Health walking neighborhoods to visit people who had sustained significant damage to their homes to see if they were aware of services available for them and offer a shoulder or an ear if needed. House after house, stuff piled in the front yards, ruined by water and what was in it. People stood on their properties and sometimes in the shell of it exhausted with the effort and the realization of loss.

As the water was coming up this time, I went to the neighborhood across from NEO where the Rotary Centennial Park is and reflected on homes gone and with them the ordeal of loss no longer felt by their inhabitants. None of those residents will be suffering this time.

Code enforcement standards were followed after that flood on what constituted damage and what indicated the property was condemned changed Miami very quickly. Housing stock decreased dramatically and almost 500 families were in immediate need of temporary housing. Charles George Court, Neosho River homes, Tar Creek homes. Homes were demolished proving you can't always go back home, but those now on drier ground don't have to be "haunted by water" as Norman Maclean once said in A River Runs Through It and other Stories.

Might we all be haunted by water if we think about what is IN the water around us? Everything that has been applied to the fields upstream, the very land itself has runoff into this water. Waste water plants get a reprieve when there are rain events like we have experienced and wastewater not processed can be discharged.

Rachel Carson spoke out about water and how it is not possible to add pesticides to water anywhere without threatening the purity of water everywhere. It is well known that a single drop of oil can contaminate one million drops of water. She understood there was a universal seaward movement of water. And a whole lot of it came down and is flowing past us, accumulating in Grand Lake before it spills past on toward the ocean.

Farmers apply chemical fertilizers and manure to their fields to grow crops, but the earth can hold only so much before it releases it into the water, usually during rains. Manure is rich with phosphorous and nitrogen, pollutants that algae greedily feed upon.  With all the runoff Grand Lake may suffer with these abundant rains  we may experience another algae bloom that will suck oxygen from the water, creating an environment in which fish can’t breathe — and zones where everything dies.

Of course the other "stuff" in these waters are the metals from Tar Creek and the Neosho River as it bathes back into Miami. Mary Daugherty's mother told her you can put out a fire, but there is not a thing you can do about water.

We might not be able to stop the rain or change the lake level, no matter how many law suits, but we can resist using pesticides and herbicides. And Tar Creek can be fixed and that would help lower the metal exposure left behind after these rain events. Dr. Bob Nairn's passive water systems in Commerce are taking a load off of us every day and we need those to continue working for us. Getting Tar Creek fixed would be easier with more voices asking for it to be done, letters demanding it and more people speaking up at Town Halls requesting action on the cleanup.
 
People who live between a creek and a river...

“... water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.”- Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim