On the last day in the summer garden with the Boys and Girls Clubbers they established another garden bed, planted onion sets, rigged up the spider web for the cucumbers and the green beans to climb and got to eat the last of the potato crop they grew and one of their art teacher Terry Riley's home grown cantaloupes. We saved the seeds and added to their new bed as they were leaving.  We take our water breaks in the shade on the front porch at our office. The emphasis is on water and the implicit need we have for clean safe drinking water.

Just that day I had heard a story on the radio that left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
In 2007 Hugo, OK contracted with Severn Trent an international company to treat their water and seven years later the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality found the company was in violation of drinking water standards for 371 days and fined them $10,000 a day for a record 3.17 million dollars. It was the largest fine they had ever assessed and the company requested a hearing and a judge reduced it to almost one million dollars. This money went into the DEQ revolving fund to be used to help cities like Hugo upgrade water treatment facilities. Now that money has been taken by the state to deal with the budget issues the legislators failed to do during its regular session this year.

Hugo was left with bad water, even though the fine was assessed to be able to help improve their water.
Who protects our regulators and makes sure they stand fast to be able to protect us?
Regulations! No one seems to want them, until it is your water and your health or your child's. To me regulators translate to protectors and much like we like police until we see that car beside the road and suddenly realize the speed limit and how fast we are driving might not be the same. They are regulators, making sure we do right. The DEQ does the same, they make sure the water we drink, here and the rest of the state, cities, towns and rural communities have safe drinking water. They monitor the spills we have into our creeks, rivers and lakes because in many cases those waters are the source for our drinking water.

Mark your calendars and get ready to make your way to the Miami Civic Center for the August 16 Open House EPA is hosting to hear the Good News about the tri-state mining district environmental protection efforts. It will be held from 4 to 7 pm.

The Open House format is a come and go, meet and greet type of experience. You will be able to meet EPA and DEQ officials who are working on this superfund site. Come by LEAD Agency's table and we will give you some ideas for questions to ask the big guys so you will walk away with answers you need and we will whet your whistle for more.
It would be a good time for a Bake Sale for DEQ after learning about their recent loss of funding. You can even drop by that batch of brownies or cookies for the bake sale.

To make sure they have enough funding  to keep testing these waters, come to the Open House, get a cookie, get the lowdown and get set for the Tar Creek Conference Sept 13 & 14 right there in the Miami Civic Center, too.
We'll need to have another sale for DEQ then, too, we want their continued involvement here at the Tar Creek Superfund site, until it is "decommissioned" or whenever the work is complete and this site is deemed to be fixed.

Years ago Sheila Hestand designed  the emblem for LEAD Agency to  represent  our hopes for the future. The design's colors will change as the environment improves, the orange water will turn to blue, the mountains of chat will be gone and the future will be bright.

For now it reminds me of the theme for the 18th National Environmental Tar Creek Conference, "A Creek Runs Through It." And as the years pass in the future, the colors will be changing both our environment and our emblem and perhaps those cookies will leave a better taste in my mouth.
 
Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim

It is July and hot weather is settling in on us. This year is already the hottest in known history. We may be able to find relief, but it is affecting people around the world, with it almost as hot in Anchorage, Alaska as it is here. Greenland's ice is melting and the ice caps at the poles are melting years quicker than any scientist had imagined.

My mother who was petite and my father who was tall and as a child seemed big as a tree had mothers who reflected their physics, so naturally they were always referred to as the Little Grandma and the Big Grandma. With summer heat the Big Grandma had a great long deep couch gotten second hand and brought home on a horse drawn wagon, with arms which served as ponies my dad rode as a child. She would open old time ice trays and fling the cubes around the couch and then place herself on them for some relief and listen to baseball games on the radio.

My Little Grandma's theory was "it only lasts about three months" so she continued cooking on "ol Faithful" one of the largest wood cook stoves ever made, producing meals she loved proclaiming came totally out of her garden. Both inspired my view of summer and endurance.

Most traditional cultures and indigenous people have a reciprocal relationship with the world. They see it literally as a series of reciprocal exchanges in which the Earth has absolute obligations to humanity, and humanity has obligations to the Earth." Indigenous peoples, and as a Cherokee, certainly count myself, David Suzuki explains for most of human existence knew we were part of nature and understood we had to be careful not to jeopardize our place in the natural world.

So clearly, according to author James Hoggan, if we want to solve these global environmental problems we need to change the way we see the world and the way we interact with nature. And we also need to shift not only our attention but also our intention. Kris Sieckert had been Miami schools' psychologist who moved back to Wisconsin decades ago always used the phrase, 'Walk softly on this earth.' Years later I saw a bumper sticker: "Leave only footprints." There is a way to do this. We have control of the energy we use and the pressure we expel on this our Common Home as Pope Francis called this planet.

Years ago, when building my house, I decided against central air and heating, installing a wood stove and an attic fan instead. I have since added a small window air conditioner, and rely on it to pull moisture out of the house. The savings went toward the above ground pool, with no regrets. This season got away and we are just now swimming in the pool, but only after pulling out hundreds of tadpoles on their way to becoming frogs and putting them where? The wheelbarrow filled with rain caught water! What a sight. It made me happy that the pool had been getting lots of use and we were able to remove the tadpoles to take our turn.

Canadian science broadcaster and environmental activist David Suzuki said the problems we face regarding energy and environmental issues are not technological, political or economic. They are psychological, and the path forward lies in learning to see the world differently.

"The environmental movement has failed," because although we now have laws that protect clean air, clean water, endangered species and millions of hectares of land—we have not changed the way people think. "The failure was, in winning these battles, we didn't change the way we see the world ... We didn't get across the idea that the reason we wanted to stop logging here, or this dam, or this offshore drilling is we're a part of the biosphere and we've got to begin to behave in a way that protects the most fundamental things in our lives—air, water, soil and other species. That's the lesson of environmentalism and we failed to inculcate that in society," he said.

Now I understand as an indigenous person and an environmental activist we need to make sure we get into the wheelbarrow while there is still time. Perhaps we don't change minds perhaps we move people to want to get on board.
 
http://www.ecowatch.com/david-suzuki-wade-davis-ronald-wright-1888917337.html

It is amazing how much we can pack into a few days, experiences that become visual memories loaded by our senses. I guess that is why summer camps became so popular and why a day at a ROPES course changed lives.
My week included searching for the Outback Farm, finding it and spending time as the lone blueberry picker late one hot afternoon with the sun shining on the west side of the rows loaded, with row after row to pick and time to sample the many varieties all grown organically. 

Another day started with a first time kayak trek with Michelle Townsley, at Twin Bridges, up for a time on Spring River then down and back to the train trestle where huge logs were wedged and hung beneath forming sculptures in my imagination of sea monsters and snakes, quietly resting until the next train crossed above to rattle them to life. Michelle takes teaching to another level, in her classroom at Will Rogers, but out there in the water with a newbie like me. She and her husband David's kayaks have had some real adventures, but that day, she quietly empowered, instructing only when needed. She is finishing up a Masters degree this summer and yes, should certainly seek another one in Outdoor Adventure, she is a natural. 

Hours later it was time to stack wheat straw bales in the barn, cut that day by Jerry Powell with the square baler bought from Dan Riley, who I still consider my farm teacher, never having had the opportunity to have a teacher like Carolyn Piguet, the agriculture instructor at Vinita High School, who is their current Teacher of the Year.

I also got to visit with Joe Maxwell, former Lt. Governor of Missouri who is working on the NO effort for the right to farm state question here in Oklahoma. He spoke about Confined Animal Feeding Operations, what they are, who owns the companies and what impact they may cause the environment.

Manure and wastewater from industrial farms have the potential to contribute pollutants such as nitrogen and phosphorus, organic matter, sediments, pathogens, hormones, and antibiotics to the environment.
According to the Environment America Research & Policy Center report Tyson Foods, one of the world’s largest meat and poultry producers, dumps more toxic pollution into the nation’s waters than any other agribusiness, and produces the most animal manure of five major companies assessed nationwide: 55 million tons of manure per year -- manure that too often ends up untreated, ultimately fouling rivers, streams, and drinking water.
 
When chicken manure contaminated two sources of drinking water for Tulsa, Oklahoma, Tyson and other poultry processors agreed to pay the city $7.5 million.

By concentrating thousands of animals on factory farms, corporate agribusinesses create industrial scale pollution with disastrous consequences for waterways across the country.
 
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency agriculture is the probable cause for making more than 145,000 miles of rivers and streams across the country too polluted for swimming, fishing, drinking, or maintaining healthy wildlife. That is an amazing loss and one I had just seen for myself.

Reflecting back on those moments in the kayak on the Spring River and down by the train trestle the water surrounding us at times was stagnant with patches of algae, the water with no clarity was murky. Fish were jumping, I always had thought, they were jumping for joy! but perhaps they jump to get oxygen since the water is impaired at least in part from agribusinesses in our watershed.

The solutions to curb agribusiness pollution -- such as buffer zones, reduced concentration of livestock, and hauling waste out of endangered watersheds -- are feasible and well-known to the industry. The hope our creeks, rivers and lakes have is for these to be practiced by all.

 Since most of the meat produced in the U.S. is exported, we can also hope these countries change their diets and cut back on their meat consumption and that could help protect our waters.

The responsibility we have is to keep learning, asking questions, thinking about the right to farm and how responsibly we do it.
 
Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

https://www.epa.gov/npdes/animal-feeding-operations-afos
http://www.environmentamerica.org/news/ame/report-tyson-1-water-polluter-among-