When I retired my goal was to return the pastures on my land to native grasses and wild flowers and harvest those seeds and sell them as my retire-ability. Life happens after you retire with tractors in and out of service, brushhogging stalled because of weather for weeks on end and my spot on the big controlled burn list further delayed, not forgetting the years we experienced burn bans. All this to say some of my pastures now look as my dad used to say, "like a widow-woman lived there."

The panic attack came after driving through the fields and finding plants I had never seen before. I pulled some out of the ground and headed to the Oklahoma State University Extension Office in the Craig County Courthouse to inquire what on earth had invaded my land. The stuff was not easy to pull up. It was long, some 3 feet long, but though tough, it had a wonderfully velvety feel. The official at the Extension Office knew what it was, and what I heard was PANIC-something. Panicking was what I was feeling when I walked in there and certainly even more so when leaving.

Walter White, the Ag Agent for Craig County explained it was a type of panicum, one of 450 varieties of the invasive species. He said I might have several types of it in a single field. Invasive species are commonly referred to as nonnative, alien, and exotic species new to an ecosystem and likely to cause economic or environmental  damage according to the National Parks Service. 

What I learned didn't help me feel any better. According to the USDA Panicum flowering occurs nearly year round and the fruits are small about 0.07 in. (1.8 mm). An article in the Smithsonian noted that since the beginning of the 20th century, the growing season in many areas of the lower 48 states has expanded by about two weeks. Frosts end earlier in the spring and begin later in the fall which helps invasive plants "annex" American soil because they are highly flexible and respond to unusual environments, being generalists and highly adaptable, taking advantage of change and disturbance.

One of the changes they take advantage of is change in the climate. Climate change refers to a significant long-term shift in weather variables and includes not only shifts in mean conditions (e.g., increasing mean annual temperature and sea level) but also changes in climate variability (e.g., more intense storms and flooding).

There are a lot of people who do not believe in climate change, but they must not be living in the country and seeing what I am seeing. My piney wood forest is dying. After planting over 50 and seeing them all reach the sky, they are being killed by the pine bark beetle, the same one that is killing the pines in the Black Hills, the Rocky Mountains and the forests throughout Canada, leaving dead wood to feed forest fires.

Walk across the yard, through the field and experience the gouging and great holes the armadillos are digging. I first saw one when a little girl outside Brownsville, Texas near the Mexican border, and now they are well established in northeast Oklahoma and beyond. Consider the honeysuckle invasion I discovered when looking for the old magical tree in the gully and finding it was like walking through unfinished baskets, the vines so entwined near it and the vines weighting down and changing the shape of young trees nearby.

 My grandmother came to visit us when we lived in west Texas and saw we had a trumpet vine growing to produce shade on the porch and immediately said, "Get the ax." Remembering those words, I have been watchful all these years when first seeing trumpet vines on fence rows in the county. Just 2 weeks ago, I discovered the first blooms on the back fence and am going back with the chain saw, forget the ax!

There are also predictions of more ticks and more toxic poison ivy being made by the National Wildlife Federation due to the changes in temperatures. We are living in a climate of denial to not accept there is something big happening around us. This is also a topic we will all learn more about at the 19th National Environmental Conference at Tar Creek September 26 and 27 at NEO College.

According to NASA, scientists think we can do things to stop the climate from changing as much by using less energy and water and by planting trees. Another way to help is by learning about Earth. The more you know about Earth, the more you can help solve climate problems. 

To deal with this piece of climate change on my land, we are going to isolate and burn the patches of panicum in the early spring and hope the native grasses will get ahead of it. Until then, I am going to brushhog a bit of it, then park the tractor and clean off every one of the tiny seeds and burn them before going back out to the pasture to do more. Yep. I am working through my panic attack.   

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim              

Last Saturday was not Rita Frayser's birthday, but it was her birthday party and my son and I drove to Edmond, OK to attend. But in a perfect world, as it seemed that day, we stopped for ice cream first and to meet up with Waleah, Sarah, who is her 3 year old daughter and her mother, who was my dear friend John Sixkiller's  sister.  Waleah and my son have known each other since they were near Sarah's age, a most remarkable age, when personality and language truly introduce us to the children in our lives.

We must have visited for over an hour before a serious look came over Sarah's little face and the word, "earthquake" was spoken. It had been only a few days since Edmond had experienced a set of earthquakes and she was clearly beyond concerned, she was shaken, so much so Waleah had been searching for ways to explain what had occurred to her child to help reduce the fear though  understanding. The next words this child spoke were "tectonic plates" with her tiny hands out in front of her moving to indicate the movement beneath the surface of the earth.

No matter how we tried to distract and change the subject, the face would become serious, the eyebrows crunched and the single word earthquake would be spoken again. That face and that word, I wanted the representatives from the Oklahoma Corporation Commission and the Oklahoma Geological Service to hear and see when they come to the 19th National Environmental Conference at Tar Creek on September 27.

The earth's tectonic plate theory gets some help in Oklahoma from the oil and gas industry and their activities of fracking and the injection of waste water back into the earth under extreme pressure which we know are the cause of the earthquakes here in Oklahoma. The official term,  inducted seismicity refers to the relative frequency and distribution of earthquakes.  They are man-made and done because it is profitable to the oil and gas industry. The 11,365 wells have pumped 8.6 trillion gallons of waste water into the ground in Oklahoma. They are injecting waste water every day, not just our waste, but we have been accepting waste water from as far away as South Dakota for years to pump and dump here in our state.

We Did This.

But we are shaking the trust of our children and robbing them of solid ground, something we all have taken for "granite" until now. It was hard to leave that child fixated on earthquakes, but we did have a party to attend, and she had an extravagant pizza to experience. Oklahoma’s recorded seismic history dates back to 1882.  The number of earthquakes felt in Oklahoma over the last five years is unusual as compared to historical seismicity trends in the state of 2 per year.

 In less than ten years Oklahoma has had more than 20,000 earthquakes. In Sarah's 3 year lifetime she has experienced over 3500 earthquakes 2.7 or greater. No wonder she says, "earthquakes" so seriously.

Rita's party with family was simple and gave us time to have a good visit before we got onto I44 to head back to Vinita. We drove through Tulsa about 1 a.m., only 18 minutes before a tornado hit, we proceeded on, stopped at Claremore where a store clerk showed me the weather on his phone and warned more was coming.

We kept driving and the winds and rain pounded us. We learned about the damages the "August" tornadoes had caused a few hours later. These tornadoes were too close. Craig County Emergency Management offered the Individual Safe Room Program and my application was accepted and in 30 days I will be on my way to having one installed on my property.

The extreme weather changes we are experiencing around the globe are linked to the changes we have made to our atmosphere, predominantly from the use of fossil fuels.

Some may still deny it, but I stand with the science, we did this. we have to hope we can also un-do it, and allow us to change. Johnson Bridgewater, Oklahoma Sierra Club will speak at our conference about the gifts we have, clean energies given freely to us all, the wind and the sun, when harnessed and put to use can power our needs and protect our future and help Sarah forget that word that haunts her.
Earthquake. 

Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim
 
tps://www.usgs.gov/news/new-usgs-maps-identify-potential-ground-shaking-hazards-2017
https://earthquakes.ok.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/7-29-17EQ-count.pdf
http://earthquakes.ok.gov/what-we-know/earthquake-map/

Last Friday afternoon Martin Lively went with me to pick vegetables from Ed Keheley's garden. LEAD Agency's community garden had not yet started to "put on," so he thought some of his produce could fill the gap with some of the community members living near our office. We must have picked for hours, filling paper bags with tomatoes, peppers and POTATOES! It was nearly dark when we returned, so some produce was put right out by our Little Free Library, while other bunches were delivered to the doors of our nearest neighbors.

There is a lot of poverty, and lots of people don't have a lot of extra money to buy fresh vegetables. But we can grow some ourselves. And that is our hope. The children who have helped the LEAD garden for four years have learned as a gardener planting a seed seems like magic when just a while later they were actually eating their own vegetables.
Farmers grow vegetables on a large scale and serve as our collective gardeners.

Farmer Dan Riley sold me his tractor, a big John Deere, one you have to climb steps to get to the cab. This year he borrowed it back so he could plant some soybeans. Then he bemoaned the lack of rain and how devastated he would be if they got no rain and didn't come up. The rain did come but too much coming could still wash away that relief.

Farmers in India have been really devastated with nearly 60,000 committing suicide in the last 30 years. Suicide is known as a stark indicator of human hardship. According to new research an increase of just 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit on an average day during the Indian growing season was associated with 67 suicides. An increase of 9 degrees on any one day was associated with an additional 335 deaths, according to the study in the PNAS journal.

Temperature increases outside the growing season in India showed no significant impact on suicide rates, suggesting stress on the agriculture industry was the source of the increase in suicides.
Climate is affecting lots of others.

Savannah, Georgia Riverkeeper Tonya Bonitatibus knows how to talk Climate Change since she is witnessing it every day. Trees are dying on her river, they are dying in a big way.  In what are called "ghost forests" — dead trees along vast swaths of coastline have been invaded by rising seas, something scientists call one of the most visible markers of climate change.

The process has happened naturally for thousands of years, but it has accelerated in recent decades as polar ice melts and raises sea levels, scientists say, pushing salt water farther inland and killing trees in what used to be thriving freshwater plains.

Seas off the East Coast have risen by 1.3 feet over the last 100 years, said Ben Horton, a Rutgers University professor and expert on sea level rise. That is a faster pace than for the past 2,000 years combined, he said. "There is a lot of change going on," Gregory Noe, USGS  said.

The ghost forests are particularly apparent in North America, with hundreds of thousands of acres of salt-killed trees stretching from Canada down the East Coast, around Florida and over to Texas.

Some of the most dramatic anecdotal evidence of the acceleration in ghost forest creation is along the Savannah River between Georgia and South Carolina on Tonya's river.

Other parts of the U.S. and the world are experiencing droughts.  Droughts are often thought of as creeping, slow-motion disaster. They represent the costliest weather-related catastrophe worldwide.

When considering the relationship of drought to climate change, it is important to make the distinction between weather and climate. Weather is a description of atmospheric conditions over a short period of time, while climate is how the atmosphere behaves over relatively long periods of time.

Individual drought periods can be understood as discrete weather events. Climate changes occur over longer periods and can be observed as changes in the patterns of weather events. For instance, as temperatures have warmed over the past century, the prevalence and duration of drought has increased in the American West.

But this drought is an anomaly, a flash drought. It essentially came from nowhere. It didn’t exist just three months ago and now it is on target to devastate half the high plains wheat harvest, the breadbasket of the world.
The frequency of these rapid-onset droughts are closely linked to climate change is expected to increase as the planet warms.

Climate is changing there is no longer any denying it. Tonya Bonitatibus, the Savannah Riverkeeper will be speaking at the 19th National Environmental Conference at Tar Creek and you'll want to hear about her "Ghost Forests."
We need to be supportive of our family farmers as they deal and adjust to what it will take to feed the world.

Check out the local Farmers Markets and thank those farmers for providing local access to us yet-to-be farmers. And in the meantime, plant a seed and appreciate the chance they take. Experience the human emotions growing your own brings. And be grateful like we were for a gardener who shares "crops" with you.

Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

The Tar Creekkeeper recognition with the Waterkeeper Alliance has a membership requirement for a water body to have a boat. Resisting because I don’t think anybody should be in Tar Creek yet, or if they are in it, certainly not look like it is for fun. I thought about getting a remote control motor boat a with a message on it that said NOT YET or something like it and simply operate it from the shore.

But that didn’t meet the Quality Standards of the Waterkeeper Alliance the largest water advocacy group in the world, with Bay Keepers, Ocean Keepers, and certainly Riverkeepers, like LEAD Agency’s own Grand Riverkeeper, Earl Hatley, who has a boat Tony Booth donated which dons the Cherokee name Ga-Du-Gi  which means “Working Together.” We later learned from Cherokee Richard Allen that the same word can also mean “Get out of the Water.” Which made it a perfect name for the boat I ended up getting, a turquoise and green kayak with a swath of orange across it.

The kayak recommendation came from Ed Fite, the man who is known by all as the protector of the Illinois. He is the Vice-President for Scenic River and Water Quality for the Grand River Dam Authority and has offered to come on the maiden voyage of Tar Creek with the Ga-Du-Gi.

 My son went with me to pick up the Tupelo kayak at the Edmondson clearing, only to find 100 kayakers leaving for a 9 mile trip on the Illinois River. It was a hot day and water, as we know can certainly ease the heat and no better way to get to know the Ga-Du-Gi and how she floats than to do it on the Illinois, one of Oklahoma's scenic rivers.

Doing so drove home all the more, the need to get Tar Creek up and running clean. What an untapped treasure to have a naturally flowing creek so accessible by the people living close by it.

Untapped treasure was a term I read this week about the iron, copper and rare earth minerals that are said to abound in a country the US has been involved in since 2001, Afghanistan. Those metals  pose to tempt the US to stay. As a place that became a "Klondike" in Oklahoma, we know some of what could go wrong, terribly wrong with their future environmental degradation in that country if companies like the ones who extracted the ore in the Picher Field or throughout the Tri-State Mining District are lured by the proposed riches.

"What could go wrong?" Just think back to Commerce, Oklahoma and former President Truman, who in his early years had  experiences with the Eureka Mine, he believed he owned only to find out when he went to sell it that the new buyer already owned it!

Ed Keheley took me to see the collapsed ruins of that mine where Truman failed, but earnestly tried to protect the site, to the point of getting a cot and sleeping there when the night watchman requested a unacceptable raise.

I took only one photo, to show my son. While a student at NEO he got on track to later receive a Truman Scholarship for graduate school. That one photo does not do justice to the waste land surrounding that mine, chat crunches beneath your feet and the biggest blackberries  grow firmly in it.

Our mine sites gained fame and made riches off the massive amount of lead and zinc that were extracted here. But they made a great deal from the cadmium, too. Lying alongside these metals were what are known as rare earth metals like geranium and others needed for the tech industry products used by computers and cell phones. We still have a treasure in the chat that remains and is primarily now being sold for road construction and asphalt.

It is interesting to note when considering the Truman connections of the first strategy meeting held during World War II of the three ally leaders, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and  Joseph Stalin called the Tehran Conference had the codename, "Eureka" was held in Iran. These world leaders sought to win the war against Hitler, but were also very aware that, "To the victor belong the spoils" a phrase our current president has stated when considering next steps for the US in Afghanistan.

If mining occurs there, their country may have the next Tar Creek because the mining methods remain the same, Eureka! They find it and then They leave.

Respectfully Submitted - Rebecca Jim