Local Environmental Action Demanded
  • Home
  • About Us
  • Tar Creek Conferences
    • 2020 Conference >
      • 2020 Speakers and Panelists
    • 2019 Conference >
      • Poetry Slam and Cartoon Contest
    • 2018 Conference >
      • Registration
      • Science & the Arts
      • Lodging & Accommodations
    • 2017 Conference >
      • Speakers & Agenda
      • Science & the Arts
      • Lodging & Accommodations
    • 2016 Conference >
      • Speakers & Agenda
    • 2015 Conference
  • Grand Riverkeeper
  • Tar Creekkeeper
  • Scholarship
  • Partners
  • Contact Us

Good Night Garden

10/31/2019

0 Comments

 
The killing cold was due to come, with the change of the seasons. And saying Good-bye can be hard. This year, with all the rains, the LEAD Agency Community Garden got lonely, untended, too soggy to get the tidying-up we like to do before planting the crops that carry over through the winter. When a warm, dry day came, so did the mosquitoes! You may have had similar experiences in your own gardens.

But when the weather report listed night after night this week way below freezing, it was time to evaluate what to dig up, pick, let go to seed or leave for the foraging migrating birds. There are lots of memories made in a garden and ours is no different. People of all ages joined us this year, working, harvesting or just taking a meander through our mix of vegetables and forbs for the pollinators.

On the last walk assessing what next steps to take, it was amazing how much diversity we had, some of which came from the unplanned volunteer plants that made their home with us. Lamb's Quarter with the seeds not quite mature, the stems have turned a distinct reddish purple.  Some black eyed susans still were blooming, lots of marigolds had seeded themselves and the strawberries had spread to fill both beds more fully. The Egyptian-walking onions will be providing for us all winter, while the cabbages and cauliflower provide proof the garden will not sleep too deeply.

The corner June Taylor and our young Boys and Girls Clubbers planted for the butterflies produced milkweed with the pods almost ready to harvest for seeds. It was harvest time for the sweet potatoes, the last of the green beans, lots of small green tomatoes that will go in a flat box and hidden in a dark cool place so they will ripen in time for Thanksgiving.

There is time to reflect in the garden, with the cold wind and mist in the face:  about the peace there is in growing and the joy from watching people we don't even know, taking a walk through the garden, and stopping to pick some peppers, okra or a sprig of oregano, basil, parsley or sage.It also gave time to reflect on lives well lived and lives ended way too soon.

Last Friday's two different gatherings, for Kayla Billings, a child lost to domestic violence, a child who lit up the lives of the people she knew and found purpose and joy in helping the lives of small animals be better. I didn't get a chance to know her, but in her short life, many others will long mourn for her. The other lost life gathering that day was for Ray Judkins, who like Kayla brought joy to those who knew him, but had great many more years to bless us. He lost his life with Alzheimer's. He might have lost his memories, but no one who knew him lost theirs of him. His infectious smile and true sense of humanity was experienced by all who gathered for his last tailgate party.


People of all ages gave a last goodnight to these two unrelated souls on the same day.And both died tragically from the plagues of our country, our time on this earth. And like the plagues of past centuries, these two surely will pass. There will be a future without their killers, when we park our guns and each home is safe filled with happy families who work out their disputes with a workout in the garden.

And Dementia's hidden causes are discovered and prevention settles in and this disease is just another dilemma we dealt with back in the day.
But until then, we will hold each other closer, enjoy the moments of clarity and know these moments must be cherished before we say our last good nights.When my mother had a stroke, she lost her ability to read and suffered with bouts of aphasia.

So I dusted off my teaching certificate and reached back to my days teaching first graders in a non-English speaking classroom on the Southern Ute Reservation. The children there spoke Navajo, Ute, Apache and Spanish. And just like starting those children from scratch, she and I just started over, learning letters, putting them together and making words and reading the same picture books repeatedly.

One of course was "Goodnight Moon" by Clement Hurd. It was a classic, written the year my older brother was born, but one I only discovered because of the 2008 flood. When so many people lost their possessions in that flood, the researchers LEAD Agency was working with at Harvard, began a book drive, sending over 50 huge boxes of new books for us to share with community members, who may have lost all their books, or to those who just loved to read a brand new book. 

One of the boxes contained that book and another called "Owl Babies" by Martin Wadell. And those 2 books helped my mother regain her ability to read again, which had always been one of her greatest loves.Understanding the significance of reading, putting our garden to bed, saying goodbye to people who touched so many lives, we know the spring will come, though answers to the big questions may take longer.


Respectfully Submitted ~  Rebecca Jim

0 Comments

Be Brave

10/24/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
The first stop before leaving for New York City had to be where else but Susie’s to pick up a few items for the Cast and Crew of the Picher Project? If you are looking for the current headquarters for the heart of Picher, that is the place, for sure.
But the story tellers with heart were found this last Wednesday in the heart of New York City near Times Square performing for a one nighter in the famed Feinstein’s 54 Below.

Throughout the last couple of decades there have been artists of all sorts depicting the stories around Tar Creek, the chat piles, the buy-outs, the tornado and of course what was once one of our neighboring towns, Picher. Lots of these stories got a piece of it right, but honestly, we have had a complicated story to tell and lots of people give it their all. Each has been appreciated, plays, poetry, geology-based books, even a couple of movies.

But no one had ever thought to just put it all to song and write the musical, until a young man based in theater saw some visual images he had to research to even find out where they had even been taken.


He convinced two of his friends to join him on a quest to learn about the place he had discovered to be Picher, Oklahoma. Their research led them to reach out to me in a simple email. I get lots of emails just like theirs and responded much like most of the others by committing to help connect them to the land, the water and our people if they ever decided to come to visit. 

When they arrived at the Joplin airport, Kimberly Barker from the Joplin Globe both greeted them and led them to Picher, where I connected with the group.


They already knew they had to find where Hoppy Ray’s Pool hall and past time mining museum was and to walk in that space looking over to see where the Country Girl Cafe had stood. They walked to see Soupy Suman’s Miners’ Park and see the vastness of the wide-open prairie landscape stacked with mine tailings we all call chat piles. 

It would not have been predicted, but just after they had marveled at the Picher gorilla and posed for the picture that would mark the overwhelming moment for them, John Sparkman unexpectedly stopped and offered to take them all up one of the town’s chat piles in his pickup truck. 

The images one sees on that pile are the what’s not there anymore: the neighborhood roads, the driveways, the trees in rows, row after row. What I saw were the memories of the houses once filled with families based right below that mountain and across the road another mountain marred by the tornado that helped literally take the town away and take the fight out of those who had stayed put until that sign from God made the decision to leave happen for them. 

These young writers, producers and musicians put the whole history of the place to song in a powerful way that depicts the emotional trauma that was experienced by trapped people in a place they loved that did and could clearly harm them. 

I saw a phrase on every side of waste-bins on Broadway on the way to the event “DON’T BE AFRAID OF ANYONE” and wondered who inspired that? But that message was one through these decades I have had to muster through. It can be easy to be afraid. Of people, or of places, or situations. 

As the sister of a thespian who was born talking and quite frankly loves the art of it, finding chances to find my own voice early on were rare. And it you are silent it is easy to get good at being afraid and being a failure at bravery. 

Through the years there have been causes large enough to help words froth. The greater the cause, the easier it is to find courage. Whether that was Native Rights issues including preserving our culture to suicide prevention and teaching sex education and being the HIV/AIDS educator for the Miami Public Schools. These qualified and were the catalyst that worked. 

The ones that have kept me going for the last quarter century have been those around our complex toxic mess, protecting our children from it and the hope this place may be more habitable in the future for them. 

Not being a scientist has not stopped me. There are scientists, researchers, medical professionals who speak for me in venues we provide for them. The facts are simple. We can prevent childhood lead poisoning. Period. We remove the lead from their environment, inside and outside and “voila” no child is poisoned. We just haven’t got that job done yet in Ottawa County, we have much more chat to deal with and many more residential yards to replace before our kids have a real chance. 

The Picher Project gets that story right and humbly tells a piece of mine, my struggle to be brave enough to speak out for the injustice we face and the environmental justice deserved. 

Hooray to these young performers and a generous thank you for singing out bravely. I hope the world hears you. 

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim


0 Comments

My Kind of Plants

10/17/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
The last purple asters, sunflowers and goldenrod may help the monarchs as they make their way to Mexico. It is tempting to brushhog, or as the OSU professor John Weir calls it 'Recreational Mowing' taking the tops off the hope the last of the butterflies need to get on with their lives as they pass through. All my country neighbors are mowing their pastures, after having hayed their fields perhaps multiple times this year. The patches of remaining wildflowers are farther apart now that we have had that first freeze. My fields are waiting to give what we have to these visitors and to allow seed collectors to harvest some of the flowering plants: liatris, button bush, and milkweed.

The BF Goodrich plant has been how my seed collecting friend has viewed the sunset for most of her life. It sat beneath each setting sun when it was operating, when it went dormant, when it was raped by the "recycler" and now as it begins to disappear. There is less of it now since the EPA's fully hazmat suited team began hauling off the asbestos loaded rubble just days after school was out for the summer. If I could have my druthers, out my window I would prefer plants, purple asters and blazing stars, not the plant she has faced all these decades.

There may be less to see, but the carbon black residue and the fear of what lies beneath will remain for her and her down the street neighbors.

She became the first person in all these years of writing columns to request a topic, so I immediately agreed. Why wouldn't I write about tires for her? Not what treads to get for the upcoming winter driving, but why not to practice one of my tried and true beliefs: recycling and re-using.

I had known for awhile if you need a carcinogen to make tires, why wouldn't that substance be part of what begins to be emitted where the tire comes to reside after its life-cycle of use on the highways ends? We know as the tire is used it leaves tiny bits of it as dust along our roadways and bigger pieces you would have had to dodge behind a big rig. Knowing what tires are made from, surely industry has had a hand in making sure they have not been labeled hazardous waste, with EPA classifying tires as simply as municipal waste, leaving the burden of getting rid of tires up to the consumers and the cities they live in or near.

When LEAD Agency decided to start a Community Garden, we wanted to create one using our style of reusing and re-purposing materials, growing and saving our seeds for next season. 5 years ago we wanted to discourage the use of tires in the garden, especially when growing... what else? edible vegetables. Why? we didn't want to chance the chemicals in the tire getting into the soil and later into the very vegetables we were encouraging people to consume promoting healthy lifestyle.

We planned to use the garden as a classroom and to use one old tire with multiple layers of paint, sealing the tire, and use bright red swath across it indicating NO, DO NOT USE TIRES IN THE GARDEN. We later decided passersby might not understand our subtle message, they might just see was LEAD Agency USING a tire in the garden. So the tire stayed in the storage shed, and waited until the next tribal tire collection day.

There is even more known now about the use of tires in vegetable gardens and generally, the environmental and health risk is still there.

Another growing concern over reusing tire material on synthetic turf fields beginning in the 1990's deemed safe by their producers. There are 12,000-13,000 synthetic turf fields in the U.S., with an estimated 1,200–1,500 new installations each year, tire crumb rubber is the infill material.

Was anyone concerned? Enough concern the Children’s Environmental Health Center of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai urges a moratorium on the use of artificial turf generated from recycled rubber tires. Grinding them into very small crumb pellets that are used on athletic fields, or as mulch, put on playgrounds furthers risk of exposure by what they called increasing the surface area and the likelihood of accidental ingestion. EPA put out information this summer on this issue and using lots of numbers and grafts showed yes they were finding metals, Semi-Volatile Organic Chemicals SVOCs, Volatile Organic Chemicals in artificial turf fields with the SVOCs from indoor fields 1.5 to 10 times higher than outdoor fields!

That residue my friend worries about carbon black, a material made from petroleum which she believes arrived from the plant by wind to her property and into her home. Also found in the crumb rubber in turf it can become small enough to be suspended in air above the field and be inhaled.

To sum this up modern tires are made of natural and synthetic rubber, carbon black, metals, including cadmium, lead (which is neurotoxic) zinc, and chemicals known to be carcinogens. My latest concern came from reading all of these ingredients can be absorbed on the carbon black in the tires, and not what neither my friend or I wanted to learn.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim


0 Comments

Jerry Hill

10/10/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
You might never have had the chance to meet Jerry Hill. He went to Miami High School and would have graduated with his class, but lacked a few credits and had to come back for a semester to finish them. But he didn't finish.
People who knew him all have distinct memories, times they will never forget. Like when the Native students attended a workshop, got matching t-shirts, and moments later, he had ripped the sleeves off and "thrashed" his to demonstrate his style.

He was one of our fancy dancers on the Indian Dance Team and enjoyed dancing, but may have enjoyed being admired by the girls even more.

Before his Senior Prom, he agreed to wear a tuxedo everyday to school for a week as a promotion to  get one to wear for no cost to the Prom because money was an issue in his life.

When he and his mother moved to Miami, they lived out near Dotyville in one of the units that had once been a motel. They didn't have a car, so if he missed the bus, or wanted to get around he would have to walk to town. Later they were able to move to tribal housing just past the turnpike.

After weeks of trying, I convinced him to come home with me by listing all the things he could do there: ride a bike, run, practice tennis, or archery, take a hike. He asked me: What do you have a RESORT OR SOMETHING?  No, I just lived in the country with dirt roads and no traffic. So biking or hiking was much safer than walking was for him out on the highway where he lived. We had a big bale of hay my dad had brought so my son could practice archery. We had a wall of the house he used to hit tennis balls.

Sometimes it is easy to take for granted what we have when someone else has so little.  A friend recently spent some time in the house my parents had lived, a quarter mile from mine. He found an old bike of my son's to ride, took the Gator out for a spin on the mowed trails through the pastures, fed the barn cats and dealt with the raccoon that was living in the attic. When he heated up the house, all the hibernating red wasps began to appear to check out the reason for the sudden change in temperature and he discovered books waiting to be read all over the house. He enjoyed solitude but wound up a few antique clocks just to stop the sound of silence.

Where I live is special to me. The mowed trails are perfect for mountain biking and the dirt roads lead to all parts of our county. The wildflowers still blooming are providing the last monarchs a boost to get them on to Mexico and the seeds are sought out by others to grow even more of those pollinator plants. The tall grasses have recently been dug up to be used as background for studies comparing plants growing in contaminated soils at Tar Creek with the same type plants grown in clean native soils.

My land has been in use by our family since the 1880's. Here in Craig County the Toxics Release Inventory indicates the whole county has zero toxic emissions. So I can breathe the air and not worry about styrene, lead and cadmium, ammonia or hydrogen sulfide or benzene pooling in a perched aquifer beneath the ground. I don't worry about the ground caving in beneath me as I drive a tractor as heavy as some machinery operating on the Tar Creek Superfund site, with operators at risk for collapse each work day. As my son says, "People work all their lives to retire to a place like this."

I don't live in a fancy house, but one my dad and I built over two summers while working for Miami Schools as an Indian Counselor, where I got to know Jerry and so many other students. I came home to a safe and healthy place and got up the next morning and continue waking up and going to a place I want to become better, safer and healthier and a place with more hope for young people who sometimes lose hope.

For some, the network isn't there, or they don't see it wrapped around them, with the care and support we all thought adequate, until we find we were wrong.

When Tisha Blakely told Jerry she lived on Morgan's Hill he immediately  said he liked that and was going to have a Jerry's Hill. He never got to live in a "resort" or his own hill and for reasons we shall never know or understand, took his life before Indigenous People's Day became a thing. He never got to understand how his culture could become a protective shield. But it can and will be for ones who follow.

Then future celebration days can be: when the last of the asbestos is hauled away from BF Goodrich, when the last chat pile is gone and when Tar Creek runs clean. And hopefully sooner, when suicide is no longer needed as an option for anyone.

Respectfully Reflecting  ~  Rebecca Jim
 


Picture
0 Comments

Seven Generations

10/3/2019

0 Comments

 

                                              Suddenly All my Ancestors are behind me. "Be Still" they say.         
                                          
"Watch and Listen. You are the Result of the Love of Thousands."
 
The constancy of knowing there will be seven generations to plan for might also be called a Golden Rule to live by, used by Native people since the stories began. To deliberate the important matters and make decisions that will protect or ensure the seven generations in the future will not be negatively impacted by decisions made in the present. The long look, the plan that gave hope to those yet to be born that their ancestors knew they were coming and planned for them.

The world has not for the most part been operating with the future in mind since the frenzy of extraction of coal, oil and gas, which actually are the accumulation of past energy, the product of photosynthesis, of condensed geological remains of once-living organisms millions of years in the past, of the concentrated essence of life on earth once lived. We have been burning up what Lewis Mumford called humanity's bequest.

As early as 1847 George Perkins Marsh was speaking about what would later be termed the greenhouse effect. In 1864, during our own Civil War he wrote the Earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant and could result in the extinction of the species. Resource management should take the needs of future generations into account, and he warned, "the world cannot afford to wait till the slow and sure progress of exact science has taught it a better economy."

Scientists a century later in 1957 explained using these fuels had become a large-scale geophysical experiment where we have returned to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years. We did this. What is happening now is the result of what has been burned in that last 200 years. Historian Andreas Malm asked, "When the awesome power of coal and petroleum was unlocked, who could have predicted that by burning up the past, we would imperil everything to come?" If we  wait some time longer and then demolish the fossil economy in one giant blow, it would still cast a shadow far into the future: emissions slashed to zero, the sea might continue to rise for many hundreds of years.”
 
Clearly decisions have not been made with the seven generations in mind, in fact if we could number the generations back, all seven generations before us have been involved somehow in the world we all have inherited. It comes now to us, each of us to begin to do the things we can to save what we can of the world those future ones will be born upon.
 
Our youngest generation now old enough to be speaking out, are. “Young people are starting to understand your betrayal,” Greta Thunberg said. “The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: we will never forgive you.”

They are only speaking now, but as they and those who follow them begin to realize what is happening on this earth, our only home, they will be YELLING at us. They have every reason to despair as well and to give up. But the resolute abundance of collective good lies within them and if you have ever had a new phone and didn't know how to do something on it, these are the ones you turn to, they know instinctively how to fix and figure out how to do the whats needing done. We need them to clean up our mess and we need to encourage them with that effort. To pick it up and do it for ... the seven generations yet to come.

We must ask ourselves: Are we violating the rights of those yet unborn? What are our ethical responsibilities? Are we seeking the best for the seventh generation? What kind of ancestor do you want to be?

Will we be the bad ancestors? Or can we ourselves begin doing what we can to change our role in the history of the planet?  I think we can suddenly remember that we are the result of the love of thousands and we will respond.
 
Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

0 Comments

Don't Retire

10/1/2019

0 Comments

 
I retired by using the old system known as “80 and out.”

That was the magic number teachers could use to allow for a full retirement with benefits from the state. It was determined by adding age and years employed in education.

As an Indian Counselor for the Miami School District, with a position I loved that never felt was work, retiring was a topic of discussion but not one of great interest to me. But the same year the Twin Towers came down, an incident at the high school occurred that changed my thinking. My office was set in the hallway with thick opaque glass open-less windows covered with burgundy calico curtains to protect the identity of the students who might be in counseling.

One day during passing period, there was a crash, breaking that what had been thought to be unbreakable making a sound like a powerful gunshot, showering the student with the curtain that served to protect the student from direct exposure to the glass shards as I hit the carpet. There had been school shootings even back in those days, but that is what it must feel like to those who suddenly taste fear in an actual deadly event. I got up opening the door to discover a student had merely been slammed into the window during the rush to classes. No guns, no mass shooting, thankfully. But it was the moment that changed my thinking and adding age and years of service added up equaled 80 and later that spring, my resignation went in and I went out. 80 and out is long gone now and the magic shifted to 90 and out making retirement a longer reward for years of service. 
 
The shift I made was to focus more directly on what citizens might do to advocate for a cleaner and healthier environment and this too has never felt like work either. We have numerous issues that need addressing both locally for sure but also on the wider-world we all hope to protect.

In a community with a neighborhood full of good people who sleep deeply, while lying beneath them is a perched aquifer as Oklahoma’s Department of Environmental Quality defines it of benzene, a legacy chemical used in the building of the tires and for the cleanup of the workers each day for decades, at the renown BF Goodrich Tire manufacturing plant nearby. Tires made there made Miami thrive, paychecks were spent downtown and money made family life the iconic one seen on TV during those days.

Tires were the symbol of the economy here. While in Commerce, OK our neighbor, tires were stacked in the late 90’s over one hundred thousand of them sat scattered on a property catty-cornered from what the locals called the Green Hole and the Red Hole, both sink holes located near the Commerce High School. A fire started among the tires and the owner had trouble putting it out. He was receiving fines daily for not removing the tires. Through a phone call with the DEQ he got permission to put all of them into the Green Hole and that’s what he did. But they wouldn’t sink right away, but eventually did.

What we know about tires is they are about 19 percent natural rubber and 24 percent synthetic rubber, which is a plastic polymer, with the rest made from metal and other compounds. Modern car tires require about 7 gallons of oil to be made and truck tires can take up to 22 gallons of oil.

Tires wear out, like the 100,000 tires showcased earlier. As you drive, rubber wears, and tiny bits of the tire are ending up in oceans. “Tires,” says Joao Sousa, who studies marine plastics at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, “rank really high in terms of contribution” to the microplastics problem. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, estimated that tires account for as much as 10 percent of overall microplastic waste in the world’s oceans. A 2017 report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature put that number at 28 percent.

Research has found that passenger light truck tires lost nearly 2.5 pounds of rubber during the average life of 6.33 years. I’ve driven these type trucks for years and contributed my share to these numbers.  

Another study found Americans produce the most tire wear per capita and estimates that, overall, tires in the U.S. alone produce about 1.8 million tons of microplastics each year. Tires are actually among the most common plastic polluters on earth.

Once these particles are in water, marine life eats them, and end up for example in shrimp guts. And we eat the shrimp. Keeping the cycle of reuse going.

All this information puzzled me because so many people I know want to do the right thing and recycle everything, and give it another life. But each time whether it is tires in the playground, or tires cut apart to be swings, all will continue to deteriorate and slough off more microplastics into our environment and after big rains like last night, won’t more of them make their way to the oceans?

All that to say – I won’t be reusing tires; they will earn the right to retire.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/09/20/how-to-recycle-plastic
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/09/tires-unseen-plastic-polluter/

0 Comments

    Rebecca Jim

    Rebecca is the Executive Director of LEAD Agency and one of its founding members. She also serves as the Tar Creekkeeper with the Waterkeeper Alliance.

    Archives

    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015

    RSS Feed

    Categories

    All
    Built Environments
    Children
    Gardening
    Other Endangered Waters
    Tar Creek Conference
    Toxic Tour
    Yard Remediation

Local Environmental Action Demanded Agency, Inc.
Miami Office:                                Vinita Office:
223 A Street SE                             19289 South 4403 Drive
Miami, Oklahoma 74354             Vinita, Oklahoma 74301
(918) 542-9399
Follow us on Facebook