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

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
 

                                              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

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/