Well, actually it was fifty years ago and a few days that the Beatles started working on the Sgt. Peppers's Lonely Hearts Club Band album. But it was twenty years ago the papers were filed to incorporate Local Environmental Action Demanded, LEAD Agency, for short.
 
Getting ready for the anniversary party and flooded by a wave of memories generated when flipping through computer images and actual 3x5's in the LEAD Agency archives, memories of environmental issues, challenging people who got involved, spoke up and some who "got up and doing" which is also a line in my mother's favorite poem A Psalm of Life by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Faces we knew from the beginning 20 years ago, some no longer with us. All who somehow became part of the archive we claim as our organization's heritage.
 
Not every memory is attached to a photo, but faces appear in my mind when unfolding letters with our first stationary designs and actual "buttons" Carolyn Gilstrap created. Back in the day we might have seemed like a Lonely Hearts Club Band, sitting around the libraries and imaging how organizing would solve everything.
 
Back then the Ottawa County Community Partnership was a partner and when they ceased their gift to LEAD were the prints they had Nick Calcagno make as a fundraiser for them. We still have the Central Mill prints from that gift to continue helping us serve this community, much as he had desired, often with Carol's help.
 
Early on John Micka shared theories, an experiment and a much used Contact paper covered Ken Luza map that continue helping us teach Tar Creek 101. He and his wife Lorene were some of our first LEAD members. Their help has continued through their daughter Jill still yet.
 
George Mayer inspired us to officially organize a citizens' group with his pleas to agencies to get his acid mine water destroyed property cleaned up and one of the biggest reasons Agency is our last name. Just lately I discovered a treasure in a used envelop in my office, left by John Mott, a Picher resident, but also a friend to us and to George Mayer, the photo was of the white Arabian horse with the orange stains, the story that inspired the passive water treatment happening on his property in Commerce.
 
Early on we did cleanups on Tar Creek, with actual heavy metal objects pulled out like a car fender and a BATTERY, but then we were covered with heavy metals on our clothes and boots, leaving us the carriers of toxic waste, which would defy our slogan to not "spread the lead." Surely you can see these issues in our LOGO designed by Image's Sheila Hestand of the land, the water the piles all in shades of rust and ruin. The plan is to change the colors as the water, the land and the piles of waste are gone and better.
 
There were questions like are the fish safe to eat? In 2007 DEQ issued fish consumption guide for lead for local residents, more stringent than those for visitors, since we get lead from our exposure to local dust. We wanted to know about the additional burden of mercury in fish, since it is also a neuro-toxin like lead. We partnered with OU and Harvard and figured out our guidelines and we are glad to keep sharing this with any local fish eater still needing to know.
 
Another question we kept hearing was: are there more cancers, more diabetes, more autoimmune issues here than we ought to be having? So with an EPA Environmental Justice grant and LOTS of nursing students from NEO, Tulsa University, ORU and our locals we conducted a survey with 562 households in NE Ottawa County and interviewed every person in them, allowing us to know the answer was YES we are sicker. The question now is, isn't it time to do it again? We think it is.
 
We asked are the metals in the mine waste affecting our children? The Harvard School of Public Health researchers were funded for a decade looking at the multiple metals our children were born with and how they affect them, and are still publishing journal articles from what they are learning. Yes, our metals are affecting some of our children more than others.
 
There are several more big questions we want answers, but we might not know the questions you want asked, they may be the next line in the song full of answers we all need to know.
 
Sorting through those images, are all those Tar Creek Conferences, our annual scholarship winners, the artists, so many artists and their art, some on our office walls, with more coming every year. Their art, their voices of outrage and hope speak out long after they have graduated and started families of their own, when we hope they remember how to prevent lead poisoning in a superfund site.
 
Then we get to why we have a community garden, rain barrels and the Little Free Library. All generate hope and empower us. But all this somehow could fit in a song, that anthem, the jingle.
 
We do need a song, one we can all sing along, something catchy like...
"Twenty years ago today...."
 
Respectfully Reflecting ~ Rebecca Jim
 

Almost a year ago I headed up to North Dakota to Standing Rock to be part of a movement to peacefully protest yet another pipeline, one close to the Missouri River, the drinking water source for millions downstream.

The weather turned as we got closer to the Reservation and the use of snowplows ceased as we crossed the tribal boundaries. It was night and the numbers of cars that had slid off the roadway on both sides of the road increased. Snow continued to fall, the road slicker as my son and I proceeded on gripping the steering wheel tighter, as if that would keep us more firmly planted in the tracks of the car we followed.

We stayed and got into the rhythm of the largest encampment of people on that site since 1876. Mornings were cold, nights colder. The flow of people entering the camp never stopped while we were there. We went to training, we signed up for media privileges, attended press briefings and were in the training for direct action when the word came that President Obama would not approve the Dakota Access Pipeline. Horns began to honk, joy was spreading in our direct action training on how to assist another when chemicals are sprayed in the face. The Veterans had arrived that day.

Fireworks began to light up the sky and we decided to head home before the blizzard arrived a few hours later.

The new administration's leader approved the Pipeline and work began and was completed a few months later with fracked Bakkan shale oil passing through it, on its way to Oklahoma. We are connected and in that connection not only by oil but by water. We cannot drink  oil, and oil may certainly make the water it comes in contact with undrinkable. We are also connected to that oil and all the oil flowing cheaply through Oklahoma, the same oil making the industry the wealthiest in the history of the world, we fail to tax, as our state falls closer and closer to becoming a failed state, no longer able to serve the basic needs of our citizens.

The Keystone Pipeline, the XL's sister pipeline leaked this week. Not a few drops, but over 210,000 gallons in a field in South Dakota. We knew it would leak, all pipelines leak, it is just a matter of time.

The race to build these pipelines serves an urgency for an industry that is ultimately in the last days of its glory. Times are changing and with it technologies that will fuel our needs in cleaner greener ways are being developed, producing jobs not earthquakes all while improving our economy.

Mistakes can be made in this rush with the consequence ruined land and worse yet, ruined and tainted water. That whole movement the country was part of last year was around the inevitable truth that Water is Life.

Here in Oklahoma where we thought Oil is Life, we are waiting for our legislature to vote for the people and demand our corporate fuel producers  pay their fair share, as they do in every other state they have producing wells. They have had a free and easy ride for several years, all as our state cuts programs that serve our citizens. It must be a lonely and frustrating time for the likes of Ben Loring, waiting for his colleagues to begin to do right. 

LEAD Agency has been doing our best to do right for the last 20 years in our efforts to speak up for the environment and her people. Our organization started with a small group of people trying to figure out the language, the jargon in EPA files on the Tar Creek Superfund site, our watershed issues, how to lower lead levels in children and how to find ways to give the communities affected by these issues chances to learn more about them. We have sponsored the annual Tar Creek Conference with our 20th coming up next September at NEO College.

We have worked with schools and children through those years to empower them giving them voice through art and writing. We have advocated for Tar Creek and the Grand Lake and established our Tar Creekkeeper and Grand Riverkeeper Programs with the Waterkeeper Alliance and teamed up with our county health department and linked up with Harvard, Oklahoma University and other colleges in the state and beyond to examine the questions we all have had: are our fish safe to eat? how do our heavy metals affect our children and their future?

Our Community Garden is planted by children  and our Little Free Library keeps our neighbors in books. We encouraged not only recycling but also reusing and reducing use and waste. We have encouraged residents to find out if their yards are loaded with lead and if they are to give permission to have them cleaned up for keeps for free.

All this to say we want to invite you to our 20th Anniversary Party November 30 from 4 to 7 at our office, 223 A. St. SE. Come by and say hello, give us your best wish for the future and your hopes like ours for the future we can believe in.

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim

We dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and 3 days later on Nagasaki 72 years ago last August. The exact numbers killed immediately are estimated to be 225,000 combined, approximately half the population of Tulsa, fried to toast or gone leaving only the shadow on surfaces that survived. Some lived through the blast with their skins burnt and shredding as they struggled to walk to water for some kind of relief.  Deaths continued. But some survived.
 
Hibakusha is the Japanese word for survivors and this week two came to Tulsa to give their testimonies with the organization ICAN the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize recipient. The two Atomic bomb survivors came to share their eye witness accounts of the bombings in order to empower us with tools to build a world free of nuclear weapons.
 
As Yasuaki began speaking, my cell phone rang! And kept ringing. I was one of those people who failed to silence mine and regretted it like crazy. But Yasuaki never stopped telling the story of the 6 year old boy he had been the day the bomb fell on Nagasaki. His family lived near the mountain and the mountain protected them from the blast, but they had no food, so they went to search for it and saw the devastation and the suffering of people walking like ghosts and saw people go into the blast zone desperately looking for relatives and not knowing about the radiation they were exposed to.

When he was older he worked in the Atomic Bomb hospital with patients who suffered terribly. Yasuaki believed he would die in these horrible ways, it would be just a matter of time. All survivors suffered another way, too. People saw them as contagious and discriminated against them. No one would marry the women, there were many suicides of both men and women. He decided to hide his identity and go to Mexico, learned Spanish and began speaking about his experiences. Mexico became the first country to be a Nuclear Free Zone. He has continued to speak out for a peaceful world. He asked all of us to understand the Hibakusha are getting older and the stories must continue to be told after they are no longer able.

He asked us to be that tiny stone in the water, use our voice, then 2 people’s voices are stronger. He asked for us to please help. He was drained when he sat next to Shigeko Sasamori who was a 13 year old school girl in Hiroshima when she and her friend looked up into the brilliant blue sky when they heard the plane overhead and saw something white falling from it and then she was blown down by a force that knocked her unconscious. She was flattened, deaf and unable to see when she regained consciousness. She was bleeding and naked. Her friend gone forever. But she began walking feeling her way with others all walking toward the rivers for relief, but the riverbanks were full of people dead and suffering. She ended up in an auditorium weak but asking for water and saying her name and where she lived over and over, still unable to see.

Her parents were not injured in the blast, but were searching for her and finally found her and took her home. They cut her burnt kinky hair off and scraped black burnt skin from her eyes and mouth and hid all the mirrors. Eight years later the American Norman Cousins raised the funds to take 25 Hiroshima maidens to America for reconstructive surgeries and she was one of them. Shigeko ended abruptly and sat down, drained. The Hibakusha with their advancing age, have a very limited opportunity to share their accounts. They were inspiring as were the ICAN  Nobel Peace Prize Winners and Norman Cousins’ belief that “War is an invention of the human mind. The human mind can invent peace with justice.” He affirmed that human beings could do better, be better, and create better societies. “The starting point for a better world is the belief that it is possible. Civilization begins in the imagination. The wild dream is the first step to reality. Visions and ideas are potent only when they are shared. Until then, they are merely a form of daydreaming.”

When we met Shigeko after the program in her excitement about being in Tulsa, she sang a whole stanza of O-K-L-A-H-O-M-A, she knew all the words, and my brother Clark Frayser sang right along with her! She told us she loved that song being in TULSA and in OKLAHOMA!  Clark remembered the words of another song from that play, "Oh what a beautiful morning," and told her when our Dad was in the war in Europe the bugler began playing it each morning instead of the usual reveille!

Those hosting the event wanted everyone who attended and participated in their programs to know that their Nobel Peace Prize belongs to US, too! They know it does because no one could leave that room without knowing we have to invent peace with justice, we have to take it from a daydream to become our reality. We have to do our part to make sure there are no more Hiroshima, Nagasaki tragedies ever again.

We will make every effort to make it a “Beautiful Morning, a Beautiful Day”

When I got home I picked up the book of poems Bruno Navasky had translated by Japanese children, "Festival in My Heart," to go deeper in my feelings for the voices of Japanese children in happier days. You will love reading them, too, and may need to after learning about the Hibakusha, but we must never forget either.
 
Respectfully with Peace and Justice ~ Rebecca Jim

Weekends can be long when a mother worries she may have poisoned her baby. Her one year had been lead poisoned and the doctor's office and the health department  were closed and the whole town of Stillwater was alive with bedlam.

Having a lead poisoned child is how the mystery starts and in this child's life with a mother who teaches literature, this will inspire once this mystery has been solved when the source or sources are found and eliminated. As we went through the possibilities, how lead paint may have been left behind in their newly renovated home and could have been tracked in. Not water, they are using a filter. Stillwater, no chat. Her baby girl has gotten her sea legs and is not crawling but walking, but everything goes into the mouth. Her husband's place of work was a possibility, an old dusty downtown building.

A while later, she asked could it be her? She is still nursing. Could she be lead poisoned and passing lead on to her baby. Yes, it can happen. She went to the top of the list of suspects in the mystery of how her child is being lead poisoned and a weekend is a long time to wait for answers. This is a woman who seeks answers and becomes them. She went on her own as a citizen representative to the Paris Climate Change Meetings. When she and her family were shaken by earthquakes, it shook her to action.

She began organizing citizens in Stillwater to take action against 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 city meetings, the oil and gas industry threatened to sue the city if they pursued. She and others did not back down but asked state legislators to get involved and now there are some regulations to curtail some of the man-made earthquakes. 

This woman took us to the underworld rich with natural resources, rivers and ancient oceans when she spoke at the Tar Creek Conference last year. As a pregnant woman then nearing the birth of the baby she worried about now, she had had to comfort her young son during the state's largest earthquake.

"What can I do?" She answered her own question then by saying she can tell her stories and believes these can create feelings that can change minds. We can do the same, tell our stories, and tell hers.

She has a new story to tell and as she finds answers she will tell them, too.

You probably don't know this woman but we know countless women in this county who have been told their child has been lead poisoned and given a number to be concerned about or a lower number and told not to worry, but the threshold for lead poisoning has changed through the years and what constitutes poisoning, always going to smaller numbers being more dangerous than we believed before. Since 2012 the level is now a 5 ug/dL, but not too long ago, doctors and nurses were assuring our mothers that a 5 is ok, a 9 is ok, but now we know there is not a result we want larger than zero.

Research is in that no lead is good for you. Now they tell us! All us lead-heads know we can get by with the load we have, we are proof, but when you know better, we can do better and protect the health of the kids coming along after us. Children should have blood tests. And there is still time to get your yard tested for lead and have it cleaned up for nothing, call DEQ Hotline 800-522-0206. We know this can be one of the sources for our kids' lead poisoning, why not get rid of it?

Another source can be our dishes. A woman brought a brown cup and saucer marked USA on the bottom to LEAD Agency this week. She had a set and had a buyer, but the buyer would not purchase them until they were tested for lead. They tested positive for lead, but with our XRF I tested again and found the glaze near the top of the cup had the highest amount of lead I ever recorded with our  instrument.

I don't like to be told NO and neither do you. NO can be clarified. NO you can't put hot coffee or tea in it, NO you won't make hot chocolate for your neighbor kids in it. But perhaps you could sit it on the mantle and look at the beauty of it, or reflect on the great memories you had with it, like I do when looking at the teapot on the mantel my mother made me tea when I was a little girl, but now NO ONE drinks tea made in it because it is loaded with lead. I never told my mother about that teapot and how by drinking that tea, I was bound to have gotten a dose of lead every time. I didn't want to burden her. Especially after talking with moms like the woman over the weekend who wondered, if she were the source for her child's lead poisoning.

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim

Last week I got a splinter in my foot at work. Yes, I had taken my shoes off and gone into a little used room and felt it immediately, and saw a splinter that must have been 3 inches long, with of course only a bit of it stuck in the bottom of my foot. I pulled on it and got the majority out immediately, right as the last of it broke off. It is a bother to have a splinter, as my dad would have said, "the size of a subsoil plow." I worked with a set of tweezers and got a bit more out, but not all. A few days later at a regular doctor visit, was asked if there was anything else that concerned me, so I casually mentioned the splinter, which was probed again, this time by an expert, who pulled out a bit more of the remains, leaving  enough to continue to be felt days later.
 
My homemade house has wood floors and some boards were showing some definite signs of wear. But they should after being laid forty years ago. I used #2 knotty pine porch flooring and I thought they would get me through for a year or two as I saved up for carpeting to lay over them. But once they were laid, sanded, sealed and waxed, they were too pretty to cover up with carpeting. My son was  a child with asthma, so wood floors were better for him than carpeting.
 
Those wood floors caused us to get into the habit of taking our shoes off in the mudroom as a way of protecting them, not knowing then it would also be a good practice to keep from tracking in any lead dust that might have followed us home.
 
But that splinter caused me to jump on that last warm day to sand and fill and seal most of the floors in the house before the cold days that followed, so NO ONE would get a splinter like the monster in my foot. And it led me to think of a carpet memory, since carpet would have prevented that splinter.
 
A really nice professional family with 3 young children moved to Miami about 20 years ago. They moved from a state that was already testing children for blood lead and these children left that state with zeros. I had actually never heard of zero blood lead before meeting that mother. But after living in the area less than a year, the kids became lead poisoned. The mother was concerned and confused about how that could have happened. And then it began to rain, rained for days and the ground in her neighborhood got really saturated.
 
The woman had a carpeted room next to the kitchen she had converted into the play room for the kids, forsaking the designed use as a dining room. One day as she entered that room, the floor felt like she was walking on a dock and she noticed the floor vent was brimmed full of water! She immediately went to the bathroom to get extra towels and there under the sink was a sump-pump, the previous owner had graciously left behind, but had not disclosed when they sold the house that it might ever be needed.
 
The mother figured out how to use it and pumped water from that floor vent yet how long I have forgotten. The problem had another twist. After the rains quit and the water table in the neighborhood went down, the water in the floor vent receded as well. When she raised the cover on the vent it was possible to see that most of the stainless steel vent had deteriorated and shifted so the chat fill under the concrete slab was visible. We took a sample to the EPA laboratory in Picher. The results got EPA's attention as the levels of lead were high and it got the family's attention and they packed up their kids and moved into a motel immediately. They hired a contractor to install overhead heating and air conditioning ducts and had the carpet removed. A load of concrete was pumped throughout the floor ducts to seal them permanently.
 
We knew it didn't take much lead to hurt a child and she was not moving back in until that place was clean. After the vent work and the playroom carpet was out in the driveway, I went in to clean for them, taking my Rainbow vacuum cleaner and a big metal container for the dirty water. After cleaning for hours there was not a dust particle left when I left the house. But in the driveway was that contaminated carpet. I pulled on it and maneuvered it into my truck and headed out that night to take it to the only people I knew who would know what to do with it. I took it to the EPA laboratory. LEAD Agency couldn't convince EPA to help homeowners with the cost of replacing floor vented heating and cooling systems with overhead ones, but I bet they remember that carpet.
 
Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim
 
To find out more about toxins in carpet and what has to change to be able to recycle them:
https://healthybuilding.net/uploads/files/eliminating-toxics-in-carpet-lessons-for-the-future-of-recycling.pdf  

I found myself under an apple tree. It was loaded with "Enterprise" apples and I was concentrating on picking ones up that had already fallen off the tree. I was under the tree. More like wedged under the tree and wondering how exactly to fold myself to make the attempt to move. Turning and winding beneath yet another even lower branch, the only method possible was to crawl. It had rained this weekend but the ground was not exactly muddy, so crawling did not mark my knees nearly like it could have and thankfully there were not too many spoiled apples to maneuver around. Some of the found apples are filling my home with the delightful aroma as apple pies and even more will become apple jelly, a light treasure we forget is ambrosia on homemade bread.

Brenda's Berries & Orchard is 4 miles east of Chetopa, Kansas and is worth the trip. So many more "Enterprise" remain while the yellow "Goldrush" apples are hanging on the limbs of her trees still not quite ripe but getting there.
Pick a few bags, take them with you on your way home, and an opportunity will occur for you to share some before you make that last turn to your house. That is how I came to learn about Brenda's orchard, from a friend's sharing with me. So as it happened for me on my last turn, Jerry and Pat Powell were harvesting our soybeans and they got a sack of fresh picked apples for being in the right place.

Mental health services and green hats at the state capitol. Advocates wore green to symbolize mental health and red to support substance abuse and addiction awareness. Pictures from the event may have seemed like early Christmas revelers with these colors to those deaf to the messages they called out.

 Everyone of these wearers were in the right place, telling our legislators that people need services that keep their lives working and making sense to them. Mental health providers and those who have found those services lifelines stood next to each other. They all found their voices that day and spoke for those who could not make that trip.

Laura and Jerry Edington got in and were our witnesses to an event that brought me a full heart feeling. All those people on the 4th floor of the rotunda, once it filled so were the 5th and the 2nd floors with people still in line to get IN. The fire marshal declared the building was full.   People stood up for services, not for handouts, not for raises, but for services that are the support for MANY people in Oklahoma. Many people you know, certainly people I know.

It was only a month ago, Lissa James made a presentation at the National Environmental Conference at Tar Creek speaking about mental health services right here in Ottawa County and how Grand Lake Mental Health had found ways to wrap services around their clients to take them from childhood into adulthood to make their lives not only possible but also meaningful.

If the cuts go through, people with mental illnesses and addictions will still have psychiatric hospitals, crisis centers and medication, but no other services, unless they can pay for them but with the drastic cuts many capable mental health and substance abuse providers will not be available, with over 8,500 staff reductions resulting by December. That is just not right. And is not safe to eliminate all outpatient services in our state.

People will have to get to the crisis level of wanting to kill themselves or someone else before they can access services, meaning in-patient crisis care, but there are already not beds available for all who could use them now.

I didn't make that trip to the capitol, our state capitol which last week had to be closed because all the wiring had to be redone. The state capitol's caretakers, our legislators had let the whole electrical system go for 60 years before they shut it down to fix it. The people who need mental health and substance abuse treatment can't wait 60 days to know if treatment will be available and there for them.

We need our legislators to be in the right place for us and do the right thing while they are there.

The Spanish philosopher and humanist José Ortega y Gasset took me out from under that apple tree and into that capitol with our green hat wearing mental health allies with his thought, "I am myself and what is around me. And if I do not save it, it shall not save me," and made me consider how urgent our "here and now" is and how there is no postponement for now. Gasset assured us we cannot put off living until we are ready. Our roles are set, this is it and we can do what we can for those around us and the world that surrounds us full of urgent needs.

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim
 

The Clean Water Act had a birthday this week. I should have made a cake and put 45 candles on it, which would have required having a working fire extinguisher. Heaven forbid having to use one and ruin a cake of any sort, much less The Clean Water Act's many layered birthday cake.

The Act was born just 2 months after my son so they are the same age. Back in 1972 rivers were catching on fire and as he would say, "That is just NOT RIGHT." Not then and hopefully never again.

I gave up and hauled an old fire extinguisher to Miami this week, a heavy, I mean really heavy one. It had been left behind by a fellow who had baled some hay for us and pretty much botched the job, left it to defray guilt perhaps. I have a lot of respect for firemen and their profession, but I don't want to be one, and picking up that fire extinguisher would have been far off my list of options to take if a fire had burst out through the years and I might have been forced to attempt to use it.

After all these years, I was not sure the heavy thing was safe to have around so the time had come to take it to the expert for an opinion, so naturally I went the 2 blocks from the LEAD Agency office to Miami Fire Protection Co. and talked to Terry Atkinson, who didn't call it an antique but did take immediate action to make sure it was no longer activated or loaded and as such safe to be around. Deactivated for sure, I left it with him to add to the scrap metal recycling pile.

The day got away from me and I didn't make that cake for the Clean Water Act but I did celebrate water today drinking cold water, filtered hold the ice. Standing Rock and the activists all across the nation have begun to use the term, Water is Life, and all my life I have loved being near water, flowing water if possible. But that Missouri River my son and I crossed on our trip to North Dakota last December, caused us to roll the windows down just to smell it. Clean water, I had never encountered it, nothing like that clean Missouri River that so many stood up to save.

Water is worth the effort and the United States knew it 45 years ago and passed a law to protect it. Imagine having to pass a law to protect the sacred thing that water is to all of us. But Congress did it and the president signed it. And ever since then Congress and the presidents who followed as well as cities and states have weakened that law until most of our rivers, lakes and streams in this whole country are now impaired.

They aren't catching on fire yet, or there are not enough pollutants in them that Congress has sought to re-in-act and re-in-state the strength of the Clean Water Act. YET. I wonder what it will take? How many more birthday candles do we add to the cakes before the water is bad enough Congress will say, stop to the polluters, to the cities who stall to improve their waste water treatment facilities, stop to citing big agriculture, or factory farms too close to our rivers and lakes?

The goal of the Clean Water Act was to have zero discharge of contaminants by 1985. The goal posts kept being moved to appease corporations and cities and the money to regulate point source and non point source pollution is being cut and cut again. 71.3% of assessed lakes/reservoirs/ponds and 54.9% of assessed streams/rivers in the U.S. are unsafe for fishing, drinking, and/or swimming. I once said regulation is not a dirty word, not when regulation can PROTECT us.

Eliminating Clean Water Act protections for water-bodies will endanger the public and will degrade and destroy our nation’s fisheries, water supplies, recreational waters and coastal waters. Permitting and regulating pollution discharges into upstream water bodies is essential to restoring our nation’s waters, which are still polluted 45 years after passage of the CWA. As a nation, we cannot have clean water unless we control pollution at its source—wherever that source may be.

I am proud to be the Tar Creekkeeper one of the Waterkeeper Alliance's team of water protectors around the globe. LEAD Agency also sponsors the Grand Riverkeeper and hope to find a Spring Riverkeeper out there somewhere to advocate for that once marvelous river. But each of these need not just a keeper but teams of people lined up speaking out for their protection.

If you find yourself wondering how you can help us get this Clean Water Act's act together, call your senator and your representative and let them know our water needs a Clean Water Act that does what it was supposed to do, protect our water. We don't want to have fire extinguishers posted at every river bend and creek bank attempting to put out the fires when the water starts burning again. That would NOT be right!

Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim