Finding the Warrior’s Path
30 years’ Evolution of Environmental Strategy
By Kathy Carter-White Tibbits
In 1986 a 30,000-pound uranium hexaflouride tank ruptured spewing radioactive gas over the surrounding countryside near the town of Gore in the Cherokee Nation, killing one worker and injuring others. Native Americans for a Clean Environment was already trying to get the NRC not to let that operation expand. Back then, we had weekend weekly demonstrations at the plant gate. We had a summer camp-in and activists from Greenpeace and National Toxics Campaign came from other states to support NACE and local groups, camping in the gritty dusty bar ditch. That radioactive gas cloud accident marked the beginning of the end, but by then, people had gotten cancer. The neighborhood turned into a ghost town. When so much visible harm had been done, finally the regulators heeded.
Four years later, ecoLaw Institute was formed, with the mission to “speak for the creatures who cannot speak for themselves.” We understood that our work was to protect the weak spots in the circle of life, and to use legal options where they existed. We talked about this notion of a “Constructive Trust” as an idea that we wished were in the United States Constitution—that the people are stewards, holding precious something that Creator gives everybody, on the condition that we not waste it and we treat it with respect. That came out of an idea from the 1970s when some lawyer asked, “Do trees have standing?” meaning “Do trees have rights?”
One of the things ecoLaw did was in helping the Illinois River by going to the United States Supreme Court, to say “Its wrong to take care of your front porch and not your back yard.” Fayetteville, AR wanted to send all of its sewage down the Illinois River. STIR--Save The Illinois River--- had a team of volunteer attorneys headed up by none other than former US Congressman Ed Edmondson who was retired and happened to have a cabin in the watershed. His kids grew up on that river. With his fearless determination and hard work we fought it. He died while it was on appeal, and that is when Julian Fite stepped up and took over the lead on that battle.
We employed a strategy that we had used in the Sequoyah Fuels case: Tetra. Every little neighborhood formed its own community group, such as Warner Area Residents Association and Carlile Area Residents Association. I think we had over 20 intervenors in Sequoyah Fuels, and we would actively spend some time on the phone building a coalition with wildlife groups like Oklahoma Wildlife Federation, Sierra Club and others.
Likewise, when we were going to the Supreme Court, we found allies such as CASE (Carrie Dickerson’s group), City of Tahlequah--- and we said, “If you will join in for our side, we will find an attorney to submit a
Brief Amicus Curiae on behalf of your organization. We had many Amicus briefs, and Fayetteville started finding their own allies so it turned out that a lot of cities and states and conservation groups and downstreamers and recreation groups weighed in on it.
Almost everything I have talked about has been about dealing with a spiritual issue in a very different arena, where you don’t even talk about that aspect of it. And just personally--- I don’t know it may seem different to each of you--- there is kind of a heavy weight and high stakes to some day be able to feel like you have kept things a little bit more in balance between humans and creatures—because they are not objects or game pieces for sport killing.
So, imagine this. You walk into that huge, gleaming white United States Supreme Court building. There the lawyers wear this traditional garb like tuxedo jackets with tails, not too different from our Cherokee Greatcoats. There will be a hundred or more people in the room. And half are lawyers, probably the other half reporters. (I saw Koki Roberts or Nena Totenberg in the press gallery, I forget which one.) And it seems so gigantic and you feel so small and humbled. There on the right end is Clarence Thomas. You recognize the Justices from seeing their picture, and from reading a lot of their opinions. They are just a handful of robed people, in big chairs on a high platform and a single long arcing U-curved bench, with so much fate in their opinions.
Arguments begin, and a speaker would utter a few words then the Justices would jump right in and interrupt asking tough questions that would take the presenter far off track. I didn’t speak, but I did stand and take the oath, becoming licensed to practice before the United States Supreme Court that day , receiving a rare honor that not all attorneys have achieved. I had written some of the Briefs.
So, later on we found that we had kinda won and kinda lost in that Fayetteville case. The court made a key pronouncement: Upstream states have to take into account the impact on downstream states and meet their ‘water quality standards’ for the designated beneficial use of that waterway. Or, in other words, they could put treated sewage into the Illinois but had to really do a fine job of cleaning up the water so it wasn’t any worse.
The 1970s is when all of this cleaning up the water began, with NEPA and the Clean Water Act. Or, if you want to go all the way back, it began with the first laws saying you can’t make navigable waters impassable by leaving sunken boats there or dumping garbage if it keeps boat traffic from being able to move.
Cherokee people have always had our connection with waterways. Canoes were our transportation—upstream and down. The best I can tell from derivative sources, there were Cherokees as far away as Virginia area at first and those ones used ocean canoes and had good ways of making dried fish for winter food. By the time it started being put down in writing, our Cherokee towns were sited by rivers. Our purification ceremonies involve water. We sort of have an appreciation for how water flows to us, and away from us. To me, that is a connection with everything upstream and everything downstream. It is a connection to the soil and caves that water runs through before it trickles to where the minnows are. And to all the creatures who drink water, swim in water, eat leaves of trees that absorbed water. To me, that is a sacrament. Water connects us to everything living, and makes everything a part of everything else. So, personally, seems like it would be good to not let a big wave of monoculture, like chicken poop from huge 40,000-bird CAFO operations, flood the delicate balance of natural purification of water.
Hunter Lovins wrote a book called Natural Capital saying that there are 3 kinds of capital in the world: Dollars, Manpower, and Nature. Money is a token or symbol of trade and it is mobile. You can get it by selling shells for beads and take it to Walmart and get mangoes from Mexico far away. Manpower is another kind of “human capital” and she is talking about the ability to make things happen—everything from manufacturing to habitat restoration where you put the natural-looking rocks next to the streambank to buffer erosion where your soil dissolves. And then there is Creator’s capital: Nature. Natural resources. Timber. Woodland.
Individually, one cane stalk growing by the Arkansas River may not seem like capital. But consider this: Canebrakes scrub the silt and settle the silt and filter the water and create a catch-net for nutrients as they float suspended in the water. If they are in the water, you might find that crawdads go there because it is some place to get food. Sort of like a McDonald’s. And soft mud makes a nice place for frogs to make a winter sleeping nest. Hunter Lovins is saying that if we were to have to ‘do’ everything that natural in-place ecosystems do, it would quickly take up an unimaginable amount of money. If you paid for every rock on your land by buying it, bought every blade of grass, landscaped every drainage route…. That would cost a fortune. That would be like Disneyworld. Very expensive. And sometimes, we humans don’t even have the knowledge to do Creator’s work--- because think about how complicated and complex and interdependent everything is. In my yard, Japanese Beetles swarm onto one apple tree to mate. They eat so many leaves that the tree gets sick. It just has dinky apples, so I don’t gather them. The deer that lives nearby knows that the apples will be there, and she brings her fawn to eat them. It happens most years. You could say that all of those beetles make it possible for the deer to get food. I have learned about traps that are used to put a stop to beetles like this. But everything we do has an effect on everything else. Aldo Leopold says it kinda like, “If you pick up anything in the world you will find that it is connected to everything else.”
I believe that we live in a robust, self-correcting and self-balancing natural world. If we are considerate about not taking too much, then we have Creator’s blessing and the price we pay for it is appreciating our lives and getting to be a part of something that cool, awesome and amazing. We are a part of the natural system around us. Besides not wasting, we can go a step further and show our gratitude by making a place for intact biologically diverse natural systems. (See, I have lapsed over into speaking the language of science here. It is the strategic language being spoken by those who are making gains within governmental and policy circles.) We can foster healthy systems--- and that does not always mean systems where we take away pieces and turn them into money, as in logging or city water systems.
Over the years, I changed my approach to how to do things that I thought were important for the natural world. Used to be, only the environmentalists protested. Today you see people protesting for selfish reasons like lower taxes. I think a strong environmental protest movement, locally anyway, came from folks in the American Indian Movement locally, who got it from AIM nationally, where it grew out of the Civil Rights Movement that began in the 1960s. We made prayers at the gates of Sequoyah Fuels. Some people chained themselves to bulldozers at Black Fox and 360 people voluntarily were arrested on October 6, 1978 or 1979. We chose Mother’s Day to bring a drum circle to the nuke plant. A lot of the NACE activists early on had also been AIM activists on the national or regional scene.
Over the years, I kept wondering how to beat the common wisdom of a popular Sierra Club quote: “Our victories are always temporary, our defeats are always permanent.” Can you imagine what it would be like to wake up every morning and think, “Gotta go to work. Because our victories are always temporary and our defeats are always permanent.” We had a lot of burnout. There was never enough money. We were all struggling to live just at the most basic level. We were being depleted and used up because we could see the needs in vivid detail. And we were throwing ourselves and our lives at some of these problems, hardly making a dent in it. Yet, we had a lot of camaraderie. We were dedicated. We would loan each other gas money. I’d help activists with legal problems, like debt issues. And in our gatherings, whomever could would make up a big pot of beans for everyone and we’d share meals. We would set our kids underneath the Board Table and hold board meetings with them playing down there, while the bigger ones developed friendships and would run around playing games of chase outside. It was our world. It was our whole world.
But the price is burnout, because society rewards certain behaviors, and it does not reward other behaviors. Families would split up because there was not enough money. People would get frustrated and stressed and depressed and go off to take care of their needs, thinking of the rest of us as obsessed with a futile mission. Bob Marley sings, “Good friends we had, and good friends we lost along the way.”
I think back on the fights inside the movement—people would want to employ different approaches and some would not agree. A big huge rift in the Black Fox fight took place between CASE and Sunbelt Alliance. Citizens Action for a Safe Environment was under the strong leadership of a tireless persistent dedicated Carrie Dickerson, who mortgaged her farm to stop the nuclear power plant from being built near Inola Oklahoma. She believed in the legal system.
Sunbelt Alliance was a coalition of about 400 mostly college students from across the state. I was in the Norman Chapter. The Tulsa Chapter had a couple of strong leaders who wanted to make a demonstrative statement and get a lot of press: Chaining themselves to bulldozers, trespassing, etc. Civil disobedience, some thought, would be the best way to achieve the goal.
Today, rather than fighting internally, a better approach is for groups like these to each take a different approach to reach the same result. When we try to budge something as big as the energy industry, it may take pushing from the back and also pulling from the front. As a strategy, consider whether everyone can approach the issue like a pack of wolves from different directions and a common ultimate goal.
Sometimes, activist burnout is going to happen. Hold your friends dear. People lose their way. Jessie DeerInWater used to say, “You bring people along as far as you can. Sometimes it becomes someone else’s work to take it from there.” This type of work that we care so much about, sometimes leaves us exhausted and in pain. We lose our inspiration and need to heal and take care of our own needs. And even if someone can never come back to it, they have the seed of it in their heart. Those are the people who will spread the message and take the idea into a whole different world. We can’t just be insulated superheroes, because for an idea to grow it has to be broadcast everywhere and some of it will find fertile soil.
Another thing to share is about creating a wide circle of gratitude. For every person who gives a lot of time and energy and care, there are half-dozen people on their support team in the background making that possible. It isn’t just the folks you see in one room who are ‘the movement’ toward a better way of our human relations with nature. Somewhere there is a wife or husband supporting the work. They may be making the family’s money or buying the gas. Someone is feeding people. Someone else is working on a quilt that shows up as a raffle item. Some kids are being a father’s inspiration for why he wants things to stay in balance. Some grandmother is babysitting. Some sister is filling in for that warrior’s role in caring for parents, etc. It is a much bigger circle of support than we realize. Those are supporters too. And we should each feel grateful for our network of support.
And we should appreciate each other, because we never know what sacrifices or hardships made possible the seemingly most inconsequential participation. Once, I needed to attend hearings at ADPCE, Arkansas’s environmental department. Back then, I was spending so much time on environmental work. I wasn’t making very much money for luxuries like a motel room. So I camped on the bank of a river on my way, and got up early to continue on, sprucing up for the hearing at a gas station along the way. It was February and I had this one nice thing—a blue down sleeping bag, that I ended up using for decades. But it was cold. Something crawled underneath my tent. I could hardly rest—the ground was so cold it would wake me up. That’s just the kind of crazy determination it took. There were not grants back then. I'll never forget the time it was cold in winter and my gas had been shut off and I was typing in a room so cold that my fingers would get stiff, then in walks Doris Gunn of Muskogee and she wrote out a check for $200 and it seemed like all the money in the world to me. It made it possible to go on.
So over the years, I’ve tried to figure out other ways to make my work more permanent, sustainable, impactful and leveraged. I thought working in tribal government would be a way to take a top-down approach in helping things to be better. And that
is a good way, because policies have mass, have money, have implementation legs, and have longevity. At Cherokee Nation I started the Cherokee Small Farm Project as a sort of 'soft place to land’ for farmers who might want to get away from the chicken monopsony, because those producers have to sign away their financial independence in order to sell into the Big Chicken market, and the integrators use economic duress to make them operate their CAFOS based on money principles that sometimes keep them from doing the right thing with chicken waste. Then Cherokee Small Farm Project became instrumental in starting up the Oklahoma Food Coop so sustainable and organic farmers could have a direct market to buyers and not have to go thru corrupt corporations that don’t have environmental ethics. There was a cascade effect.
And making a bigger impact brings me to my sales pitch for the Greenway of the Cherokee Ozarks. Last winter while I was working for Cherokee Nation Environmental Protection Commission, Blue Sky Water Society’s Myra Robertson and Cherokee Nation Community Services development facilitator Steve Woodall came to talk about a technical assistance grant awarded for The Greenway of the Cherokee Ozarks. It would be a long corridor from I-40 up to State Highway 412. It would stretch down the Illinois River, encompass Lake Tenkiller, go to Cookson Wildlife Management Area, add Sallisaw Creek, include Brushy Lake and continue on down to Vian. It would include the conservation areas along that way, and the recreation areas. It would some day eventually link up all these great places with wildlife corridors, with cross-country biking trails, with hiking trails and pedestrian commuter transportation routes. Then kids could be “free range” again. Kids could play and explore some where on public land even if they didn’t have a big yard. People could get exercise around nature instead of in a building, enjoying fresh air and seeing the seasons. It would rekindle their connection to Creator's world. Tourists would come and bring dollars, and maybe less people would have to be peasants to chicken colonialists. Elders would have plenty of places to find just the right medicine plant. Artists would have reed and cane and dye plants. Grandparents could take their little ones and tell them the Cherokee names of everything that Creator has given us, and what it is for. This Greenway of the Cherokee Ozarks would be so big, that if someone tried to put in a nuke plant or spew out sewage or load it up with chicken CAFOs, they would have to go so far away from the river that we’d have a protective buffer against those things.
So, in September of this year we brought together everybody we could get, to say, “Do we want to do this?” There were government agencies like US Fish & Wildlife Service and National Park Service. There was someone from the state Recreational Trails grantmaking program who said she would help. One couple who lives by the river said, “We’re retired journalists, and we’ll help with Public Relations.” Someone else said, “Green Country Cyclists will help with trails.” We had maybe 50 volunteers, and now, today it is a challenge just to help in coordinating the work groups and their members. But we have said, “If you people who want to work on a subject together would like, please form yourselves into some type of work group and give your input, as we plan the Greenway.”
We have maybe 10 or 12 core Planning Team members who’ll mesh it all together and --- here is the Alter Call--- you are invited to be a part of the Greenway of the Cherokee Ozarks in whatever capacity you may feel called to do so. We need clerical typists, web geeks, grantwriters, speakers, and more. Your skill, whatever it may be, is exactly what we need right now. Because if you want to do this, you are here for a reason. It is going to take thousands of hours by hundreds of people to create the Greenway of the Cherokee Ozarks. It is a collaboration and it will be whatever we make it. Nathaniel Batchelder once said this, about working to elect a good man to office, and it applies to all work that is truly grassroots: "We all just put our little work into one big pile and it adds up."
Does creating a Greenway solve everything? No. It isn’t a complete solution. Will we see quick results? No. It is probably a slow process to get buy-in from such a far-flung and diverse bunch of leaders capable of making it happen. But when it happens it will be big. It will be sustainable. And it will be satisfying.
My son Justin White was a Wildlife student here at Bacone, and my step-son Ry Thompson was watershed planner for City of Portland. I used to joke that I deserved to retire from environmental work because I had replicated myself for the next generation, and they were “fresh horses” for the movement. But when I think about something as big as the Kerr Navigation System except in the context of wildlife conservation and recreation and cultural preservation in the Cherokee Nation, it seems to me like that is one of the ways that we can honor a big commitment back to Creator in thanks for all of the air that we breathe and all of the water that we take in, and all of the land that we use. Not that it is an ultimate balance such as everyone on Earth finding the right way to live every single action prayerfully and respectfully, appreciatively and harrmoniously with all of the other creatures that are also beloved. But, its something.
To help with Greenway of the Cherokee Ozarks, reach Kathy Tibbits 918 696-3175.
