Amelia Taylor

Partial Transcript: My name is Amelia Taylor and I grew up in Cocke County. I am a whitewater river guide on the Pigeon River and also an organizer for Cweet, Clean Water Expected in East Tennessee.

Partial Transcript: Well I grew up here so it was natural that I gravitated towards the river. I’m a water person so I actually got involved in working on activism surrounding river issues when I was 14 years old with Deborah Barr who is the director of Cweet. She ran an after-school program when I was a young adult and we did performance poetry about the river and its pollution. And then I later became a river guide in my early 20s probably because of my proximity to the river. It was a job that was available that seemed like a lot of fun and it just happened to be happening in my back yard. And so, I became a river guide and boy I haven’t looked back since.

Partial Transcript: Sure well the fact that the Pigeon River has been polluted for over a century is I think a statement about the condition related to many of our rivers in this country and so I think the Pigeon basically represents many of our other waterways and the fact that it’s been degraded by industry and capitalism and economic endeavors for capital gains for over 100 years. And so, what inspires me about it is that this river truly is the lifeblood of our community. It brings in the most amount of economic resources to the whitewater rafting industry and also it brings me my passion which is whitewater and getting out in the water, getting hit with big waves, flipping upside down in my kayak and getting extremely intimate with the water. So that’s where my passion lies.

Partial Transcript: Um I would say on the Pigeon River, and I have worked on many rivers. I’ve worked on the Kern (sp) in California, the Youghiogheny (sp) in Pennsylvania, the Rio Grande in the Big Bend, the American in California, and I would say on the Pigeon, way more likely chance to get a rash. There’s a lot of ammonia and other chemicals that are skin irritants in the Pigeon and so it’s pretty common for river guides to have rashes throughout the season on their feet and other parts of their body that stay wet. So, I think that’s pretty unique to the Pigeon.

Partial Transcript: I don’t typically warn the guests. I do at some point usually tell them that the river has been polluted for 100 years and then I describe how people came together and the river improved by 50% but we still have a long way to go. And then I usually go back to the exposure thing and I’m like well, you know, just being out here one time, it’s probably not going to have any negative impacts on you. But as for the river guides who are exposed to this water every day, it’s hard to say what the long-term effects are of being exposed to all the chemicals that Blue Ridge Paper puts into the water as part of their discharge.

Partial Transcript: Well my mother’s side of the family is from the Cosby area and that’s for basically as long as anyone can remember. Scotch-Irish people, certainly been here since before the paper mill started polluting the Pigeon River. And in terms of the history of the paper mill and Champion and all that, I know what I’ve read in the books but obviously I’m only 31 years old and so it’s been going on a lot longer than I have been alive. I can tell you what I’ve seen happen over the last 15-20 years as part of my activism which is that the conditions in the river have not improved very much since the 90s. And I really find that to be a shame because I know the technology exists for Blue Ridge Paper to improve their process which would decrease their pollution, especially if they use an oxygen-based bleaching process as opposed to chlorine-based bleaching. And this is something that paper mills in Canada use kind of as their protocol whereas Blue Ridge Paper feels that they don’t need to make the technological improvements. For some reason they’d rather fight the people downstream so that they can maintain their power and control would be my guess. I don’t know why they want to spend so much money fighting us when they could just invest it in the technology to clean up their process.

Partial Transcript: I’m concerned about the many carcinogens and toxins that they use. You can go look up through their permits online through the EPA all the different chemicals they use. Most of them I can’t even pronounce. I’m not a scientist, I’m not a chemist. But I know that there are at least 10 or 11 carcinogens and 30+ toxins and so I’ve also seen the Pigeon River above the paper mill and then below it and I don’t know if you’ve ever spent any time upstream of the Canton Mill but I believe the French Broad River Keeper just defined that section of river as being one of the most pristine sections of water in Western North Carolina whereas we don’t really have that so much here. I certainly wouldn’t call it pristine.
I paddle a lot in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the water quality between there and the Pigeon is pretty stark.

Partial Transcript: Yeah, there are definitely fish. Life has come back to the Pigeon and that’s what the paper mill will tell you. They’ll tell you what a success the Pigeon River is, what great work that they have done because life has come back and that’s wonderful and important and it has allowed us to establish this whitewater rafting industry. But the fact of the matter is that they are still putting toxic and carcinogenic chemicals in our waterways and I just personally don’t think that that’s ok.

Partial Transcript: I would say if it weren’t for those people that most likely the Pigeon River wouldn’t be in the condition it is today. That it would still be the dead Pigeon River. I don’t believe that the paper mill would have decided to clean up the river on their own and I’m sure that even that the Clean Water Act being enforced would have made the improvements necessary. I think that community organizing and people being upset and the community coming together had a great impact on influencing the politicians and other people to get the will moving. And so, I feel as if the people who came before us have allowed us to have what we have now and if the river were still a dead river I certainly wouldn’t be paddling in it. And I do remember from my childhood the river having bigger foam piles, being darker and nastier in the late 80s and early 90s and I’m just really thankful it’s not that way anymore because that means I get to go out and enjoy the river in a very real way.

Partial Transcript: Sure, Cweet is Clean Water Expected in East Tennessee. It was an organization started by whitewater river guides I believe in 2006 and that was in response to the renewal of the pollution permit, the NPDS permit, that was being issued by Blue Ridge Paper so some of the raft guides came together to organize around that permit hearing and get people in the community prepped for that permit renewal because with the Clean Water Act that’s one of the few times the public actually has any input or chance to give input to the powers that be like our state regulatory agencies and the EPA. So the organization was started in 2006 by a few of the guides and after the permit renewal hearing passed they kind of moved on with their lives. I was at Warren Wilson at the time and at that school you have to do community service. I really wanted to do my community service back home because I saw so much need here for changes and improvements in my community. And I kind of took the reins of Cweet along with a few other folks and I believe we got our nonprofit status in 2012 maybe and since that time Cweet has done a lot of work surrounding environmental advocacy, education, working with local and state government in order to advocate for cleanup in the river. And generally just education in the community about the Pigeon River. I think because this issue has been going on so long people are very tired of it, they’re exhausted of it. And there are so many other issues in this community because of endemic poverty that people aren’t able to focus their attention on the river because people are living hand to mouth here. People are suffering with addiction. Many of the issues that are created by poverty don’t allow people to focus on things like the environment when they are basically just living hand to mouth.
So Cweet works to empower Cocke County and this community to be a healthier place not only with the physical environment but also with our social environment and our economic environment. So we are concerned about how economic development is going to impact this area in the future and we are looking towards the future and how we can influence the kind of sustainable development that we would like to see as opposed to the type of development we might not want to see.

Partial Transcript: Cweet has a water monitoring program that’s funded by Patagonia, the outdoor clothing company. They are a pretty awesome company and they are our largest funder as of right now. And they give us funds to do stream monitoring. So we have two aspects to that. We do chemical monitoring where we go out and collect samples and send them off to a lab and we also do biological monitoring, actually right here at this site where we are. We go out with a kick net and we collect macro invertebrate insects and then we count and catalog them. Over time that gives you an idea of the health of a river and it can tell you whether the river’s health in increasing or decreasing. We’ve been doing that data gathering for about three years and we hope to just continue doing it every year.

Partial Transcript: Through the macro invertebrate stuff? Well it’s pretty cool because you get to see all the little guys that live in there. For example, this site is actually not as diverse as our upstream site in Hartford so that gives me an idea there might be some pollution issues going on between here and Hartford that might not even be related to the paper mill. But you know we haven’t really been gathering the data long enough to make a real scientific guess as to what exactly is going on. But what’s really exciting about the program is that it’s a citizen science program so we train regular people, college students and concerned citizens to go out into the field, identify these insects and actually be able to participate and offer their time and service to doing something that might make an impact in the future for the river. And I think that’s really empowering for people because we often feel powerless in the face of these huge economic powers like Blue Ridge Paper Mill or the federal government or so on and so forth. So, I think that gives us some power and some say in the matter and it allows people to feel like they’re making a difference or contributing to an issue that at times feels unmanageable.

Partial Transcript: Well I’ve read her book “The French Broad” which I think is very lovely and I enjoy it a lot. Wilma Dykeman has actually inspired me to want to write a book about the Pigeon River one day so I feel like I’m in the very early stages of creating my own book about the history of the Pigeon and that was definitely inspired by Wilma Dykeman’s book “The French Broad.”
Well I think Wilma Dykeman is an inspiration to Cocke County and our community simply because she was a wise woman who was a historian and a writer and contributed greatly to the record of our local history. You know I never knew her so I only know how she spoke in her books and I haven’t even seen many recordings of her other than the very brief clip that’s on the film that I shared with you. The documentary that was made by one of the river guides on the Pigeon. I wish I could have met her in person but certainly I would like to consider more what you’re saying about her approach as being a little bit milder. I’m not known for that approach and I know it could probably be more tactful at times. Also I think from reading maybe one of her fictional novels I got the idea that she was really affected by the pollution that was happening at the factory here, what is now Conagra was Stokely Van Camps which was her husband’s factory and I think she saw her own family profiting off of pollution and I think it was a very intimate matter for her as well and probably she felt some responsibility just as many people who care about the environment do because we all are contributing to the problem and we all need to contribute to the solution.

Partial Transcript: My hope would be that Blue Ridge Paper Mill shuts down. Laughs. They don’t want to hear that but my hope would be that the river runs clean and clear below the mill as it does above the mill or otherwise Blue Ridge could stay open if they were actually good environmental stewards if they could find a way to make their process much less harmful for the environment. I would hope that corporations could change the way that they approach their profit making and actually consider total and true costs of the effects of what they are doing and not just their profit margin. My hope would be that we move away from a capitalist society, actually. Which is going to be a tough one but I see our economic system of capitalism as being the primary driver at this moment in history of environmental degradation and I would like to see a change in the way that we approach economics in our culture.

Partial Transcript: Well, as my mother said, if you don’t know history, you are doomed to repeat it. And I also think it’s really important to honor the people who came before you and to learn from their tactics what worked for them, what didn’t. Also, I think just remembering our history as a way that allows us to move forward more consciously.