Jill Hodges

Partial Transcript: I’m Jill Hodges, and I moved to this area with my husband about forty years ago. We’re originally from Pennsylvania. And as a child, I would come here every year. My mother had a teacher that would come here in the summers and work in some of the missions. And one year she gave a skirt with her name and address on it and asked whoever got it to be a pen pal. The lady that got it wrote back. And that was when they were fifteen years old. They’re in their late eighties now and have been best friends all those years.

Partial Transcript: Having come here as a child, I just always knew that this was going to be the place I would live. Fortunately, when I brought my husband, Dan, to visit, driving down interstate forty through the Pidgeon River gorge is one of the most beautiful drives. And from that point on he was sold on it. Found a little mountain farm and bought it in 1980. We moved the following year and we’ve been here ever since. We were really fortunate when we moved here to know one family. And they introduced us around. And we had a couple of families that just took us under their wing. And living in the mountains is a little bit different than living in most places. So, it was really great that they helped us figure out how to live here, what needed to be done. We had a tobacco allotment. They just absolutely made sure that we were okay. And it was a really wonderful experience.

Partial Transcript: I hope in the future as our children grow and see how dedicated and how life changing it is to stand up for what you believe in, it’ll empower them. They can see where we might have fallen short. Take this history and build on it. It’s important that we don’t forget the people that came before us—the first people that stood up and said, we can’t do this. We won’t take this. If we don’t, we’re left to just wallow in the death and pollution, the elitist—it’s going to eventually touch you too. You may think that you’re only dumping on poor people, people that can’t defend themselves, people that aren’t educated to your standards. But once you kill all us off, it’s going to follow you around. And when you look at—you can be the CEO of a multi-billion-dollar company and watch your grandchildren. Are they sicker? Are they showing signs of health problems? We can stop it now. We can make it cleaner. We can make a viable earth, or we can destroy it for money. And the choice is really up to us. And, in this county, we’ve proven that you can be poor, not have anything to eat other than what you’re growing in your garden or you can trade with your neighbors, and you can still stand up. You know what’s happening in your community. You know when somebody’s putting one over on you. Don’t take it. Stand up.

Partial Transcript: Well, in the Hertford area—and that’s the town that I live closest to—was a booming logging community. And even in the sections of the national park now were heavily logged around the 1800s and so. From that, once the logging kind of died down, things really started changing for the community. There weren’t—the jobs just weren’t there anymore. And then when, in the ‘60s when the interstate—interstate forty—was built, it pretty much ran right through the middle of town. So, it became more of a little thumbprint than a town.
Well, like in most places, if you’re a river community, you depend on it for so many different things. It was used to float logs down the river during the logging days. As the papermill came about and the first wave of pollution came down in the early 1900s, things radically changed. The first pollution caused the—the first wave of pollution caused poisoning of the cows and fish—were both dying along the river. So, it impacted anybody that was trying to raise beef or dairy. It was virtually unusable. Unfortunately, being a poor community, fishing really fed a lot of families. And there’s stories of, the men would catch fish and then put them in clean water for a week—let them live in clean water—try and flush their systems out. Unfortunately, pollution isn’t always seen. And most of the women didn’t want to eat the fish just because of the way they smelled—just didn’t feel good about it. Where the men would campout along the river, they’d eat the fish. And we think that that’s why a majority of the men in the community back in the mid-1800s really through probably the ‘60s and ‘70s, a lot of the men ended up dying of cancer. And that was when some people started calling Hertford, Widowville, because the only ones left were elderly women.

Partial Transcript: It’s interesting always to see what statistics say and how those statistics can be manipulated. When you live in a town whose population is about five hundred people and a majority of them have cancer, you know. You know what’s going on. You may not know how it’s going on, but you know there’s something wrong in your community. There’s many communities out there that are being dumped on and polluted by chemical companies, oil industry—and, unfortunately, they’re always in low-income areas where you can see the death toll rising. The people in the neighborhood can go, there’s a house, there’s a house, there’s a house. And the statistics don’t prove that out, but when you’re going to funeral after funeral or helping with cancer patients that are your friends and family, you know there’s something desperately wrong. Just because we are poor, doesn’t mean that we don’t see what’s happening in our communities. And just because we’re poor, doesn’t mean that you should just discount us for the profit of a company.

Partial Transcript: Okay. Well, one of the interesting things about the startup of the mill was Newport was looked at as a site to have the papermill. Unfortunately, there was also a tannery in this town that polluted the river. And so, the river was too polluted to make paper. They need good clean water. So, they chose a site further upstream. And they got good, clear water on a very small river. Unfortunately, what they put back in the river was devastating. So, between fish kills, between cattle dying—even into the 1980s, the river was so polluted that we couldn’t even use it to put out fires. The chemical reaction on fires was unknown, so insurance rates are higher because we don’t have the available water. As things continued to flow downstream and you have clean streams feeding into it, the pollution looks less devastating. But, again, looks don’t always tell you what’s happening.

Partial Transcript: When I was in fifth grade, I actually did a report on papermaking process. And it was just a lovely little—you chop up the trees and you grind them up and you smash them with water and you press it down, and voila, you have paper. And I thought it was just a dandy thing. Unfortunately, there’s so much more to it, as you find out when you grow up. And one of the most devastating things is the use of chlorine. The use of chlorine in combination with the amount of heat that is needed to generate the papermaking process causes dioxin to be formed. That’s why we have fought so hard for the elimination of chlorine in the papermaking process. It’s something that it’s only purpose is to make paper white. And because of the dandy marketing that industry does, we feel like we have to have bright white paper. Now we’re to the point where there’s nothing else offered. And with the elimination of chlorine or chlorine dioxide in the papermaking processes, you would eliminate a lot of the organochlorine byproducts that we find in the river today.

Partial Transcript: Really, shortly after the mill opened and the first wave of pollution came down into Cocke County, there was a major fish kill. There were—the cows that drank from it were dying. And there was alarm, but what exactly was it? So as time continued on, we’ve seen—looking at the history of the river and the papermill—that about every twenty years, there would be a real effort to look at a cleanup of the river. One of the first, back in either the ‘30s or ‘40s, Knoxville came on board fighting the pollution because it was now affecting their drinking water. And now with the establishment of dams between the papermill and Knoxville, they acted really like huge settling ponds. So as the water got closer to Knoxville, it was getting cleaner. So that helped that community out, but it really didn’t do much for us. In the ‘60s there was another big push. And there was some environmental improvement. The ‘80s when we were looking at the problems of the Pidgeon, we had another big push. One of the things that was difficult is this county needed help. We couldn’t do it alone. People didn’t feel like they had a voice. Nothing was ever going to change.
The fear of taking jobs away from people in North Carolina—they’ve been poor here. They know how to live. They know how to survive. But to take a job from somebody else was a really difficult thing for them to stand up for, especially if it was just an aesthetic thing. Once we found out about the dioxin contamination, really changed a lot of people’s opinion on what could and should be done of the river. And we worked with—we heard about a group, the Dead Pidgeon River Counsel, here in Newport. And they were a group of business people hat could see what we could have if we had a cleaner river. So, we attended some of their meetings and started working with them.
One of the things that we wanted to do was kind of expand on getting help. So, we contacted Greenpeace. We feel like a lot of these huge environmental groups have the resources to do the research and so we wanted to take advantage of anything that they knew. And, unfortunately, they were very happy to hear from us because they had just finished their new margin of safety with the Great Lakes paper industry and their findings of dioxin in that area. So, we were able to take that book, read through it, and we fortunately had a lately that could call the plant manager and say, gee, Mr. Blackwell, are you doing this? Are you a craft bleach mill? Are you using chlorine? And we got a lot of sweet answers and came back, read our book, and like, man, we are in knee deep in this now.
And once we could show that it wasn’t just the river looks bad and it smells bad, but it is actually hurting us and killing us, a lot of people threw more support. Even our county officials came on board. It was difficult because Champion spent a lot of money in this county because if you want to keep somebody down, keep them quiet, throw them a tidbit, and you know they’ll go away. But once you start knowing that your mom died of cancer—she lived along the river, she ate the fish in the river, the water coming out of her spicket for washing and cooking smelled like rotten eggs just like the river—it starts taking a toll on you that that happened to your mother, to your grandmother. Do you want it to happen to your child and your grandchild? And it’s just—it always amazes me how we are, as a society, are willing to accept being killed slowly. If they came through, bombed us, everybody’d be up in arms. But if you kill us slowly, well, you know, at least it puts food on the table for my child. We’re not thinking about that child not making it to adulthood. And I think it’s time that we need to think in those terms.
Do we really need bright white paper, or can we do with a little bit less like they do in Europe? Europe will run—in the ‘80s, they were running two separate bleach process lines. One was bleached with chlorine and shipped to the United States, and the other was without chlorine that they sold in Europe because, again, the marketing in this country tells us we have to—nothing is better than pure white. And you see that in all areas of our society. Pure white. Maybe not quite so good.

Partial Transcript: Okay. When we got the copy of Greenpeace’s “No Margin of Safety”, and it was a study of the Great Lakes area pulp and paper industry, and they were finding that every mill was spewing out dioxin. Studies are done and there has never been a safe level of dioxin for human consumption. No matter how they break it down, as technology gets better and we can test smaller and smaller amounts, they’re still not finding any level that’s safe for human consumption. As it bioaccumulates, like it does in fish, it will bioaccumulate in our body. It attaches to fatty solids, so while you won’t find it in the water, you will find it in sludge. You will find it in the fish. Fish get it from the sludge. We get it from the fish. And we’re all walking around with cancer.

Partial Transcript: Yes. And that’s how companies justify what they’re doing. You can’t say it was just us. And that’s true. We are polluting ourselves at a rate now that almost everything we do has a health effect on us. And while you may not be able to address everybody because I live here and I’m downstream of a papermill, that’s what I’m addressing. If we can change one industry to stop the pollution that’s hurting so many people, in the long run, over a long period of time, then we’ve made a dent. But it really takes standing up, knowing what’s going on in your community, talking to your community—your churches, your business people, your farmers—and see what’s affecting you. Work on that issue because that just expounds to other communities. We’re looking to be in contact with some of the other towns that are below pulp and papermills to see what they know because there’s a good possibility that they don’t even know that they’re being contaminated by dioxin. It was simply by us making a call to Greenpeace that we got the ball rolling on the toxic nature of this river.

Partial Transcript: We’re firm believers in there’s power in people. You can talk to your officials. You can talk to the plant. You can talk to—and they pat you on the back and send you on your way. When you show up with five-hundred people, that’s not so easy. So, one of the things we did first was contact Greenpeace. And because they had such a big initiative on this issue, we were able to tap into their Atlanta office. And they sent some of their people up to help post the river. When we decided, okay, Greenpeace is helping to post the river, who else is out there, we were fortunate that the Student Environmental Coalition in Knoxville, University of Tennessee, we were able to—from then, they were able to tap into other college environmental groups. And we kind of laugh because it’s like, oh, Greenpeace is so radical. They’re so mainstream now.
And so, we went from Greenpeace to college students to Earth First. And that rallied so many people. And we were fortunate because we knew we had somebody on our back. We could count on them to show up. We could count on them to stand their ground. And that in turn fed into the power of the local people to stand up. You know, if you see a bunch of people from off somewhere coming to stand up for your river, don’t you want to be there with them? And it was incredible. One of the hearings we had in Newport was a state hearing, and we were concerned that, okay, it’s going to be in an auditorium, how many people are going to show up? Okay, what can we do here?
So, we talked to the ladies in Hertford. And they made little placards—cardboard, black, with white—and wrote down the names of everybody they knew that had died of cancer. And we went to visit and there was a living room full. And the lady that was hosting it was—okay, this guy, he was married to her and they had that child. And she could tell you the entire connection between everybody on that floor. We decided, to take those placards and put them on the seats in the front middle of the auditorium. We figured, well, that’s going to take up some seats, and a big, empty area, and we can point those people as would have been here, but they died of cancer. And we got a lot of flak from a state official saying, you can’t block off, you can’t, you can’t. And my husband and I just don’t like the words “you can’t”. So, we stood there, and we talked to them and we talked to them. And eventually people started coming in. And a really amazing thing happened. A man came up and said, “That’s my uncle’s name. Can I sit in his chair?” I was like, well, sure. You know, this is our hearing.
This isn’t the state’s hearing. This is our hearing. And those seats filled with the relatives of the people that had died with cancer. Sometimes you make plans to kind of, you know, how can we make this look. And then just the natural thing comes out. And it was just beautiful because those people who never would have said a word, who probably never would have come to a hearing, showed up—are you going to say anything? No, no, no. I’m just here to—and by the end of several hours, these people were standing up. If all they said was, we don’t like it and you need to stop it. And it was just so powerful for the people themselves and for us to see the community come together and say, this is something that cannot be.

Partial Transcript: Well, through the hearings, permits were developed. And they took the public comments and kind of washed them all out. And we had permits. Strong enough? No. What we want to see? Not exactly, but we’re going to take those steps forward. You can’t—you won’t—get everything you want, but that doesn’t mean you should stop because you take this step now, in a few more years, technology changes, attitudes change, and you get a little bit farther. Now there’s a really strong feeling in our county that this river can give us jobs in so many different ways. Factories are not going to come to Cocke County fi they’ve got a polluted river. They can’t stand the smell. They can’t use the water. We have an incredible white-water rafting industry that contributes not only from the state tax they generate; they also have a river fee that goes directly to the county. And it has done so much in enabling the county to do things like this park. It enables them to put more funds into schools. It goes into our general fund. So, it funds everything that happens in this county. What would happen if pollution came back? Tourists would leave, and we’d have nothing again. So, we can’t afford now to allow the river to ever digress. We can only keep improving.

Partial Transcript: We feel very fortunate that through all the hard work—not only that we did in the ‘80s, but that they’ve done in the ‘60s, the ‘40s, and the ‘20s—have taken a river that was unusable and devastating the people that lived along it and the entire county—through all those processes, we’ve been able to get better permits, more restrictions on the papermill, so that now we do have a good white-water industry. That white-water industry brings tourists into our county. Tourists come. They spend money at restaurants. They spend money at gas stations. The tax revenue from that feeds our county. And there’s also a river fee that goes directly to the general fund of the county that keeps our schools open. It allows us to have small parks like this along the river that people can enjoy. It has changed the attitude of what Cocke County is. We’re not the embarrassment, the low life, the “you don’t want to go there” place anymore. We can sit here and be proud. Be proud of what our ancestors have done. Be proud of what we’ve done. And be proud of what is going to continue because when you see the different, when you can feel it, when you can smell it, you just want it to continue. You never want it to go back to what it was.

Partial Transcript: In my wildest dreams, what I would love to see out of the pulp and paper industry—but in particular, the plant in Canton—if they really want to be at the forefront and really push the edge of the industry, there’s two things I’d like to see. The first one, completely eliminate chlorine, chlorine dioxide, that no matter how you shake it is going to produce some levels of dioxin. The other thing they could do is go to a more renewable and sustainable product like hemp, instead of doing clear cuts—cutting our trees down. Reserve those trees to build houses. Reserve those trees for more important things. For paper? Hemp would be a stronger bonding, you renew it every year on a yearly basis. It gives jobs to farmers who produce the hemp. For whatever reason, our society is so bent on demonizing it. There are so many things that could come from the use of it—economic benefits, environmental benefits. And we just need to kind of shake off the old ideas and accept, really, older ideas.

Partial Transcript: It is happening. It’s happening in Europe. And, in fact, I have a milk carton from Sweden and, yes, the outside is white—not as white as you find here, but the inside—this is an unbleached carton. So, it is out there. It is available. The United States just refuses to make that change. And while all change costs money, the benefit is enormous—not only to the environment and to the health, but the less chemicals we spew out, the cheaper it is. You don’t have to depend on Dow or any other chemical company for that additional cost that you have to bare every time you produce something like this. It’s time that we really, maybe, take a step back and look at how some of the old ways might have been better.

Partial Transcript: When you have a group of people that stand up for a river or a mountain or any land issue, they’re preserving it, not for you—they’re preserving it for your grandchildren. And hopefully—we’re seeing more children with asthma, more children with health problems early in life. And we don’t—we’re not willing to accept the fact that we are doing it to them. If you kill them slowly, nobody’ll notice. And we need to now stand up and say, if we can take a dead river and breath life back into it, we can do that in other areas too.

Partial Transcript: Fortunately, I was raised in a family with a strong mother who always told us and always let us know that you stand up for what’s right. So, if it’s on the playground, if it’s in school, if it’s—wherever—you see something that’s not right, it’s your job to stand up for it. And the environment has just always been a passion. I grew up in a rural area of Pennsylvania—Pennsylvania Dutch country—and so farming and mountains and rivers were just a part of where we played. When you come and see a river with three foot of foam on it that smells like rotten eggs and ask what’s going on with that river and you’re told, eh, it’s a papermill, you can’t do anything about it, that’s music to my ears because you can do something about it. One person can start. And by one person talking to another person, all of a sudden, you have a whole tribe that’s ready to fight for a clean environment.