Deborah Bahr

Partial Transcript: My name is Deborah Bahr, I moved here in the late 80s to put on a Rainbow Gathering in North Carolina and stayed. I moved to Del Rio and stayed.

Partial Transcript: The mountains, I loved the Great Northwest, that’s where I was headed, and this was the closest thing I could find. When I got pregnant I wanted to be close to my family, which were all up in Maryland, and so I was basically gifted with a house and I stayed here.

Partial Transcript: I lived with folks back in the woods who had land grants from King George, so I learned their stories and learned how to live in this area off the land. Learned that a lot of people here didn’t value their lifestyle as much as I valued their lifestyle, and I came from a bit of privilege, I’ve experienced all kinds of economic status during my life, all different levels, and I feel most comfortable with people who appreciate natural resources and try to connect their soul and their mind and their bodies align with a spiritual alignment that comes from the earth.
I worked with the Longest Walk and the Longest Walk 2 and Native American spirituality is where I feel the closest and every breath is a prayer and every step is supported by this green ball we call earth and I so want to make sure that it’s in as good a shape possible to pass on to my kids.

Partial Transcript: Oh yeah, ya know, poor folks need the lands to survive, and they can thrive when they don’t have to deal with pollution. And there’s no one left alive right now that remembers the Pigeon unpolluted, but there was a guy I met one time in his 90s he told me some amazing stories about swimming and about the fish and the animals that used to be around here. And collecting stories of our elders I ran across folks in their 60s who were asking their grandparents where the animals that they talked about in their stories were and why they didn’t see birds and animals on the river anymore unless they were dead.

Partial Transcript: Well, coming out of Maryland, as a young person I worked in the Chesapeake Bay, I’d watched it be a great thriving place that I played in as a child, and then watched it be a place where you couldn’t eat the fish that came out of it. And got my feet wet in activism trying to turn that around, had to make it a federal battle because 60% of the Chesapeake Bay comes from Pennsylvania and then it ends up in Virginia. So we had to work across boundaries, which was the situation here and it wasn’t really happening very successfully for this community, and the people here were very kind to me and very supportive so I thought I should use my education and my experience to try to help them find the resources to, for the answers that they felt were most valuable for their lives.

Partial Transcript: Well, we started really simple with the first Del Rio Festivals, putting up Tee Pees, and selling food, and teaching people Garbology, which is recycling according to the chakras, end up with a free box. And then we found some folks on the North Carolina side that were working with the department of, was it Deener, over there, their water quality state folks, and they were really kind to us and were trying to hold up the community below the Pigeon River, in Canton, and found Highlander Education and Research Center in Newmarket, and that’s where I learned about participatory research and popular education, kind of based on Paulo Freire philosophies, and going into a community, ‘cause I was an outsider, and not telling people what they should do, but trying to listen to them and help them find their voice and their own solutions and then help them find resources to put those solutions into practice,
And, I ended up having my daughter go to school here in Parottsville, I moved here because I liked the principal at that school. And she got to travel more than most of the kids that she went to school with and she was well versed in community organizing, ‘cause she hung out with me, I was her mother, and she came to really love the water and the community and wanted to do things where there weren’t any particular groups or support to do what she wanted to do. So I started some afterschool programs, at the old black school in town, the Tanner Building, and worked on active listening, and participatory research. I got all my kids through Highlanders Youth Camp, and their Seeds of Fire Camp, which taught them even more skills with people from all around the world, and this was one of their, the kids’ pet issues, and that’s kind of how I came to be working where I’m working now with the kids that I trained in high school, and in 7th and 8th grade. These kids went off to really good colleges, worked making really good money, and then came home and wanted to put their skills and their talents to work helping this be a community where kids didn’t have to leave, where they could live their lives out and buy a home and have a car and maybe go out to the movies and eat once in a while.

Partial Transcript: Well, it started with trying to prep the kids for public hearings, trying to work within the system using the processes. They were already in place, and it was, it’s a brutal kind of process because most of the decisions are already made by the time it comes around to the public hearing time. It’s more of a lip service that’s paid, and when the kids realized that they became very activated and very motivated and they did a variety of things that helped them out individually, and then over the years they figured out to how to work the system a little better. We went into litigation a couple of times, in the mid-90s a settlement was reached when EPA finally stepped in because the water was dead then, the effluent was so thick and the color so dark that light couldn’t penetrate. And the kids created a poetry troupe, they did spoken words slam style poetry, they wrote a poem that was scripted for a group and performed it at a public hearing in Cherokee. And it was the only time I’ve ever been to a public hearing where the folks in authority sitting in the panel actually put their pens down and looked up, and that was a key to me that, you know, like the bible says, the children will teach us, suffer the little children.
And so twenty years later, another cycle of fighting for the river comes around, Amelia Taylor, who you’re gonna interview later, was in Warren Wilson school and she took on the Pigeon River as a project and came to me asking for ideas. And then out of that came more litigation and public hearings and rallying the community to have their voice heard. And when we didn’t get very far, we got one thing that we wanted, which was a plan with the mill for low water flow, so in August when it’s not raining very much there wouldn’t be so many fish kills, and it had been a fish kill that precipitated the awareness in the community. But we had really great lawyers, really good support in the Southern Poverty Law Center, no, not them, Southern Environmental Law Center, that’s them, they helped but then they’re telling us that the things we wanted to argue over, which was like a numerical standard for the color, which doesn’t exist in Tennessee or North Carolina, and some of the chemical issues with the effluent and what it does to humans, the lawyers were saying the judges weren’t smart enough to understand those arguments, and so we shouldn’t spend our money and time trying to argue those points. So the kids got pretty disgusted, and so we pulled back, just like we are now when the E PA is being undercut and unfunded, and research isn’t being shared, and we just try to work in our community as locally as possible.
And so we started working around food issues and around trying to build resilience and hope again, so that we can finally get a governor, maybe, that will help us. In the past I think, in the 90s, what really helped turn the tables for us was Park Overall, she was a TV star, who comes from the next county up, and she used her celebrity to help us. And she bought some shares of stock in the paper mill and went to stock holders’ meetings, and she spent a lot of money of her own on lawyers and educating herself, and we’re partners with her right now over another river that borders Cocke County, the Nolichuckey River, and they are in litigation right now.
But the kids decided around 2012 that they didn’t want to do litigation anymore, it beat their spirits up too much, and they wanted to try to find more sustainable, more grass roots ways of supporting the community. And so it’s trying to change people’s minds, trying to educate them about the river. The river isn’t swimmable, our political figures feel that it is, and they don’t even know their DO3 list. And our kids have health problems that they carry with them months after they stop guiding along the river.
We are seeing a much improvement near, the big animals are back, the big birds are back but I still wouldn’t eat the fish. I know young women who have had issues with cancer. All the kids wear fingernail polish on their toes and their fingers because of staph infections that run rampant. There’s a lot going on with the river still, but because we’re able to make a little bit money off of it, the kids can earn a living wage working four days a week in the season, and they’re outside, it’s a healthy lifestyle, and then there’s a lot of camaraderie, and a lot of joy, you know negativity can’t stand by moving water, it just can’t. And they really value that in their lives, and we’re trying to figure out ways where we can get it just a little more cleaned up because we think it would be a big boon for the economy in this town as well.
We have the best of the commons with the national park and the national forest, and these kids, they know technology, we don’t have a lot of it out here, because we like our mountains and our trees better than we like our power lines and satellite dishes.

Partial Transcript: There’s a little foam.

Partial Transcript: Well, so the settlement brought the Pigeon River from the Dead Pigeon to the Dirty Bird, that’s what it’s called all around the country by paddlers now. I don’t swim in it, and I don’t let my dog drink out of it myself, but lots of people do.
And, what could I say about the river? The white water rafting industry has brought a lot of money into Cocke County. At first, nobody thought it would. The Olympic kayaking trials in the 90s were up here, and we held a really great protest with a coffin that Maria Guzman had made, and local artists had made some really great shirts about what your body looks like on Dioxin, and the kids had made little effigies of fish that they had seen from the river that didn’t look like normal fish. And we got to talk with the kayaking team that Champion, which is the name of the paper mill at the time, was sponsoring, and they had no idea that the water was in bad shape, ‘cause we’re telling ‘em you're gonna need to wash all your gear afterwards or it’s gonna really smell bad, and you should definitely take a shower when you get out of the water.
But the whitewater rafting industry brings a lot of diversity to the community, which is one of the things we really love. It’s pushed the local folks’ boundaries a little bit more. But the interaction and the money that it brings in kind of balances out their fear and some of the bigotry.
So, it’s been great to have more arts and culture that’s appreciated by everyone. We’ve been able to show off the local culture here in a different light. Things that a lot of local folks thought of as backwards, and things that would put them in a bad light, kind of flipped the script on them.
Like calling an outhouse a composting toilet, and pointing out that it’s a new technology. That people will pay a lot of money from the East Coast to come and experience this kind of lifestyle. How much healthier their food is and how people will pay extra to buy something out of your garden at a roadside stand, rather than going to the grocery store. That’s all been really interesting to watch the locals change about that. I call it “challenging the colonized mindset”. The folks here really have that kind of “noblesse oblige” attitude where they’ll, they feel, I think, that they’re unworthy. If somebody gives them a job that lasts year round they’re easily taken advantage of, because they’re so thankful to have that little bit of extra that they will do things, that they should be paid for, for free. And just trying to put a different framework around their attitudes and their worth.
In 2014 Cleanwater Expected in East Tennessee was working with the Seed Task Force. We have a broadband campaign because we feel that broadband would help everyone market their specific little niche to the tourists. We had people from 17 different counties here, some cold country folks, and we were able to take them around and show them success stories, Air B&Bs that were doing well, we had a farmer’s market that was thriving at the moment. The rafting industry, the hiking hostel, little convenience stores that service kind of the backwoods folks. And people went home, and what we heard was, when I used to talk about this plan for my community, my family and my neighbors told me I was crazy. But now I can show them where it’s working.
And we’ve had some great success stories, folks that were on food stamps had to work 2 or 3 jobs are now able to have health care and have a living wage, raise their kids, buy homes. It’s been a big change. But there’s a lot of fear associated with that change too, in the fact that outsiders are coming in more challenges their openness, and some of their Christian values too. But I’ve seen a lot of growth and it’s been very encouraging.

Partial Transcript: Well, SWEET is a Nestle volunteer organization and we want to support diverse social environments, thriving economic environments, and healthy natural environments, and we think that Cocke County has got a lot going on with the national forest and the park. With what we can offer folks with healthy lifestyle with mountain biking and paddling, hiking, camping. And we’ve got great stories. And, everything that happens here organically is intergenerational. The grandparents come along, everything is, being so rural, it takes a while to get from one place to another. So you kind of try to pack everything into one day and you bring everybody along so you can get it all done. And I hope that we can, that the communities can have enough voice and development so that it doesn’t become Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg and kind of, plastic Appalachia.
We want it to honor its roots and there’s a lot of culture here. We’ve watched the whole moonshine phenomenon kind of get usurped. Folks from outside came in and make a lot of money off of it. But I would love to see moonshine trails, we’ve got some local distilleries here. And then people staying in Air B&Bs, and maybe visiting artists’ studios, and hiking from one mountain down to the river and taking a rafting trip and then hiking up to the park, and spending a week here.
Folks that come and make connections they have a way of sticking, these mountains have a way of holding you, and people come back year after year. My daughter grew up here, she went to Berea College, which is geared to Appalachian kids, and she’s an amazing over achiever, and she tried to live here for 7 years after college and ended up moving to California. And she still comes back every year and she works on the river when she’s here to help pay for the ticket. Because the community, says, “oh ??? is in town, if you want her to come back we need to help her out.” And you can’t, you don’t find that in very many communities, especially when we are dealing with money. So, I’m hoping that we can create a space and an environment where kids can choose to stay in their community of place and live their lives out if they choose to do, and have it be a viable option where they can fulfill their potential and create something else beautiful to hand down to their kids while honoring the past. You always like to think, frame things, in 7 generations. And a generation being a lifetime, not just 20 years. So if you are looking back at your mother, grandmother and great grandmother, and then you’re looking forward at your kids, your grand kids, and your great grand kids. When you frame the world like that it makes it really easy to be a good steward of the environment, and to try to put your money where your mouth is. In a capitalist society anymore I feel it’s not one person one vote but one dollar one vote.

Partial Transcript: Well, there’s a lot of lessons there, and we’re standing on their shoulders. If they hadn’t made the small increments that they did we wouldn’t have anything to stand on. So it’s a foundation I think that needs to be honored. When you get to the top of the mountain, you don’t play king of the mountain you reach down on both sides and try to pull your neighbors up next to you so everyone is standing on top. And we’re sharing the resources and we’re not leaving a mess for somebody else.

Partial Transcript: Just thanks for your attention to the Pigeon River. We love it, we would love to have it be as clean below the mill as it is above the mill. And we think that if, we plan and expect that to happen. And it would be great to see it before our elders pass away, because they worked so hard and they lost so much, and they’re still grieving for that loss. And we feel it every time we walk by the river. But the heartache is getting less and less with the Eagles and the Ospreys coming back.