News from rural America.

his week on Yonder Radio we bring you a story from KBIA reporter Jana Rose Scheils about energy policy in Missouri. We also bring in Alexis Bonogofsky with the World Wildlife Fund to learn about sustainable ranching. Jocelyn Catterson takes us to the San Luis Valley with her interdisciplinary work interpreting drought through painting and art. Nick Bowlin of the Frontier and Katie Campbell of ProPublica bring us the story of their new documentary, Toxic Ground: How Oil Field Pollution Is Threatening Oklahoma. Finally, we head to the midwest with Arts Midwest reporter frankie felegy who brings us a story about basket weaving. Our featured musician this week is country artist Ryne Brashear. Tune in for all that, and more, on Yonder Radio.

TRANSCRIPT

Hi, I'm Jared Ewe, the host of Yonder Radio, where we take rural conversations and launch them into national reach orbit.

And that's what we're doing this week.

We're talking to Jana Roe Schleiss of KBIA, the radio station out of Columbia, Missouri.

And what's going on in Missouri is at the intersection of inflation and energy.

And then Alexis Borogovsky talks about sustainable farming and brings us a tiny rhyme that will help us get there.

Jocelyn Catterson is doing everything one person can.

She's in the San Luis Valley, and she interprets drought through her art.

We also chat with Nick Bolin of Frontier and Katie Campbell of ProPublica.

They put together a documentary, Toxic Ground, How Oilfield Pollution is Threatening Oklahoma.

That is on the way, along with Frankie Faligi.

We love talking to her from Arts Midwest.

And our featured musician this week is Ryan Prasheer, a rising country star at an intersection in his life.

Tune in for all that and more.

This week on Yonder Radio.

We'll be right back.

Thank you.

Jared Ewe here, host of Yonder Radio, Rural Conversations with National Reach, and we thank you for being here.

We're going to go full fireside chat on you today, folks.

Tell your friends this show is packed.

Coming up, Jana Rose Schleiss on Quip.

It's about energy, it's inflation, it is the conversation for right now.

A woman named Alexis from the World Wildlife Fund shows up and gives us a tiny rhyme that may change your life.

And we're going big with ProPublica, a huge story out of Oklahoma.

All of that is coming up with music and trivia and now news with editor of Yonder Radio.

I'm trying to be efficient here, Susanna, as I know you're the one that has to cut out all the extra stuff I say.

So efficiently to you, Susanna Brown with Rural Headlines.

What's going on?

Hey, Jared.

So I can't edit my voice to sound like yawn, but here I am with the news.

Thank goodness.

This first story is from Newsweek, and it's about President Donald Trump's approval rating.

So among rural Americans, President Trump has swung back into negative territory, according to a new Fox News poll.

This poll is showing Trump at a 44% approval and 56% disapproval among rural voters.

That is a 14-point decline from June, when the same polling found him at 51% approval and 49% disapproval.

Rural voters do continue to view Trump more favorably than voters overall, but dissatisfaction with the economy and inflation remains widespread.

Welcome to America, where every day is an election year.

What is happening here at the Medscape Medical News in radiation deserts?

What's the story?

So in more than two-thirds of U.S. counties, which is home to over 50 million people, there is a lack of radiation oncology practice sites.

This is from 2025, according to a national analysis of Medicare data.

And so between 2018 and 2025, community-based radiation oncology practice sites had higher odds of disappearing than hospital-affiliated sites.

And also sites in rural counties had higher odds of disappearing than those in urban counties.

So overall, the consequences of this data shows that in areas that are maybe already underserved, they're growing barriers to accessing radiation therapy.

And Grist reporting on wildfire smoke, many of us living it.

What are they saying, Susanna?

So wildfire season, as we've heard lots about, is becoming longer and more severe across the American West and specifically in Montana.

Wildfire has always been a part of the landscape.

But now summer is including days or even weeks when it's recommended that children stay indoors because of how unhealthy the air outside is.

And what's interesting is this isn't just having consequences on children's lungs from the smoky air, but also a 2024 UNICEF report found that wildfire smoke is also impacting children's learning, mental well-being, and opportunities for play and that kind of enrichment that can really shape children's livelihoods and their childhoods.

So let's do them a favor and stay informed for a better planet.

Susanna Brown, bringing the kind of Ivy League luster.

You'll never hear from Jan Patolsky.

Is he coming back soon?

What happened to him?

He's coming back.

I didn't hurt him too badly.

Okay.

On Yonder Radio with Rural Headlines.

Thank you.

Thanks, Jared.

All right, well, whatever's going on, Jan.

It's all in jest, we hope, for you the best.

A little poem.

And that was Susanna Brown doing the news, the editor of this very show, Yonder Radio.

Energy is the story across the nation.

Actually, energy and inflation.

And standing at that intersection is the woman I'm about to talk to, Jana Roeschleis.

She's a reporter with public radio station KBIA in Columbia, Missouri.

She covers energy, utilities, infrastructure, environment, and agriculture for the rural communities in central Missouri.

I'm excited that you're here because you can share with us the details of something called QUIP, which was quiet for a while.

But it's back because it seems like it's fertile grounds for this debate again.

What is QUIP?

Yeah, I've been following a 50-year-old debate that's been reignited.

As you mentioned, electricity demand is rising, and that's on people's minds.

And lawmakers and industry are looking for ways to respond to that.

And specifically in Missouri, policymakers are looking towards nuclear power.

They want new nuclear power.

They think it's the right choice to fill this spiking energy demand we have. but those multi-million dollar investments that's a lot of money and that how to pay for that has become a sticking point in the state legislature this year and that brings us to QUIP.

So yeah it stands for Construction Work in Progress C-W-I-P and it's essentially a financing mechanism that would allow a utility company looking to build a new power plant it would allow them to kind of spread the financial burden out among customers.

They can charge customers little by little, anybody getting power from them in their service area through their utility bills.

And that's shifting that cost burden away from the companies and among all of us.

And they can do that while that project is in construction.

So before it's completed or producing any power.

So the good thing for the company is it means that using Quip would allow them to build stuff, But they don't have to take out these huge loans often when it comes to nuclear power, prohibitively expensive loans that come with huge interest to finance those projects.

And the story of Quip, it's got history and it's just so tied in with everything we look back on as a society, things we remember with the energy crunch in the 70s.

And there it is born.

So give us a little bit of that journey.

Yes, let's go back to the 1970s.

It was a decade wherein I did not exist, but I learned a lot about it for this reporting.

There are a lot of economic conditions of the 70s that we're seeing again today.

For one, that increasing electricity demand that I mentioned was the same in the 70s.

Inflation was high.

Cost of living was rising.

Gas prices were up due to global conflicts.

All of those things we're seeing again today.

And, you know, late 60s, early 70s, mid 70s, a lot of nuclear power plants were being built.

Almost all of America's fleet was built during that time period.

At the beginning of that decade, Missouri's first and still only commercial nuclear power plant was built.

It's in Callaway County here in mid-Missouri.

The company behind the project at the time was Union Electric.

It's now owned by a utility called Ameren.

And the public, like today, in the 70s, many Missourians were frustrated with that rising cost of living and how those increases were showing up on their utility bills.

And in the mid-70s, that led to a campaign to ban Quip via ballot initiative.

And it was successful.

Voters in 1976 voted to ban Quip, and the ban went in effect.

And that was in effect for decades.

Power companies in Missouri could not use this financing mechanism to build power plants. until last year.

The Missouri legislature changed that law to explicitly allow gas plants to use Quip.

And there's debate about whether it can apply to other types of construction.

They've added some consumer protections that didn't exist in the 1970s, but basically now Quip is back on the table and it's kicked off this debate about whether it can or should be used to pay for new nuclear power plants.

There we enter into the pros and cons.

And the arguments are Tell me about some of these pros and cons that you've been learning.

Yeah, some of the quip debate mirrors just the nuclear power debate, period.

A lot of folks who are pro-quip are pro-nuclear power generally.

And we've been in this energy transition for some years now, right?

Society is trying to move away from dependence on fossil fuels.

So as we do that, some folks are seeing nuclear power as a good baseload power source.

Let me use a couple of industry words here, but I'll explain them.

Baseload power is essentially a plant that can work around the clock.

That's producing power almost at all times.

And energy experts say that that type of power is necessary right now to complement solar and wind, which are called intermittent resources, a.k.a. they only produce power when the conditions are right, when the sun is shining, when the wind is blowing.

So one of my sources, Michael Sykuda, is an energy economist at the University of Missouri.

He's in agreement that it's a good baseload power source, nuclear power.

And he says Quip is going to keep power companies from having to take on huge amounts of debt to finance new power plants.

We were talking about whether a state having Quip, like, enables them to invest in more power or have more power.

There's certainly anecdotal evidence that that has an impact for nuclear power as it has in Missouri.

And this is Michael Secuda.

About 11, 12 years ago, Ameren tried to propose a second Callaway plants and asked for Quip Authority to do that.

And because they didn't get the Quip Authority, they didn't build it.

So here we are 10 years later, about when that facility might have been coming online, and we are in a tremendous energy deficit.

And then there are those who know the cons and maybe even see it as such.

Tell us that story.

Yeah, totally.

Nuclear power is expensive.

As far as power plants go, they often take much longer to build.

And in recent history, they have run way over budget.

So those who are anti-QUIP say nuclear is a risky investment, and that investment shouldn't be placed on the residents of a state.

Jeanette Mudd-Oxford is president of the Board of the Consumers Council of Missouri.

It's a statewide consumer advocacy organization.

They don't think nuclear power is a cheap source of energy.

And they also say that Quip is a bad deal for Missourians.

They compare it to when the St. Louis Cardinals wanted to use public financing to build a new stadium.

If you're breaking out the St. Louis Cardinals, this fight has gotten ugly.

Here's a take from Jeanette Mott-Oxford.

They wanted us to pay $431 million to build this new ballpark and then charge us more to attend the games.

Such a deal, right?

That's socializing the risk and privatizing the profit.

We help build it.

And then we have a higher, you know, a higher cost for what we get in the end.

We help build a nuclear power plant for Ameren.

And we have higher rates in the end for our electricity.

Such a deal.

Proposals both to banquip and to support it.

They died in the legislature this spring.

I do suspect that the debate isn't over.

Missouri's Governor Mike Kehoe has assembled a task force to look for ways to expand nuclear power in the state of Missouri and the corporate utility Ameren, who owns the power plant in Callaway County.

They have been very clear that new nuclear power is a part of their long term goals.

Jeanette Mudd-Oxford and the Consumers Council, they want Quip back on the ballot.

Right now, they're asking the legislature to put it back on the ballot and they want it on the ballot as a constitutional amendment.

So what happened last year could not happen again if it were to pass again.

Jana Rose Schleiss, thank you so much for this story.

And we look forward to following it and learning more.

Thank you so much for your time, Jared.

That was Jana Rose Schleiss with KBIA in Columbia, Missouri.

You can find more about CWIP and energy in Missouri by following Jana's reporting at KBIA.org.

And now our featured musician this week, Ryan Brashear, a country singer who grew up on a cattle farm in southern Kentucky.

Well, he recently moved back to his hometown.

This is a song in it in the making.

He's gone from Nashville back to Upton.

And today we talked to him about how he is inspired by his small town and then moving out of the big city.

What does it mean for Ryan and his career?

So there is this video I found of you probably about 15 years ago.

And you tear a hole in small town America by playing Chuck Berry's Johnny B.

Goode.

And it won you first place in a talent contest.

Yeah.

And I'm wondering, what did that guy not know about life that you do know now?

Oh, my gosh.

There's so much that that guy didn't know.

I thought like duck walking across the stage like Chuck Berry was cool and doing everything that anybody else did.

I was trying to copy it.

You're more authentic now?

You found something in yourself that you like?

I would like to think so in the past 10 years.

I think that's the hardest thing to do.

At least it's been a struggle for me because I've spent the better part of my music career playing covers, playing other people's stuff.

The thing that I've kind of struggled with is like putting out stuff like, I think people will like this.

And I made that mistake.

I know now that the new stuff that I've been writing, it's like I really enjoy playing that more.

So I don't think I'm just like totally authentic.

I think I'm still pulling from my influences, but I'm definitely getting a much better direction.

It's like, OK, this is the way I want to go.

And this is what I want to be remembered doing.

Show me how to slow down.

Keep it steady in the middle.

Said there ain't no rush.

Got the answer to the riddle.

It's a diamond in the rock.

The world keeps spinning.

Time keeps ticking.

Don't try to speed it up.

It's already fast enough.

Well, congratulations to Upton, Kentucky, because I saw in the 2020 census you cracked 700 people.

Really?

Yeah.

Good deal.

Moving on up.

Yeah.

It looks beautiful down there.

I mean, you've got the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln.

You got Mammoth Cave Park, right?

That's pretty close to you.

Talk about Upton a little bit.

How does Upton make Ryan Brashear the artist that he is?

I think just growing up, I mean, you kind of had to get creative in ways to entertain yourself.

Like there wasn't a ton to do here, but it was it wasn't a bad thing.

That's one reason I'm I'm glad to be back here and nothing wrong with Nashville.

But it's just I enjoy this better.

And I know the people you feel a little more familiar with everybody.

And I don't know when I drive through Upton, I see the ballpark that I've written about.

I see the church softball and baseball when I was a little kid and just all the farms there that have, I don't know, I've worked on some of those other farms that kind of helped instill somewhat of a work ethic, I guess, to survive in the industry.

So it's just inspired me a lot.

And I'm glad to be back here now.

And I've written more songs, I think, since I've been a couple more songs since I've been back here now.

It's just there's just like less pressure here for some reason.

It could all be in my head, but it just feels more at peace.

There was a time when leaving L.A. or New York or Nashville was a sign that you'd given up, but that's not the case anymore.

I mean, this may be necessary for your career.

How are you seeing this?

That's definitely a fear that I had, and everybody I've talked to is like, no, you need to quit thinking of it like that.

I think back in the day, in the 90s and the 2000s, we didn't have technology the way that we did.

Everybody can set up a studio.

I can set up a studio right here in this kitchen and record an album.

And it's like, you couldn't do that then.

So it's like, if you weren't there doing it, then you had like no chance of recording or, you know, meeting that right person or whatever it is.

But nowadays I think that's helped, you know, with writing.

I do a lot of writing with people in Nashville, with people in just other States remotely.

And then I, and like, I'm not too far from Nashville.

So I still go quite a bit.

I went a couple of days last week and it's like, And I'm still playing and I'm still playing everywhere all over the country.

I just got back from Mexico playing down in Cabo.

And I played Roatan Honduras earlier this year.

I got to wonder, you know, you said in an interview I saw that you were all or nothing from a very young age about being a country music star.

And I'm wondering about your parents.

Did they ever have to find gentle ways to talk about potential disappointment to their country kid who may have been distracted while they were herding cattle?

I don't know if they I don't know if they found gentle ways they just straight up told me like very few people make it you probably won't just protective you know I've got a five-year-old boy and it stresses me out just I don't want anything to happen to him so I can't imagine like I think about my early early on when I first started doing this traveling all over the country at all hours of the night and I drove back from North Dakota straight through we left at eight o'clock in the morning and got home at eight o'clock the next morning and never, you know, never stopped.

We just took shifts driving.

I'm like, if my kid did that, that would make me a basket case.

Yeah.

They told me that just like, you know, this is a really hard business.

Like not a lot of people make it.

And if you talk to my dad, he would tell you like, I was pretty stubborn.

I was like, Oh, I think I can.

I don't know why, but I think I can.

I was like, I'm going to give it a shot.

I'm like, I know I definitely won't make it if I don't try.

So way at it for 10 12 years well you have this album out i'll start again sounds incredible everything you're chasing it's right in front of you get there when we get there when it's time thank you thank you i'm really happy with this of this record i'm of all the stuff that i've done leading up to this this has been you know what i'm most proud of well ryan i greatly appreciate you sharing your house and your time and your story and we can't wait to share your music and you on Yonder Radio.

So greatly appreciate it.

Thank you guys for having me.

That was Ryan Brashear, a country musician out of Upton, Kentucky.

You can find his newest album, I'll Start Again, on Apple Music, Spotify, or wherever you find your music.

Now it's time for our first trivia clue Every week we bring you Rural trivia about everything from history To pop culture And the answer to this week's trivia Is an event that took place in 1927 Or in the 1900s As my kids talk about my birth year On the border of Tennessee And Virginia 1927, border of Tennessee and Virginia What is it?

Some more trivia clues are coming up We're going to talk to Alexis Bonagoski and this simple rhyme for the prairies for all of us.

Oh, and pro publica in this story out of Oklahoma, this family and what they're dealing with that is coming up on Yonder Radio. music guitar solo guitar solo This is Yonder Radio, rural conversations with National Reach.

And that's what we're doing right now is conversing.

Thank you for being here and being part of the dialogue.

You actually can make it a two-way street, this conversation.

You can email us, info at yonderradio.com.

But right now, Alexis Bonagofsky is the vice president of the World Wildlife Fund's Great Plains program.

And she grew up the daughter of a farm town's tire guy.

So she knows work.

She knows farming communities.

And now she works with ranchers and tribes to bring back diversity in the prairie ecosystem to help wildlife and agriculture alike.

She's also a freelance writer and photographer who documents the prairies of eastern Montana.

And let me know when you hear the rhyme.

I'll remind you what it is on the other side.

I want to know about East of Billings.

Tell us about where you live and where you grew up.

So East of Billings is an idea, a concept, a sort of metaphor for things that people don't pay attention to or maybe care about as much.

And the term came from my friend Wally McRae, who was a cowboy poet and rancher east of Billings.

And him and I would have coffee a lot of mornings and he would always say, Alexis, no one cares what happens, EOB.

And what he meant by that was that the grasslands and the prairie tend to be overlooked by people, potentially because it just doesn't have that hit-you-in-the-face aspect of mountains, and so you have to look closer.

But I think people see it as empty.

The prairie is where a lot of the wildlife are.

It is an economic driver in our grass-based economy, and it's really a place that we need to protect and conserve and make sure it's healthy for future generations.

So these prairies, despite the topography, are delivering mountains of opportunity for change.

Yes, they are.

They definitely are.

And a lot of people, when we think about the prairies, don't realize how important they are for climate change and carbon sequestration, how important they are for filtration of water, and how important they are for wildlife habitat and for food production.

How much power do ranchers have, Alexis, in being able to help with so many things in curbing climate change, in maintaining the prairie?

Ranchers own and manage, depending on where you're at in the Great Plains, 70 to 80 percent of the land.

And so their decisions impact everyone.

It's really important that we support those ranchers in their land management goals in their attempts to become more sustainable and to make these decisions that will not only provide good, nutritious food for people, but also keep the grasslands healthy.

We work with 140 ranches covering about 1.6 million acres, and that is continuing to grow every month.

What can a rancher do to change what they're doing to become more sustainable?

That's a good question.

Every ranch is different.

And so when we work with ranchers, we really spend a lot of time trying to understand where they're at and what their goals are for their operation and how conservation projects can help them succeed both financially but also ecologically.

And what we say out here is what's good for the bird is good for the herd.

Luckily, a lot of management practices that are good for wildlife are also good for cattle.

We just really try to understand what improvements can be made.

And we're not prescriptive.

We don't go in and say, you need to do this, this, and this in order to work with us.

A ranch might have a really big pasture, you know, a couple thousand acres that they just turn their cattle out into at a certain time of year and then go gather them in the fall.

So we help with, hey, maybe we should split this pasture and you should, you know, rotate the cattle between these two smaller parcels so that land has a chance to rest.

We work with a lot of ranchers on virtual fence, which is basically collars on cows that talk to a satellite, so you can fence off riparian areas without physical fence, which we love because that doesn't impede wildlife movement.

And they can be a lot more adaptive in their management.

The goal is to make it as easy as possible to make those changes, to de-risk new practices.

So like virtual fence, for instance, we want to make sure that people can try it without feeling like, you know, they're going to go into debt doing it.

And we found that it works.

Do you have a specific story?

I mean, you laid out some pretty good examples of what you do and what the World Wildlife Fund does in talking to ranchers.

But is there someone you're working with now that you can kind of share with where you are in the process?

Astori is a ranch we work with in southeast Montana, and they used our help to split their pastures, add some extra water.

And then through those changes, their grass production improved so much that they were able to increase their herd size by 30 percent without buying more land.

Wow.

So the fact that someone could increase their herd size by improving the ecological function of their ranch and have better grass, more diversity, more wildlife, and more animals is pretty spectacular.

I mean, people get overwhelmed by all the things that we know need to be done.

And here you are in this pocket east of Billings doing it.

You've got to be stoked because I am, as you might be able to hear.

Well, I appreciate that.

There's so many things that could be worked on and do, but for me, the grasslands, the prairie, my home, the people that live here, that's what gets me up every day to do the work I do.

And I am very, very lucky that, I mean, who could have imagined that I could work for the World Wildlife Fund from my house near Billings, working with ranchers and tribes and people who care about the prairie.

I mean, it's, it is pretty remarkable.

Alexis Bonagofsky making major change in this world.

Sustainable ranching initiative, the World Wildlife Fund.

Thank you so much.

Of course.

Thank you for this time.

And I really appreciate the interest in our great grasslands.

What's good for the bird is good for the herd.

Oh, thank you, Alexis.

Well, next up, we have another song from this week's featured musician, Ryan Brashear.

Here's all about the roses.

Four in a bottle, 12 in a vase.

A five star buzz or a smile upon her face.

I gotta choose before this store closes.

I gotta make the call, it's all about the roses.

The choice at hand, I've had time and time again.

Sweet gratitude, not a proof temptation.

One could be the death of me, a real good time.

The other just might be my salvation.

Four in a bottle, twelve in a vase A five star buzz for a smile upon her face I gotta choose before this store closes I gotta make the call, it's all about the roses That was all about the roses from Ryan Brashear on Yonder Radio.

Next, we're headed to southern Colorado, to the San Luis Valley, where Jocelyn Catterson works for the Rio Grande Headwaters Land Trust, and also makes art that interprets scientific concepts like drought for community members.

She's also a member of one of our previous featured musicians in the gothic folk band The Beauty and the Horror.

She is a Swiss army knife of activity for her community, for the environment, for your soul.

Here's Jocelyn.

The San Luis Valley is an insanely special place that has been tugging at my heartstrings my entire life.

I have always really loved rural communities.

I grew up in a rural community.

I've spent most of my life in rural communities.

The moment that I moved here, I just felt so held by the valley and this community.

And it was just like a gut feeling that this is exactly where I'm supposed to be.

People in the valley talk a lot about the frog spirit, and everybody talks about this story of the frogs that used to live here, and the concept being that if you are supposed to be here, the frog spirit sort of attaches itself to your back and keeps pulling you back here.

A lot of my art focuses on really place-based topics, often natural resource topics, trying to translate some of the really complex science tied to water here in the San Luis Valley to more digestible visuals for people to help them understand.

Sort of the example of the type of work that I do is the groundwater piece that I did, which is a giant four wooden panels combined titled The Big Picture.

And so within that painting, there is literal data.

You know, there's groundwater aquifer data, snow water equivalent graphs surrounding all of that.

So without even knowing what the data that you're looking at is, you can understand the story. you have a picture of the aquifer, declining snowpack, potato plants growing in specific parts of the data versus other parts, pictures of burning beetle kill and wildfire smoke and dust on snowy mountains and how all of these things are connected.

Art is never really just art for me.

Art transcends language and so I think that often science can get really caught up jargon.

So many of these scientific topics are very relevant to our local community.

And sometimes we have to see it in order to feel that the data is actually connected to us.

I've done a handful of projects where I've gotten farmers and ranchers teary-eyed, which is, I feel like, a big deal because they can look at it and it hits a certain chord that's different than me standing up in front of an audience and talking about drought in the San Luis Valley.

So much of what I do, whether it's art personally or the programs that I create here, is trying to get more people aware of what is happening around them with the ultimate goal of more civic engagement.

Jocelyn Catterson, who strangely enough, her sister lives in my childhood home in Gould, Colorado.

Weird coincidence.

She's in Del Norte, Colorado now.

You can find her art at jocelyncattersonart.com and learn more about the Rio Grande Headwaters Land Trust at wrightslv.org.

It's time for our next trivia clue.

This event was made possible by New Technologies.

Remember, it was 1927.

It was made possible by new technologies at the time, like portable and electric microphones.

Was it the first bad open mic night?

I don't know.

Coming up, we'll have the answer, and we're also going to be talking to journalists from ProPublica and this documentary, Toxic Ground.

It's an incredible conversation about, I would say, a watershed, oil shed event in Oklahoma on Yonder Radio. music plays Yonder Radio, rural conversations with National Reach.

Hello, my name is Jared.

And Nick Bolin, a reporter with The Frontier, and Katie Campbell, a filmmaker with ProPublica, the two of them are behind a new documentary film called Toxic Ground, which tells the disturbing story of the consequences of orphaned and uncapped oil wells in Oklahoma.

The film follows the Merediths, whose home began filling with toxic wastewater last year, and who have struggled to get a response from the state government.

Here's Nick Bolin and Katie Campbell.

Nick, how does your relationship begin with the Merediths?

And what's happening with this family that gets you involved?

The quick story for them is on a day last August, this oily, black, sludgy substance just started coming up through the floor of their bathroom.

It was coming up into their bedroom.

Their eventual solution, and it kind of remains the solution today, is they had to drill a hole in the foundation outside the house where they thought it was coming up, and they were able to kind of divert this gushing substance into the yard where it is now killing all their grass and filling up a trench and spilling into the neighbor's yard.

So subsequent investigations have showed that there's an old oil well that was essentially just plugged with mud, not plugged by anything resembling modern standards in the 1940s.

And state records show that that's about 400 feet, just kind of like out their backyard.

There are some other aerial images from decades ago that suggest that that old well might not be 400 feet out the backyard.

It might actually be right underneath the house.

The state has not officially located the well yet, but it seems like a very plausible explanation for what's going on here is that there's an old well.

It's either right under or very near the house.

Something woke it up, and because it's unplugged, all of the toxic substances and fluid that tend to be in oil and gas wells are pushing their way to the surface.

There's so many entities here that could be involved in this story.

You know, you have oil and gas, there's insurance, there's home builders.

But there's this linchpin there that it simply just needs to be recognized that it is oil from a well.

Katie, journalistically, what does this mean?

Is that the pursuit?

What's really frustrating and interesting about this is that the Merediths are stuck in this bureaucratic holding pattern.

You know, regulators have been saying they can't do anything because they can't get access to below the foundation of the house to confirm whether or not there is this abandoned oil and gas well underneath their home.

They're saying, like, the house has to be removed first.

But they've done sampling that has been conducted by the commission that shows that there's salt readings that suggest the presence of wastewater resulting from the production of oil and gas.

And there's been other testing by the state's Environmental Quality Department that's found elevated levels of heavy metals that are commonly found in oil field wastewater.

And Mitch Meredith even took his own samples and paid for an independent environmental lab to test them.

And all the results from that have pointed to oil and gas pollution.

But the agency, the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, has never stated explicitly that the substance contaminating the Merediths' home is a byproduct of oil and gas production.

State lawmakers have passed this new bill that would create a fund that would help families like the Merediths, whose homes have been damaged by oil pollution.

And in fact, this law was inspired by the nightmare that the Merediths have been going through.

But the catch is that state regulators would have to confirm that oil and gas pollution damaged their home.

And so far, they've been unwilling to do that.

And the agency has simply referred to this pollution as water in public statements.

Well, this is like an Erin Brockovich moment.

OK, drink the water then.

Nick, you know Oklahoma.

What's the deal?

Why can't they just confirm what this clearly is?

Well, the sympathetic view for the commission is they want to find the actual presence of the well underground before saying anything too definitive.

Oklahoma has 120 years of oil and gas production and hundreds of thousands of wells that are unplugged and no owner to plug them.

In many cases, the state doesn't know where they are.

You know, you've got this state agency that is habitually underfunded and undermanned and has just a tremendous amount of oil and gas wells and pollution to deal with.

And that brings me to the Merediths, because here may be the darkest day of their lives when their daughter finds this fluid flowing into the house.

How was that introduction when you walked in?

What was the impression you got of this family?

Oh, I mean, you know, the first time I talked to him, it was just a, you know, a couple of people who really just kind of had their lives ruined in the span of 12 hours had gone from just a nice normal life with their three kids, one of them a newborn baby.

And by the next day, they were out of this house and they've never been able to return.

And they, you know, they still have a mortgage on it, you know, haven't been able to really put their life back together.

And I get the feeling, though, you know, a year ago, it struck me that this is not a family that would have been worried about oil and gas operations.

Who are they now?

Are they going to come out?

No matter what happens here, is this a family that's always going to be maybe vigilant for other families throughout the state?

I think so.

I mean, I think many people in rural energy states aren't naturally anti-industry.

I think they respect the jobs and the history of oil and gas.

But when industry pollution hits your backyard and it changes, it just naturally changes how you see the industry and the world in which they operate.

I think part of why they have been so vocal is that they don't want this to happen to anybody else.

Nick, how much trouble are we in with all of the pressure being pushed up against our Earth's crust by trillions of gallons of wastewater?

Yeah.

So, you know, Oklahoma has, just like every oil state, huge volumes of wastewater that's separated out from the oil.

And the industry's standard method of getting rid of it is blasting it out underground.

That method, which worked okay for many decades, has been causing problems in the past decade or so.

You know, in Oklahoma, the earthquakes, you know, we often call them fracking earthquakes.

That's from the disposal of all this wastewater.

So if you put it deep, you get earthquakes.

If you inject it shallow, you know, it can crack the rock and spread underground and get into groundwater.

We just have all these old wells here, right?

The ground is just full of holes.

Not enough of those holes are properly plugged.

Just basic path of least resistance.

When that wastewater finds one of these holes, it can race up from a couple thousand feet below ground to where drinking waters aquifers are, blast out onto the surface and pollute the land or pollute someone's house.

As far as regulation of oil and gas, you have a man in the documentary who's saying we'd rather go with a handshake than a hammer.

You know, not that I want anybody wielding a hammer, but is the handshake enough to get people to abide by necessary regulations?

So that's an interesting question.

At the top, the three commissioners who run this governmental body are elected and are regularly elected with a great deal of money from the industries they oversee, and a lot of that is oil and gas.

Within the agency itself, you certainly have people who are trying to do the right thing, but there are obstacles to cracking down too much on industries.

I've identified all these pollution events over the course of my reporting and then have also shown that the commission doesn't punish oil companies.

And, you know, by the state's own account, it's going to take a couple hundred years to plug all of the orphan wells that we know about, let alone all the ones we don't know about.

The issue with all old, you know, that pollution that comes from an old source of oil and gas is that there is no owner, right?

So the company that drilled that well hasn't existed in decades.

And so when there is no responsible owner to plug a well, that becomes an orphan, right?

It is the state's responsibility to deal with this.

The industry does pay a small excise tax into the orphan well fund from profits every year.

It's not a very large amount.

And, you know, the Oklahoma Orphan Well Fund, the number of orphans, the number of identified orphans is the most extensive in the country.

Yeah, this is a really big problem in oil states all over the country, and there isn't really an obvious solution.

It's like this is part of the cautionary tale.

If you don't hold the operators accountable to clean up the pollution and plug the wells while they're still making money, then you have this legacy.

So what is next for you with the Merediths in this story?

Well, we'll certainly keep paying attention to their cases, And then, yeah, we have plenty more stories about Oklahoma oil and gas coming.

So there's a lot more to read for those who are interested and more on the way.

We do have a call out for anybody else who has experienced the kind of things that the Merediths have experienced.

The documentation that the Merediths did themselves, we've seen that this kind of evidence that people gather not only makes it more possible to tell the stories, but also leads to really important change.

I think this piece and what the two of you have done will inspire people to share their stories.

They see that their stories matter.

That's the hope.

I greatly appreciate your time.

This has been just truly an honor to be able to talk to you.

Yeah, thanks so much for having us.

The work that you all do to share these rural stories across the country is really important.

Yeah, it was a pleasure.

Thank you.

That was Nick Boland, a reporter for The Frontier, and Katie Campbell, a filmmaker with ProPublica.

You can watch the full documentary, Toxic Ground, How Oil Field Pollution is Threatening Oklahoma, at ProPublica.org.

And now, one of our regular contributors, Frankie Falleghi from Arts Midwest.

The article at artsmidwest.org is Midwest Weaver Carries Family's 150-Year-Old Basketry Tradition.

And the person who brings it to us, ladies and gentlemen, Frankie Falleghi.

You bring us the story of the Graeber flavor.

What is the Graeber flavor?

From what does this derive?

I'm so glad you started with that.

I'm actually really proud.

I came up with that during my interview with Vicki Graeber.

And she said, I'm taking that and running with it.

And I said, you go, girl.

So the Graeber flavor started 150 years ago in the Dakotas.

So this man named Jacob Graeber, who you will later learn is Vicki Graber's great-grandfather, immigrated to the Dakotas, settled on a farm in Freeman, South Dakota, super small town.

And at the time, and still now, it's a hub for folks in the Mennonite community.

So Jacob began making baskets for egg gathering and for working on the land, because back then, if you needed something to hold something in, you made something to hold something in.

Through the generations, through his son, and then his son's son and then eventually his son's son's daughter learned about basketry and the process of sorting and soaking and drying and eventually plying and weaving it.

And it turned from this really practical form into a really beautiful art form that Vicky now practices today in Indiana.

In your article, she has, what, 15 types of willow growing outside of her house and make beautiful baskets.

And it looks like Vicky is the person to learn from.

Yes.

So Vicky's father was a master in basketry and not just in the family and not just in Freeman.

He won in 2009 the country's highest, highest folk artist honor through the National Endowment for the Arts.

And so now Vicky's like, okay, he's a master.

I got to live up to this legacy.

And she has.

Now one of her baskets is sitting at a Smithsonian gallery at the Renwick Gallery.

And it's sitting right next to a basket crafted by her dad.

And yeah, you mentioned all those 15 different willow pieces and species in her yard.

You'll have to look up a photo of this.

It's in our article of the really cool thing is all of the willows look different every single year, even if they're the same species, because it all depends on the weather and the soil mineral content and sunshine and how much water they get that year.

And so there's these beautiful like greens and reds and yellows, which you wouldn't think go into kind of a tan basket.

Something Vicky told me, which I have thought about, I'm a huge thrifter.

When I go to the Savers or the Goodwill, you see just racks and racks of baskets.

There is no such thing as like a machine-made basket.

All of those baskets were made by hand.

So if you think about the process of taking a stick from the ground and plying it and waiting and creating anywhere from what Vicky says, seven to 30 hours on a basket to make this beautiful thing that holds holiday traditions and memories and junk and arts and anything you want.

You sit with this basket.

This basket, you know, is part of your hands and is part of the stresses and the joys of your day.

And that is seen in every single little movement and tweak in these baskets.

And when you sell that, that person or gifted, that person who receives it is getting all of those memories as well, not just from the person, but from the willow that grew before it and the water that came into it in the soil.

And we can kind of go back and back and back, but it's a really holistic, circular, beautiful way of artistry and humanity coming together.

The Graeber flavor passed through the years and now shared with us by Frankie Flege.

So Frankie really into basketry and we appreciate it.

I guess I am.

I didn't realize until I started talking about baskets.

I told myself at the beginning of this interview, there would be no puns, but I'm just going to say this.

You're potentially a basket case.

That's actually good.

I like that.

Is that all right?

Okay.

I didn't weave any others in, but I just wanted to end on a potentially high note.

Well, thank you so much, Frankie Flegi.

Thanks so much, Jared.

Nice talking to you all again.

That was Frankie Flegi with Arts Midwest with a story about weaving in South Dakota and Indiana, the places you can find the graver flavor.

You can get the story at artsmidwest.org.

Well, it's time for our final trivia clue.

This event is considered to be the big bang of country music.

This event introduced musicians like the Carter family and Jimmy Rogers to the world.

The answer?

The Bristol Sessions.

The Bristol Sessions were a series of recording sessions that took place over two weeks in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.

Ralph Peer, a producer with the Victor Talking Machine Company, came to Bristol in order to identify and record musicians who played hillbilly music.

The first hillbilly record was created in 1922, and other major recordings followed in 1924 and 1926.

But the Bristol sessions are credited with the creation of country music because of the record's superior sound quality.

The lasting star power of musicians like Jimmy Rogers and the Carter family, whose sound still influences modern country, bluegrass, Americana, folk, and even rock musicians.

In 1998, Congress officially recognized Bristol as the birthplace of country music.

And we had one of their great, great grandchildren out today, Ryan Brashear, one of our first pure, hard-driving, Nashville-inspired country musicians today.

So we're happy to share his story and we are happy you are here to hear it.

The show brought to you by homonyms and you and the entire staff, which every week makes a new episode of Yonder Radio for radio stations across the country and at yonderradio.com.

Thank you for listening to Yonder Radio, a production of the Center for Rural Strategies, publisher of The Daily Yonder.

I'm your host, Jared Ewey.

Thanks to Don Castle and the Tennessee Sheiks, Steph Gunno and the Lone Tones, Quincy Ponfair, Leo Pozel, and Tim Merrimah for the great music.

Our editor and producer is Susanna Brown.

This episode was also produced by Alana Newman with additional support from Anya Patron Slepian and Julia Tilton.

Our executive producer is Joel Cohen.

The executive in charge of production is Adam Georgie.

Yonder Radio, rural conversations with National Reach. guitar solo