 Good afternoon or good evening. You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German or Turk or Japanese, but anyone from any corner of the earth can come to live in America and become an American. Welcome back to a nation of immigrants by weekly talk show program featuring the lives of the immigrants, knowledge, diversity and inclusion created by Sintank Hawaii and the Kingsfield Law Office. Our guests share their life stories, journey to the United States or their ancestor journey to the United States and their contributions to cultural diversity. Today's guest is Tova Fleger. Welcome Tova. Hi there. Hello. Thank you so much for inviting me to be on your show. Well, we are honored to have you and you are licensed attorney in Minnesota and you're currently focused on environment and environmental justice issues in the St. Croft's watershed, where you work in the University of Wisconsin system as a lecturer and a sustainability professional. You teach the topics, including sustainable land use law, environmental policy, environmental sustainability justice and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Your education includes a 2006 Jewish doctorate degree, Kung Lao Di, from the University of Minnesota Law School in Minnesota. What a coincidence. I graduated from the same law school in the same year. I feel like you look familiar. Yeah, it's wonderful to reconnect with you, Tova, on this platform. It's has been how many years we graduated? I lost count. It's better to just lose count and let it be the richness of the years. Well, after law school, you're a much better law student than I was. You are Kung Lao Di. I didn't, you know, with any honors. But after law school, you have working very hard. But let's start with you, family. And because of the topic of the show is a nation of immigrants, and you told me you are a first generation immigrant. And do you know how your ancestors settled in this country? Well, we know, and I'm saying we because I have not done any of this homework myself, but my mother and some other relatives have done some genealogy and we're more fortunate than most that we've got some stories. We've got some records that we can rely on, unlike many others who've come to many other countries around the world who weren't able to bring anything or were brought by force themselves. So we have some, we don't have everything, but I have some stories here. Before I get into that, I just have to, there's a couple of things I have to push back on. One, I never took law school in like a different language than my original birth language. So just on the Kung Lao Di and everything, I did try to take some literature courses in St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg, Russia, and it was challenging to say the least, and that wasn't law school, so. Yeah, what year was that? That was before your law school, right? After. Oh yeah, in undergrad, I lived in St. Petersburg, Russia during undergrad via Grinnell College, and so they had this fabulous study abroad program and I know now that you're teaching undergraduate students sometimes, so I hope that you also encourage them to study abroad where possible. I think it's so enriching and it was maybe one of the first things that opened up my understanding of intersectionality of sustainability issues where it's the Venice of the North, St. Petersburg, Russia, all of these canals, but they were all so polluted in 1997 when I was there and I asked people, well, why aren't we doing anything with this terrible water and people were basically saying, we're really trying to make a living and trying to get food on the table and have some overall stability, so having the canals be cleaned up is not the first priority and so having just a little inkling of understanding where people are coming from is something that I have tried to develop awareness of ever since then, but... Yeah, absolutely. I appreciated the anecdotes and there are so many things I can relate. I grew up in China in 1980s, 90s, and it was the economy was booming, but the environment was heavily polluted. And a few years ago, I went to Florida, a small town in Florida near Jacksonville and the air just smells so awful. I asked people, what's going on? They said there was a paper mill factory owned by Coach Brothers, just discharging polluted water in the river and nobody did anything about it because they provide basically jobs to half of the population. So I know exactly what you were talking about, that there's a balance where we need to, should we develop it first or then take care of the environment later, but that might be too late, don't you think, Tova? There's a sense of urgency and I think more and more people are becoming aware of that urgency. So I would completely agree and I am smiling at the paper mill factory because there's a case I teach some of my students in land use law about a paper bag factory, a paper mill back in the 1800s and some of the land use issues, are we gonna have this economy with this paper factory or are we gonna have clean water because the downstream farmers and residents were not too happy with paper mill back in the 1800s. So with your story, obviously we still have some work to do and we've made some progress and maybe it's a two steps forward, one step back for some of their dance version, I'm not sure, but. Yeah, yeah, well, you are very few people I know so razor focused on environmental issues. Yes, through your professional and educational journey, how have you experienced the shape of your current focus on environmental and sustainability issues, particularly in St. Croft's watershed in this particular area? Well, it's very selfish if I'm gonna be fully transparent. I have some, a place right near where I teach in River Falls, Wisconsin, where my family has lived there for decades and then moved away so it was not being taken care of and so I moved out here to take care of some of the land and try to restore some of it and we were talking a little bit before we started recording about thinking of our fabulous Midwestern water, Minnesota, Wisconsin. We've got so many lakes, so many rivers, so much fishing, all of this wonderful nature around us and I was getting delicious tasting water from my well on this property and come to find out the nitrates are just going in the wrong direction. They're a little higher than you want for drinking water and so applying our law background, looking into what are the legal limits, different restrictions. It's really challenging for somebody who is on a private well system in Wisconsin to get well water testing, to get information and this was several years ago, it's actually improved in my area since I came to this realization and there is an increase in free well water testing but any of my neighbors could not afford yearly well water testing so I would get our well tested and then give all the information out to my neighbors and that it got me interested in taking it further. Well, that's a wonderful thing for you to do is a few years ago I had a chance to test some water quality and I couldn't figure out how to do it and I called so many people in the government and in the university and everybody gave me different answers. So I can definitely relate to your story that for normal folks and not very easy and to understand the complications and even to figure out what the procedures are to protect themselves. So you are doing a wonderful job to help the community and you are both teaching and practicing and giving your background in law and we graduate from the same law school and in current role as a lecturer of sustainability profession so how do you integrate the legal framework into your teaching and are sustainable land use law environmental policy? So are they closely related or your separate them? My poor students, I think everything is related and I think everything has a connection to our legal policies and framework that we're working under in terms of sustainability and land use and I'm gonna have to backtrack just a little to say that my work isn't mine. There are so many people, one of the reasons that I started teaching at university was this well water and I'm not a scientist, I'm a lawyer by training so finding folks at the UW system who were working with hydrology and finding water testing through the counties, et cetera and connecting all of this was really something that I've been working on but none of the science, none of the product is mine, I'm just one little piece of it all and that's the other transitioning back to your recent question that's sort of what I have been realizing as I'm teaching different sustainability classes is that we've got these different lenses, different frameworks and policy really undergirds so much of the undergraduate experience and so much of our daily experience is just steeped in law whether we realize it or not. So if you're a student, if you're signing that loan agreement or your first apartment when you're moving to school or all of the app agreements on our phone are some of the examples I use for students to get that realization that policy and law is sort of ubiquitous and learning enough about it to work and get things done is valuable but it's not the be all end all and there are so many aspects of it around the world that I think have to start coming into the picture. So I am. Yeah, I totally agree. And would you describe a specific project or initiative you undertaken in the St. Croft's watershed that you feel particularly proud of and what impact it has had on the community and the environment. So you've been working on these in this area for quite long, 10 years? For a few years, well, almost 10 years now, absolutely. And so yeah, it all started from my selfish desire for clean water from my family well and connecting with the university. I connected with a watershed steward training that was happening through an EPA Environmental Protection Agency grant to the St. Croft watershed here in Western Wisconsin and taking part in that I became a volunteer and we started trying to basically address as many issues as possible throughout the 8,000 square mile and it's somewhere close to 20,700 plus square kilometers for those who use a more cultured metric system. But it's a lot, it's a lot of space and we have volunteers throughout the watershed, but not a lot of funding. It's not an incredibly resource rich area necessarily. And so we have done some work which got some recognition and won some awards to really boost the work and then started a collaboration with different counties, specifically Washington County in the St. Croft watershed area. And so we've managed to network and collaborate and really expand projects that started small and keep that local attention and that local awareness of what's happening, which I think is very important to have people who really have lived in an area and know the land and water to have that input into what happens if there's gonna be funding and ability to do something to improve or maintain it. But yeah, we have managed to complete several projects in terms from research to education to outreach and it's multiple small projects throughout the St. Croft watershed, but it has leveraged multiple times the original grants and awards and continues with just different energy from disaster recovery from natural storms and weather events to water pollution, addressing things like well water, testing, et cetera. And I just am thrilled to be working with such great people in the St. Croft watershed Northwoods and Waters of the St. Croft has been a partner with the St. Croft watershed stewards and the universities and it's just been a great collaboration all around. Well, so wonderful to hear and I congratulate you tremendous accomplishment and I hope you'll get and your team will get all the support that you need to continue the good work. You mentioned that you are not scientists, me neither. You and I both studied arts and literature undergraduate and then we received legal education and but you have been working with people in the scientific area and how has your understanding of environmental justice evolved and how do you address the complexities of the issue in your work and the teaching? I mean, not only to relate to the science but also other aspects of the environmental justice. Well, to address that, if you'll indulge me, I'll go back and try to answer your very first question with where did I come from, ancestor story? Oh, yes, yes, definitely. So this is Nation of Immigrants, this broadcast that I so very much appreciate and I wanted to just address, so some of my family were brought over as indentured servants, some came over mostly from the British Isles Western Europe area and we've got some stories dating back to Civil War colonial area. Yeah, and but just to note, a lot of the stories do address that we were coming to a place where people were already living. So as I've gotten older, we grew up with these stories of the dreaded scout, Benjamin Whitcomb, who was an ancestor of mine who fought in the Civil War and was so clever hiding in hollow logs and reattaching cobwebs across the top of the hollow logs so that the Red Coat Army wouldn't find him and it was very, you know, romantic sort of to a child to think of these daring exploits than learning a little more and learning where some of his awareness of how to function in this land came from indigenous people who were already here and who were getting forced off the lands in part by my ancestors, keeping some of that awareness and really starting to learn and address and I think as we who are immigrants and then one quick stop in 1938 and then I'm gonna come back to the present and wrap it all up, but there's a connection that some of my East Coast relatives have with organization daughters of the American Revolution and I'm not as familiar with them so somebody's gonna school me on it if they see this recording, but there was an organization and President FDR Roosevelt was retorting to them because they didn't like a lot of his policies and he said, you know, daughters of the American Revolution, it's important that we remember that you and I especially are a descendant from immigrants and revolutionists and that we have these maybe people who have some resources that are immigrants and that we have to both acknowledge where we have landed and to take care of that land and then acknowledge, you know, that balance of resources with how to respect where we've landed and this area that's nurturing us now. So I think I am trying to have that inform more of my work and I think the complexities are multitudinous, but... Multitudinous, yes. There is a lot that we can do just to acknowledge that many of us, even if we have this, whether it's science or literature or law, this background in formal study, not necessarily the expert in sustainable land use if we're not familiar with the land or water of a place and there's a lot of traditional environmental or traditional ecological knowledge that is being addressed and recognized a little bit more recently that was covered up for the longest time and so I think just recognizing that we're not necessarily the experts in how to solve some of the sustainability issues and the environmental issues and I think the justice part is really not only the acknowledgement, but if we have the resources to put some time and effort towards doing something about it and I would also recognize that we're being hosted by the lovely islands of Hawaii and so looking at environmental justice and environmental work, there's a lot of traditional ecological knowledge that is resurging in Hawaii currently and just a shout out to everybody who's working on that and trying to keep the islands from being the extinction capital of the world, which is what unfortunately Hawaii has been called due to some of the less careful movement of our species around the planet, so that's... Well, excellent. Well, very well said. Thank you so much, Tova. Now let's chin to a little bit lighter topic and it's been a while since we graduated from law school and I've been thinking because I never leave Minneapolis so I've been back to the U of M all the time and now reflecting on your time and our times at U of M, University of Minnesota Law School, Mongdae Hall, and what are the most memorable moments you'll still cherish from the law school? Well, obviously our debate, Shang. Yeah, that's right, yes. Was that legal writing, I think, the very first year? But yeah, for sure I really, it was memorable to get to meet people who were passionate about learning and taking action and it was memorable also for me to get to work with the law school clinics. So that was an opportunity to take what we were learning and then immediately apply it to the benefit of the community, whether it was I helped start the immigrant, or the, sorry, the workers rights clinic at the U of M while we were there, but there was immigration law, there was tax law, there were all sorts of family law clinics and all sorts of ways to really apply the learning that we had and help people at the same time. So that was a kind of memorable part of our school background. But how about you? Well, it's embarrassing to say that I'm not sure if you remember that it's a law school parking lot and there was a attendant and now it's everything is automatic by machine, but back when we were in law school and there was a attendant in the parking lot and he's shift as a midnight. And so basically all the, a lot of students waiting in the law library until midnight when the shift as when the attendant left the door open that everybody just went to the parking lot and the drive, drive out of the cars parking for free for the entire day just to say a few bucks. And we were poor law students, but that was the most memorable memory I had about law school. Obviously there were a lot of fun and wonderful memories, but that's just one thing I don't want to mention, just to make you laugh, yeah. It did and I have those memories. I tried to stay up till midnight, like all of you very hardcore studyers and it did not do me any good. I needed to go to bed way before that. My bedtime is earlier. Yeah, I totally, you made the right decision. That's not worth it. We did till midnight. And we are running a little bit behind time, but there are a couple of questions that I do want to ask you about. The first question is, you know, you're studying in Russia at a study abroad and you're probably pretty familiar with Russian art and literature. And who is your, I grew up with Russian literature and a Slavic music. And I was curious about who's your favorite novelist or author or who is the end of your favorite composer from that part of the world. We are going to have a much longer conversation about the cycle. We should have a separate episode for that. Yes. So I would say Bulgakov Mikhail Bulgakov is an author that I admire and writing about everything from being a doctor during war to very fantastical aspects of literature with Master Margarita. And I want to say something very cultured for the music. And I do appreciate the Tchaikovsky Prokofiev, but I've got to say my favorite Russian language music is probably all the pop and punk, like Dedetek and Bravo and Kino. So yes, but we'll have to chat and I would love to... Yeah, I'm eager to hear your recommendations. I should check them out. And I grew up with Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, but I also love rock and punk. The next question is, are there any specific books or movies that have deeply resonated with you and you would recommend it to our audience? That doesn't limit to a Russian literature or film. Well, a lot of mine are going to be environmental and agriculture focused, but there is a fabulous independent documentary, Seren las Duenas de la Tierra, and I'll just say it in English, excuse my Spanish, Dreams of Stewards of the Land. And so it's three new days films. Okay. And it's all about some young farmers who are trying to bring healthy food to their community and agroecology to Puerto Rico and the challenges they're facing all around. So it's a fabulous, well done documentary. There's also, we have PFAS, different carbon and other pollutant issues in the forefront of ag and environment. And so Dark Water with Mark Ruffalo is something that my students have found to be helpful in getting behind some of that PFAS and just to end, all sorts of books for students. And this is Vanessa Nakate, a bigger picture, just like Greta Thunberg. Yep, we've got all sorts of books and things to talk about some more, maybe. Yeah, we should definitely have a separate episode about recommendations, but in doubt of me for one last question, and that normally we end up on our show with our distinguished guest, if you could offer advice to your younger self in her 20th, what wisdom would you share? I was thinking about this and all I could think of was get working on climate issues sooner. We've got so much and it's a rich world, a beautiful world, and there's so much to work on, but if we don't have a planet, then a lot of the rest of the stuff is a little less meaningful, I think. So that's a great point. It's that the survival of our planet trumps everything, it takes priority. I totally agree, Tova. And we're all in it together. It doesn't matter where you're from or where you've landed. We've got to figure out this planet. Exactly, exactly. Well, thank you so much, Tova, for your time and for your insights. I really appreciate your work, you do the environmental justice, and I congratulate you for your accomplishment. And sorry, we ran out of time today. There are so many other questions I want to ask you. But definitely you might go back on the show and we'll talk about more about other things, not too heavy topics, perhaps, but I will continue to keep my eye on your work in St. Cross River watershed. And that's just so vitally important to our life in the Midwest. Thank you so much, Tova. It's one vote while you're here. One vote reconnected. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Aloha.