Podcast episode 1: “A Preservationist Spirit” in The Bancroft Gallery exhibit VOICES FOR THE ENVIRONMENT: A CENTURY OF BAY AREA ACTIVISM

Listen to podcast episode 1, “A Preservationist Spirit,” or read a written version of this podcast episode below.

Over a blue, brown, and green background there is white text in a stenciled style that reads Voices for the Environment A Century of Bay Area Activism, Episode 1: A Preservationist Spirit
Podcast Episode 1: “A Preservationist Spirit” is part of the Voices for the Environment exhibition in The Bancroft Library Gallery

Voices for the Environment: A Century of Bay Area Activism is a gallery exhibition in The Bancroft Library that charts the evolution of environmentalism in the San Francisco Bay Area through the voices of activists who advanced their causes throughout the twentieth century—from wilderness preservation, to economic regulation, to environmental justice. The exhibition is free and open to the public Monday through Friday between 10am to 4pm from Oct. 6, 2023 to Nov. 15, 2024, in The Bancroft Library Gallery, located just inside the east entrance of The Bancroft Library. Curated by UC Berkeley’s Oral History Center, this interactive exhibit is the first in-depth effort to showcase oral history along with other archival collections of The Bancroft Library.

This exhibition includes three podcast episodes that offer deeper narratives to supplement the archival posters, pamphlets, postcards, photographs, oral history recordings, and film footage that are also presented in the gallery. Please use headphones when listening to podcasts in The Bancroft Library Gallery.

A written version of podcast episode 1 is included below.

Listen to episode 1: “A Preservationist Spirit” on SoundCloud.

PODCAST EPISODE SHOW NOTES:

Episode 1: “A Preservationist Spirit.” This podcast episode accompanies a section of the Voices for the Environment exhibition that explores how, after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, demands to rebuild San Francisco targeted the state’s ancient and fire-resistant redwood trees, while desires for a reliable water supply called for damming the Hetch Hetchy Valley within Yosemite National Park. In the decades that followed, an outpouring of activism shaped the ensuing conflict between economic development and environmental protection, and fueled a preservationist spirit in the Bay Area that would only grow over the century.

This podcast episode features historic interviews from the Oral History Center archives in The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, including segments from the “Growing Up in the Cities” collection recorded in the late 1970s by Frederick M. Wirt, as well as oral history interviews with Carolyn Merchant recorded in 2022, with Ansel Adams recorded in the mid-1970s, and with David Brower recorded in the mid-1970s. The oral history of William E. Colby from 1953 was voiced by Anders Hauge, and the oral history of Francis Farquhar from 1958 was voiced by Ross Bradford. This episode also features audio from the film Two Yosemites, directed and narrated by David Brower in 1955. This episode was narrated by Sasha Khokha of KQED Public Radio and The California Report Magazine.

This podcast was produced by Todd Holmes and Roger Eardley-Pryor of the Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, with help from Sasha Khokha of KQED. The album and episode images were designed by Gordon Chun.

WRITTEN VERSION OF PODCAST EPISODE 1: “A Preservationist Spirit”

Anonymous Witness 1: The older people were running around wild! They thought it was the end of the world. Everything was shaking.

Anonymous Witness 2: Kind of a low roar. You had the feeling that the roof was coming off.

Anonymous Witness 3: It was a six-story brick building. We were on the third floor. When we finally got out of the building, we were on the top floor. The top three had gone off.

Anonymous Witness 2: By night the city was—it looked like the whole downtown area was on fire

Anonymous Witness 1: Everything was burned, you couldn’t—the home was gone. Everything was gone.

Sasha Khokha: Those are voices of people who survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. And they’re just some of the rare recordings you’re going to hear in Voices for the Environment: A Century of Bay Area Activism.

[music]

This podcast accompanies an exhibition in The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley that’s the first major effort to bring together both the oral history and archival collections of The Bancroft Library. You’re about to hear more voices recorded by UC Berkeley’s Oral History Center, founded in 1953 to record and preserve the history of California, the nation, and our interconnected world.

Voices for the Environment traces the evolution of environmentalism in the San Francisco Bay Area across the twentieth century, and highlights how Bay Area activists have long been on the front lines of environmental change—starting with efforts to preserve natural spaces in the wake of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. We’ll also learn about the midcentury fight for state environmental protections, and demands to address the disproportionate burden of pollution that sickened communities of color across the Bay.

You’re listening to the first episode of Voices for the Environment. We’re calling it “A Preservationist Spirit.” I’m your host, Sasha Khokha, from KQED.

[music]

Sasha Khokha: A beautiful vista, an ancient forest, a flooded valley. Our relationships with the world around us define who we are, from the air and water that sustains us, to the natural spaces we enjoy, to the creatures we share our surroundings with. Together, we refer to these intertwined elements as “the environment.” Sometimes we struggle with how to change those relationships.  We call that work “environmentalism.”

[piano music from the early twentieth century]

In the San Francisco Bay Area, a new environmental spirit was flourishing in the first decade of the twentieth century. The catalyst for this public activism was not pollution, oil spills, or climate change. Not yet. Back then, it was the 1906 earthquake and fire. 

On the morning of April 18, 1906, a massive earthquake struck just two miles off the coast of San Francisco, then California’s largest city. The quake, with an estimated magnitude of 7.9, was absolutely devastating. Thousands of buildings crumbled to the streets, reducing vast sections of the city to rubble. The recordings you’re about to hear are rare, firsthand accounts of people from the Bay Area who survived the harrowing event. These interviewees were children back in 1906, and they recounted their experiences decades later.

Anonymous Witness 5: I was ten years old, I’d just had a tenth birthday, but I had never heard of an earthquake, I didn’t know the word.

Anonymous Witness 6: We woke up. It’d shake, shake you right out of bed, but we couldn’t get out. The house boxed and the doors jammed, and we had a heck of a time.

Anonymous Witness 5: My mother got us into the doorway and stood us there. And she said, “now stand right here.” And she stood us right in the doorway, “Stand right here.” I said, “Well, what is it?” And we could look across the room and out the building and see the buildings collapsing out there.

Anonymous Witness 1: But when the earthquake came in 1906, the day of it, my mother had a baby girl on that morning. She was ill all evening, all night. The earthquake was so strong that, we lived on the first floor, and on the third floor, the balcony and everything fell down. And fire, our kitchen caught fire, there was my father. So finally, the people—there was a little Irish lady who lived next door with her two young sons, I think they were seventeen and nineteen at that time. Her sons broke the windows and took mother, the mattress, baby and all, brought them  outside on the sidewalk. I remember that like yesterday.

 Anonymous Witness 3: We were four people living in one large room in what was called the Old Supreme Court Building, which was diagonally situated across or located across from the City Hall. Larkin and McAllister Streets. It was a six-story brick building. We were on the third floor. When we finally got out of the building, we were on the top of it. The top three had gone off.

Anonymous Witness 2: So my father said, “You’ve got to get up. You’ve got to get up and dress.” First thing, we went out in the street and you could smell gas. People were all out of their homes in their pajamas and their nightshirts, and so forth, wanted to see what’s happening. Well, it wasn’t too later in the morning when we fully dressed and went out and down the street. And the street car on Geary [Street], the rails were all up in the air and bent. Big gaps, you didn’t, couldn’t—you wondered how far down it went, big gaping holes.

Anonymous Witness 5: And we watched people go by with empty bird cages, and wheeling empty baby buggies, and you know, in a state of complete shock.

[sound effect: fire bell ringing]

Sasha Khokha: As devastating as the earthquake was for San Francisco, it was fire that caused most of the damage. The quake ruptured gas main all throughout the city, sparking nearly three dozen fires, producing an inferno that burned for three-days straight. To make matters worse, firefighters and residents in San Francisco soon ran out of water.

Anonymous Witness 2: And then, about Noon time, we got word that city’s on fire and there’s no water

Anonymous Witness 1: We didn’t have a stitch of clothes on, just an up-top shirt, couldn’t get anything. He went back, thinking he’d be able to save something. Everything was burned, you couldn’t—the home was gone. Everything was gone, so we didn’t.

Anonymous Witness 5: We had gotten some blankets from my aunt. And of course, we went out with nothing from our building except what we were wearing. And we got some blankets from my aunt, and we slept in that—we stayed in that lot. That’s my first recollection of the fire, because from there we could watch everything burn.

[sound effect: dynamite demolition explosions]

Sasha Khokha: No water and a raging fire left city officials only one option: to create fire blocks by dynamiting the buildings that stood in the fire’s path so there would be nothing left to burn. 

Anonymous Witness 5: We watched them blast down on Valencia Street and down on Mission Street, sort of backfiring, watched them blast the old theater out there, the Valencia Theater. We slept under the blankets that night, and had to wake every once in a while and shake them because they were heavy with ashes.

Anonymous Witness 4: I recall going to where the Mint is today to watch the fire from where the Mint is on that hill. We could see the fire burning downtown from there on Baker.

Anonymous Witness 2: There’s the school up—it’s right up the hill here—the Lone Mountain College. It was a bare hill at that time, that’s where the name Lone Mountain came to be. So, we walked up there, and by night the city was—it looked like the whole downtown area was on fire.

Anonymous Witness 6: Mr Shields had an automobile, he was the third neighbor to us. So we went down on Market Street. Here was the Palace Hotel, and we were here. And we saw the windows go boom-boom from the heat.

Sasha Khokha: Here’s more recollections of what became known as the Great Fire of 1906.

Anonymous Witness 7: We could see the flames, the fire, from the hills that were burning, all the houses. And the Fairmont Hotel was being built at the time, and it wasn’t finished. And the fire was all around there, but I don’t think it did that much damage there. But just like it was over the sky above us.

Anonymous Witness 2: I can recall the first night when the city was on fire, saying nothing, just staring there next to my father. And I cried and cried. He finally looked down at me and he says, “Well, what can you do about it?” I said, “There goes San Francisco.”

Sasha Khokha: When the last fire was finally extinguished, San Francisco lay in ruins. The earthquake and fire had claimed over 3,000 lives and destroyed 80 percent of what was then the largest and richest city west of Chicago. Within weeks, the mission to rebuild San Francisco got underway.

What you may not know is that the plan to rebuild involved cutting down some of California’s ancient redwood forests. Coastal redwood trees (known scientifically as Sequoia sempervirens) are among the largest and oldest organisms living on Earth. They’ve survived along California’s coast for at least 20 million years, some of them reaching more than 300 feet high and twenty feet wide. That giant size made them a prime timber source to rebuild the devastated city, especially because redwood is pretty fire resistant.

That started a logging frenzy. Timber interests like the Redwood Car Shippers Bureau circulated promotional photos showing buildings constructed out of redwood still standing amid a burned-out San Francisco skyline. [sound effect: sawing wood] In the years that followed, lumber mills up and down the coast worked overtime to meet the city’s endless demand. And record shipments of redwood made their way to San Francisco Bay.

And here’s where the earthquake and fire led to an early call for environmental preservation. Bay Area residents, including John Muir and other members of the newly formed Sierra Club, spearheaded the effort to stop logging redwoods. Muir was an immigrant from Scotland who fell in love with the Sierra Nevada. In the late 1800s, he settled in the Bay Area city of Martinez. In 1892, he and other Bay Area residents founded the Sierra Club with an early mission to explore, preserve, and protect California’s mountains and forests. They feared the logging frenzy to rebuild San Francisco had already taken its toll on the region’s redwoods.

Take the area around Palo Alto. Located 30 miles south on the peninsula, the city got its name from surrounding redwood forests. Palo Alto means “tall tree” in Spanish. In the years after the earthquake and fire, that reference would be lost though, because rebuilding San Francisco depleted those “tall tree” forests.

Concerned residents throughout the Bay Area reacted quickly. They started lobbying the state and federal government to protect the region’s remaining redwood groves. State officials responded by expanding the boundaries of Big Basin Redwoods State Park in the Santa Cruz mountains. It’s California’s first and oldest state park, founded in 1902. Over the decades, the protected area of Big Basin would steadily expand to include some 18,000 acres. That’s 6 times as big as the park’s original boundaries.

Federal officials took action to preserve the redwoods, too. In 1908, Bay Area Congressman William Kent led the charge to federally protect 295 acres of redwood forest in Marin County, just north of San Francisco. The preserved area is known as Muir Woods National Monument. Here’s what John Muir wrote to Kent shortly after the Monument’s creation: “Saving these redwoods from the axe and saw, from money-changers and water-changers, and giving them to our country and the world is in many ways the most notable service to God and man I’ve heard of since my forest wandering began.”

John Muir and other men became figureheads of environmental preservation. But women played a critical—yet often overlooked—role in early environmental activism, too. Women provided much of the grassroots momentum to save California’s redwoods through letter writing, lobbying, fundraising, and leading various organizations. Women in the Sempervirens Club and California Club were instrumental to the creation of protected areas like Big Basin Redwoods State Park, Muir Woods National Monument, and Calaveras Big Trees State Park. The creation of these protected areas forced timber companies to concentrate their operations in more remote regions along the North and Central coasts. But the activists in women’s organizations, from the California Federation of Women’s Clubs to the Women’s Save the Redwoods League, kept pushing to protect those regions, too.

Men may have cast the votes in congress and state government to protect redwood forests, but it was the activism of women throughout California that helped put these issues on the table in the first place. Here’s UC Berkeley environmental historian Carolyn Merchant:

Carolyn Merchant: Women had power, but they had power through their roles in a traditional patriarchal society, so that they could do more things within that patriarchy than had been thought of before. And so women began to feel a sense of power, a sense of what they could do. And they can actually assert that power in order to help save the planet, and how women themselves can become important forces in the whole role of conservation and resources.

Sasha Khokha: The tug-of-war between the development of cities like San Francisco and preservation of California’s redwood forests—that was a fight that would continue for decades, putting the focus on humans, rather than fire or pests, as the primary threat to these ancient trees and their environments. This battle helped ignite and expand the preservationist spirit that would shape environmental activism in the Bay Area for the next century.

[music]

San Francisco had long impacted environments well beyond its city boundaries. In the wake of the 1906 earthquake and fire, the city’s efforts to rebuild began to affect more remote regions of the state, including areas previously protected by preservationists. And as rebuilding San Francisco continued, the city began to need not just trees, but water. 

In 1908, city leaders proposed a project to provide a reliable water source for San Franciscans. The scale of the idea was unprecedented. They wanted to dam the Hetch Hetchy Valley, which was then preserved as part of Yosemite National Park. The plan was to engineer a system to carry the water 160 miles to San Francisco—what used to be a 2 day stagecoach ride before the Yosemite Valley Railroad opened in 1907.

The proposal to dam Hetch Hetchy sparked a five year debate, from San Francisco city hall to the steps of congress in Washington DC. The preservationists who opposed the dam were led by John Muir and other Sierra Club officials. They argued Hetch Hetchy Valley was a sacred piece of Yosemite National Park. If it were sacrificed to bring water to San Francisco, that would set a dangerous precedent for tapping into resources in all kinds of protected areas. 

William E. Colby: Another outstanding matter that came before the Sierra Club for action, and John Muir was strongly behind it, was what we refer to as the Hetch Hetchy fight. The Hetch Hetchy Valley had been included in Yosemite National Park largely as a result of John Muir’s efforts.

Sasha Khokha: That was Anders Hauge [How-gee] reading the oral history of William E. Colby, who stood on the frontlines with John Muir during the Hetch Hetchy campaign. Colby, who was born and raised in the Bay Area, held the post of Secretary of the Sierra Club for more than forty years. He led campaigns to expand Sequoia National Park, as well as create Olympic and Kings Canyon National Parks. Here is Hauge again reading from Colby’s 1953 oral history about how he cut his political teeth in the fight to keep Hetch Hetchy preserved.

William E. Colby: San Francisco became interested in acquiring this as a municipal water supply. When we heard of it, of course John Muir was tremendously exercised to think that a great part of his work would be undone. And so the Sierra Club very strongly opposed this application by the city of San Francisco. We were successful in preventing the grant for a number of years.

Sasha Khokha: But city developers pushed back. Creating a viable water supply? That was progress. It would help bring fresh water to a thirsty city. Developers also drew heavily on the imagery of a vulnerable San Francisco left without water in the face of a raging fire. The 1906 earthquake and fire was the first natural disaster captured on film. So advocates for the dam had lots of material to help make their case.

William E. Colby: But the tide turned when Woodrow Wilson became president, because he named Franklin K. Lane, who had been City Attorney of San Francisco when the application for the Hetch Hetchy site had been made, Secretary of the Interior. Because of this change in the political situation, we found that we were at a great disadvantage. We had tremendous support from many sources. But this political change was too powerful for us. We even enlisted the support of civil engineers, hydraulic engineers, who aided us in preparing reports showing that there were half a dozen other sources of supply that San Francisco could have obtained. And that was absolutely demonstrated later on by the fact that Oakland went over to the Mokelumne River and obtained a very fine water supply and brought it into Oakland long before San Francisco got the Hetch Hetchy supply. We were handicapped in every direction.

Sasha Khokha: In the end, Congress sided with the city of San Francisco, passing the 1913 Raker Act, which permitted the flooding of the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite. And the construction of the massive O’Shaughnessy Dam, with an extensive water-delivery system. Colby recalled in his 1953 oral history how this decision impacted his friend and mentor, John Muir.

William E. Colby: The loss of Hetch Hetchy Valley was a tremendous blow to John Muir. I’m quite sure that this loss of the Hetch Hetchy Valley had a great deal to do with Mr. Muir’s subsequent Illness and ultimate death. He probably died in advance of the time that he would have if the attempt to save Hetch Hetchy had not gone against him. Muir didn’t mince any words in expressing his ideas of the tremendous loss to the nation by reason of the flooding of Hetch Hetchy Valley.

Sasha Khokha: John Muir died in December of 1914 – one year after congress voted to authorize San Francisco’s plan to dam  the Hetch Hetchy Valley.

[piano music]

Decades later, native San Franciscan and famed photographer Ansel Adams shared his grief over the loss of Hetch Hetchy. Adams joined the Sierra Club shortly after Muir’s death and would build his career photographing Yosemite National Park.

Ansel Adams: We lost the Hetch Hetchy. And one of the great disappointments there was Gifford Pinchot’s support of it. You see, he really turned the trick with the secretary of the interior.

Sasha Khokha: Gifford Pinchot as America’s first professionally trained forester. From 1898 through 1910, he served three American presidents in the US Department of Agriculture as the nation’s chief of forestry. He also became a major supporter of  damming the Hetch Hetchy Valley. If John Muir became a figurehead for the preservation of nature, Pinchot’s early leadership of the US Forest Service symbolized the corporate and multi-use model of natural resources.

Ansel Adams: People forget the Forest Service is primarily a commercially oriented, really, a controlling administration. It’s just recently that they’ve been stressing “many uses” for political reasons. It sounds very fine, and in many ways is all right. But when you get into very beautiful areas that should have park or wilderness status, see, it doesn’t work.

Sasha Khokha:  As Adams recalls, the Hetch Hetchy site was not just about getting water, but hydroelectricity for the growing city of San Francisco. That would help build the power grid of the utility giant Pacific Gas and Electric, or PG&E.

Ansel Adams: The Hetch Hetchy—where are you going to get your water? In San Francisco, that’s our water supply. And San Francisco, that is a big community. And the Russian River was considered. See, what happened there was that there was another site further down that would be much bigger in expanse but not so deep. And we worked for that very hard, but that could not provide enough power. There wouldn’t be enough “fall.” But the whole Hetch Hetchy was put where it is, in the Hetch Hetchy Valley, because of the favorable power situation. 

Sasha Khokha: Some of the defenders of Hetch Hetchy came from San Francisco’s business community, like Francis Farquhar [Far-kwar]. He was a Harvard-educated accountant who joined the Sierra Club a year after moving to San Francisco in 1910. He would serve more than 25 years on the Club’s board of directors, including two terms as Sierra Club president. Here is Ross Bradford reading from Farquhar’s 1958 oral history.

Francis Farquhar: I never participated in the Hetch Hetchy matter. I was in Boston at the time the bill finally passed. I had seen it in 1911 when I came out to the Sierra Club outing with Jim Rennie. We came all the way down the Tuolumne canyon and camped in the Hetch Hetchy Valley a day or two. I recognized its beauty.

Sasha Khokha: For Farquhar, the devastating  loss of Hetch Hetchy had a silver lining. Because – although tragic – it may have provided one of the most powerful and lasting influences for what would become the environmental movement in the U.S.

Francis Farquhar: I think that it is too bad that the national park idea had not developed further at the time to prevent the surrender of such an important portion of a national park. Possibly, the fact that Hetch Hetchy was surrendered strengthened the whole national park idea with the slogan, “Never another Hetch Hetchy.”

[music crescendo]

Sasha Khokha: Few activists in America likely used that slogan as effectively as David Brower.  Many consider him the godfather of the modern environmental movement. He’s from Berkeley, and served as the first executive director of the Sierra Club from 1952 to 1969. He oversaw a tenfold expansion of the Club’s membership and led campaigns to establish ten new national parks. Brower also pioneered the use of film, books, and other media to advocate for environmental causes. One of those was the fight against a proposed dam on the Colorado River in Dinosaur National Monument.

David Brower: I didn’t go to Dinosaur until 1953. That was the year the Sierra Club started to run river trips that were patterned after a river trip that Harold Bradley had taken his family on the year before. He went there to make a film, and made a family film, and showed around. That was certainly one of the things that awakened my interest in what was there.

Sasha Khokha: When the dam proposal came to congress, Brower and other environmentalists waged an all-out campaign to preserve Dinosaur National Monument. 

David Brower: It did—at least it was important to the Sierra Club. It was important to a lot of the conservation organizations, where they could really take on the establishment and stop it. There were all kinds of—that is, whatever led Newton Drury to say, “Dinosaur is a dead duck,” was a force that was reversed, and it was reversed with a battle that had a nationwide audience. And we persuaded a good many of the people whose voices were heard in Congress. They’re a lot of people, but you find a few of the leaders and get them to go, and you’re in fairly good shape.

Sasha Khokha: In his oral history, Brower says the similarity of the dam project in Dinosaur to Hetch Hetchy was striking. He highlighted that parallel in his advocacy film, “The Two Yosemites.” 

David Brower: There was one other thing that worked pretty hard, worked well in our lobbying effort. And that was the lowest budget film on record. The one I did on Two Yosemites. The budget was, I guess, five rolls of Kodachrome film and my own time. I did the editing, and I wrote the script, and then I recorded it. We put out this film, it’s an eleven-minute film. We made six copies of it. I showed those in a good many places. And it had quite an impact. That is, what had been done to Hetch Hetchy, and all the claims that were made of how beautiful a lake it would be and how great a recreational resource. Of course, it wasn’t. It isn’t. It wasn’t necessary. And the parallel with Dinosaur was so beautiful that we worked on that constantly.

David Brower in the film Two Yosemites: The other Yosemite was only a little less beautiful than this one, and a few miles to the north: Hetch Hetchy Valley. John Muir, the Sierra Club, and other conservation groups fought hard against this destructive park invasion. San Francisco argued that, without this water, they would wither; it must have this cheap power; there were no good alternatives; and the dam would enhance the beauty of the place and make it more accessible; the greatest good for the greatest number; teeming San Francisco against the few people who had yet visited Yosemite. Not one of the city’s claims has proved valid. 

Sasha Khokha: David Brower’s activism, along with efforts of other preservationists, did prove successful. In 1955, the Secretary of the Interior withdrew the proposal for the dam at Dinosaur National Monument. And that campaign was just one of many environmental efforts Brower would lead from Sierra Club headquarters in the Bay Area. By the late 1960s, Brower’s leadership would elevate the Sierra Club’s national profile, transforming it from a California-based group to one of the largest and most influential environmental organizations in North America.

[music]

We’ve heard how a new and bustling San Francisco arose from the ashes of the 1906 earthquake and fire. So did a robust and ever-growing spirit of preservation, a force that would shape environmentalism in the Bay Area, and beyond, for well over the next century. The activism that began to preserve the state’s ancient redwood forests would result in forty-nine state and federally protected redwood parks in California. And the legacy of the Hetch Hetchy fight helped inform the preservation of landscapes across the U.S.—423 federally protected areas to be exact.

Yet, in the middle of the twentieth century, environmentalism in the Bay Area once again found itself at a crossroads.The Postwar development boom forced a choice between protecting the environment and using natural resources to meet the needs of a growing population. You can hear that story in our next episode of Voices for the Environment

You’ve been listening to “A Preservationist Spirit,” the first of three episodes in the podcast Voices for the Environment: A Century of Bay Area Activism. It’s part of an exhibition in The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley that runs from October 2023 through November 2024. This episode featured historic interviews from the Oral History Center archives in The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. Including segments from the “Growing Up in the Cities Project” recorded by Frederick M. Wirt; and oral history interviews with Ansel Adams, Carolyn Merchant, and David Brower. The oral history of William E. Colby was voiced by Anders Hauge, and the oral history of Francis Farquhar was voiced by Ross Bradford. To learn more about these interviews and the Oral History Center, visit the website listed in the show notes. This podcast was produced by Todd Holmes and Roger Eardley-Pryor, with help from me, Sasha Khokha. Thanks to KQED Public Radio and The California Report Magazine. I’m your host, Sasha Khokha. Thanks for listening!

End of Podcast Episode 1: “A Preservationist Spirit.”

ABOUT THE ORAL HISTORY CENTER

The Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library preserves voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public. You can find our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria. Sign up for our monthly newsletter  featuring think pieces, new releases, podcasts, Q&As, and everything oral history. Access the most recent articles from our home page or go straight to our blog home.

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New Publication by Faculty Lisa Pieraccini

 Etruria and Anatolia : material connections and artistic exchange

Lisa Pieraccini, Lecturer of First Millennium BCE Italy, Reception, Collecting, has published a new book, available from the UC Berkeley Library. It is also available as an e-book. 

From the publisher’s website:

Striking similarities in Etruscan and Anatolian material culture reveal various forms of contact and exchange between these regions on opposite sides of the Mediterranean. This is the first comprehensive investigation of these connections, approaching both cultures as agents of artistic exchange rather than as side characters in a Greek-focused narrative. It synthesizes a wide range of material evidence from c. 800 – 300 BCE, from tomb architecture and furniture to painted vases, terracotta reliefs, and magic amulets. By identifying shared practices, common visual language, and movements of objects and artisans (from both east to west and west to east), it illuminates many varied threads of the interconnected ancient Mediterranean fabric. Rather than trying to account for the similarities with any one, overarching theory, this volume presents multiple, simultaneous modes and implications of connectivity while also recognizing the distinct local identities expressed through shared artistic and cultural traditions.


Townsend Berkeley Books Chat with Margaretta Lovell

Painting the Inhabited Landscape: Fitz H. Lane and the Global Reach of Antebellum America

with Margaretta Lovell
Wednesday, Oct 4, 2023 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
For more information, see the Townsend website
lovell

The impulse in much nineteenth-century American painting and culture was to describe nature as a wilderness on which the young nation might freely inscribe its future: the United States as a virgin land, unploughed, unfenced, and unpainted. Insofar as it exhibited evidence of a past, its traces pointed to a geologic or cosmic past, not a human one.

The work of the New England artist Fitz H. Lane, however, was decidedly different. In Painting the Inhabited Landscape (Penn State, 2023), Margaretta Lovell (History of Art) singles out the modestly scaled, explicitly inhabited landscapes of Fitz H. Lane and investigates the patrons who supported his career, with an eye to understanding how New Englanders thought about their land, their economy, their history, and their links with widely disparate global communities.

Lane’s works depict nature as productive and allied in partnership with humans to create a sustainable, balanced political economy. What emerges from this close look at Lane’s New England is a picture not of a “virgin wilderness” but of a land deeply resonant with its former uses — and a human history that incorporates, rather than excludes, Native Americans as shapers of land and as agents in that history.

Calling attention to unexplored dimensions of nineteenth-century painting, Painting the Inhabited Landscape is a major intervention in the scholarship on American art of the period, examining how that body of work commented on American culture and informs our understanding of canon formation.

Lovell is joined by David Henkin (History). After a brief discussion, they respond to questions from the audience.

Registration Requested


Robert H. Merriman Plaque online kick-off event 10/3/23

photo
Dr. Mark Strauss and Robert Merriman at the Estado Mayor of the Brigade at the Fuentes de Ebro, probably on October 12, 1937. ALBA Photo 11-0766 Tamiment Library, New York University.

Please join us in celebrating the memory of the UC Berkeley graduate student in economics, who gave his life fighting fascism in Spain as a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

Remembering Robert H. Merriman (1908-1938):
From Berkeley to the Trenches of the Spanish Civil War

Tuesday, October 3, 2023

6:00 PM – 7:00 PM Pacific (PST)

Online event (registration required)

Robert Hale Merriman (1908-1938) was a UC Berkeley graduate student in economics and native Californian, who was among the first of some 2,800 American men and women to join the International Brigades to fight for democracy during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). This diverse and racially integrated group of volunteers formed the unit known today as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, in which Merriman was quickly promoted to major, becoming one of the highest-ranking Americans in the conflict. He went missing in action on April 2, 1938, near the Ebro River in the province of Tarragona.

The University of Barcelona’s DIDPATRI research group has offered UCB a second casting of the commemorative  plaque that stands today in the village where it is believed that Merriman was held and then executed by the fascists. We are launching a fundraiser to cover the costs of its installation at the center of campus near Memorial Glade, which honors UC Berkeley veterans of World War II.

This memorial will contribute to the educational mission of the University as a readily accessible stop for campus tours, as well as a relatable point of reference for interdisciplinary classes touching on twentieth century history. Its location near The Bancroft Library, where the Bay Area Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Post Records are archived, will also call attention to the research opportunities available there. These records were donated by Merriman’s widow, Marion Merriman Wachtel, who accompanied him in Spain where she was also a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

photo of plaque

Project sponsored by the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at UC Berkeley.

For more information or to make a donation, please visit ucblib.link/robert-merriman.


Celebrate print and more this Bibliodiversity Day!

two books

Bibliodiversity Day was created in 2010 by Latin American publisher members of the International Alliance of Independent Publishers, a professional collective that brings together more than 800 independent publishing houses from over 55 countries around the world.

Since then, the event has taken place every year, especially in Latin America where the term “bibliodiversidad” was first coined. On September 21, the first day of spring for the southern hemisphere, publishers, booksellers, book professionals and readers are invited to celebrate independent publishing and bibliodiversity.

Bibliodiversity is the response to the huge imbalance in the publishing market, where commercial logic vastly prevails over intellectual adventurousness, characteristic of small, independent, or unconventional publishers. For academic libraries, the imbalance between commercial and independent publishers is further exacerbated by institutional preferences for digital over print. Faced with the continued prevalence of print publishing in most regions of the world (including Europe), the spectrum of viewpoints collected and preserved by academic libraries risks becoming impoverished without the conscious intervention of librarians and book dealers in charge of such curatorial decisions.

With that here are a few recent acquisitions to showcase from the Romance languages collection on this day of bibliodiversity:

Atzeni, Paola. Corpi, gesti, stili : saper fare e saper vivere di donne eccellenti nella Sardegna rurale. Nuoro: Illisso, 2022.

Ayroles, François. En terrasse. Paris: L’Association, 2019.

Bekri, Tahar. Chants pour la Tunisie. Neuilly-sur-Seine: Al Manar, 2023.

Cruanyes Plana, Toni. La Vall de la Llum. Barcelona: Destino, 2022.

Dumas, Catherine. Salette Tavares, Obra Poética 1957-1992. Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 2022.

Hernando, Almudena. La corriente de la historia : (y la contradicción de lo que somos). Primera edición. Madrid: Traficantes de sueños, 2022.

Junyent, M. Carme. El futur del català depèn de tu. Barcelona: La Campana, 2022.

Kanapé Fontaine, Natasha. Nauetakuan. [New edition]. La Roche-sur-Yon: Dépaysage, 2023.

Sánchez Soler, Mariano. Una hojarasca de cadáveres : crónica criminal de la España posfranquista. Primera edición. Barcelona: Alrevés, 2023.

Lugassy, Maurice. Les Justes en Occitanie : cette page de lumière dans la nuit de la Shoah. Toulouse: Privat, 2023.

Mak-Bouchard, Olivier. La ballade du feu. Paris: Le Tripode, 2023.

María, Daniel. Bisutería auténtica. Barcelona: Egales, 2023.

Migneco, Giulia. Donne e antimafia. Ed. Valeria Scafetta. Padua: BeccoGiallo, 2022.

Ondjaki. Vou mudar a cozinha : contos. 1a edição. Alfragide – Portugal: Caminho, 2022.

El Moumni, Salma. Adieu Tanger : roman. Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2023.

Previtali, Enrico, Elena Ravera, and Stefano Rozzoni, eds. “Nuovi fascismi e nuove resistenze : percorsi e prospettive nella cultura contemporanea.” Ospedaletto (Pisa): Pacini editore, 2022.

Scotti Morgana, Silvia, ed. La letteratura dialettale milanese : autori e testi. Roma: Salerno editrice, 2022.

Sonko, Seynabou. Djinns : roman. Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2023.

 

And remember, new acquisitions lists are running again for print titles in French, Italian, and Iberian Studies. Check them out!


New Publication by Faculty Margaretta Lovell

Painting the Inhabited Landscape by Margaretta Lovell
Margaretta Lovell, Professor of American Art and Architecture, has a new book published, available in the UC Berkeley Library.  There will be a Berkeley Book Chat with Margaretta Lovell, joined by David Henkin, Wednesday, October 4th from 12:00 to 1:00pm in 220 Stephens Hall.  Registration is requested for attendance.
“Painting the Inhabited Landscape is an American art history that in its depth of research and its absolute assurance in method and goals matches or surpasses anything done by any global modernist art historian today. It is a significant contribution to the study of nineteenth-century world history in visual and material studies, and will be of interest to anyone looking at the formation of global modernism, technologies, and capital markets.”—Bruce Robertson, coauthor of Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction
“Painting the Inhabited Landscape is by far the most insightful study of Lane and his art to date. Margaretta Lovell’s close examination of Lane’s life, art, and the historical contexts within which he worked represents not only a quantum leap for our understanding of Lane and his world but also a new standard of scholarship for the field of American art.”—Alan Wallach, author of Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States

Hispanic Heritage Month 2023

Hispanic Heritage Month 2023

Starting September 15th, Hispanic Heritage Month begins as we celebrate and commend the great works and achievements made by the Latinx community. Find inspiring and excellent recommendations by Latinx authors below and look for more in the UC Berkeley Library’s collection on Overdrive.



“Carolyn Merchant: My Life Exploring Science, Environment, and Ethics,” oral history release

New oral history: “Carolyn Merchant: My Life Exploring Science, Environment, and Ethics”

Video clip from Carolyn Merchant’s oral history on the 1970s social contexts for her book The Death of Nature

Color photograph of Carolyn Merchant outside with a green tree in the background
Professor Carolyn Merchant at UC Berkeley. (Photograph by Robert Holmgren.)

Carolyn Merchant is a Distinguished Professor Emerita of Environmental History, Philosophy, and Ethics at UC Berkeley. Her extensive research and teaching at Cal explored historical relationships between humanity, nature, and science with an ecofeminist focus on Western culture’s domination of nature and women. Throughout her academic career, Merchant published numerous peer-reviewed articles and wrote eleven books, as well as four edited volumes. Her genre-shaping publications—including The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (1980); Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (1989); Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World (1992), among others—influenced various academic fields from Women’s Studies to the History of Science, and from Ethics to Environmental History.

Merchant and I video-recorded seven hours of her oral history over four interview sessions in the spring of 2022. Those recordings resulted in a 132-page transcript that includes an appendix with photographs. Merchant’s full-life oral history not only explored her intellectual and academic career, but also recorded lesser known details from her female-centered childhood, her educational mentors, her personal relationships, and her social activism, all of which shaped her academic research and teaching at UC Berkeley.

Sepia photograph of Carolyn Merchant wearing a sweater and a pearl necklace
Carolyn Merchant in her senior year in Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, 1958.

Merchant was born in 1936, in Rochester, New York, where she and her younger sister were raised by their mother, grandmother, and aunt. Merchant recalled how sharing a home with five strong women taught her that “women could do anything. …That gave me a role model unconsciously to know that I could do anything I wanted to.” As a high school senior in 1954, Merchant became a national top ten finalist in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. She earned her AB in Chemistry from Vassar College in 1958, studied physics for a year at the University of Pennsylvania, and then, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, she earned her MA in 1962 and her PhD in 1967 in the History of Science. Her graduate research explored the Vis Visa controversy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries over a “living force” in nature, from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to Jean-Baptiste le Rond D’Alembert.

 

Video clip from Carolyn Merchant’s oral history on learning and teaching the history of science, 1960s and 1970s

During graduate school in Wisconsin, Merchant met and married botanist Hugh Iltis, with whom she had two sons, both of whom later graduated from UC Berkeley. Merchant also began her environmental activism during graduate school, which included lighting Wisconsin prairies on fire as a means to restore native plants and animal habitat. At that time, Merchant first read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which affected both her life and academic trajectories. In the late 1960s, upon completing her PhD thesis and her divorce from Iltis, Merchant and her sons moved from Wisconsin to Berkeley, California.

Color photograph of Carolyn Merchant outside and wearing a straw hat with a floral design
Carolyn Merchant in Honolulu, Hawaii, 1967.

Merchant’s life on the west coast provided new opportunities and realizations. While teaching the History of Science as a Visiting Lecturer at Oregon State University, Merchant lived on a Corvallis farm where the runner-up Dairy Queen of the state of Oregon taught her how to milk goats and cows. Merchant’s back-to-the-land experiences would shape her later analysis on utopias and what she described as the “organic society,” from John Salisbury’s organic concept of the state in 1159, to Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis in 1627. To support herself and her family back in Berkeley, Merchant worked as an adjunct instructor, which she eventually parlayed into a fulltime position. She taught as a Lecturer at the University of San Francisco, where by 1976 she became an Assistant Professor, and she also taught in the innovative, interdisciplinary, yet short-lived Strawberry Creek College program at UC Berkeley.

Throughout the 1970s in the Bay Area, Merchant engaged in feminist, environmental, anti-war, and anti-capitalist politics, which is how she first met UC Berkeley historian Charles Sellers, whom she later married. Over many decades together, Merchant and Sellers advocated for social justice and shared adventures traversing the United States in a camper van while searching for rare birds and visiting far flung archival collections. On the road, Merchant used some of the first laptop computers to draft her eventual publications. Back in the Bay Area, Merchant connected with intellectuals like Theodore Roszak and became a visiting scholar at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences. Around that time, Merchant learned from a USF colleague that UC Berkeley planned to hire a professor to work in the then-nascent field of environmental history. “I can do that,” she said to herself, and walked up the hill from her house to campus to submit her application. As she recalled, “when I was interviewed, I was from Stanford, and I was not a local yokel four blocks away in Berkeley where my house actually was.”

Video clip from Carolyn Merchant’s oral history on her hiring at UC Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources, 1980

Color photograph of Carolyn Merchant inside a room, leaning on a white cabinet and standing on a dark wood floor
Carolyn Merchant at her home in Berkeley, California, July 1984.

Women played a central role in Merchant’s research, as well as with her hiring at UC Berkeley in 1979. Merchant applied to the College of Natural Resources for a position in a new department then called Conservation and Resource Studies, which later became the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. On the hiring committee were five male faculty members and five female undergraduates. Many women took courses in the college, yet the faculty of the College of Natural Resources were still mostly men. After her on-campus interview, Merchant recalled “the students wanted a woman, and they lobbied. …They wanted to understand what role women had played in the environment, and how they used the environment, and how they developed as scientists and environmental scientists. And they liked me because I was interested in pursuing those topics and finding out by digging into the archives who the women were and what they had done.” The first three hires for the new department were all women. In 1980, one year after Merchant joined the faculty at UC Berkeley, she published The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, which remains in print today and has been translated into numerous languages. As Merchant recalled, when the book appeared, “there was a column in Newsweek, and then it was brought up at a congressional hearing. It [my book] was a criticism of what mechanistic science alone would do to the environment if it wasn’t associated with an ethic and some restraints and understanding of what the consequences were. So it was very gratifying to see that reception.”

The majority of Carolyn Merchant’s oral history explores her career as a Professor of Environmental History, Philosophy, and Ethics at UC Berkeley. The topics we discussed ranged from the evolution of Merchant’s research and teaching to her reflections on how the College of Natural Resources has changed over time. Generally, Merchant’s research and teaching examined the history and ethics of science and the environment through the lens of gender. As she noted during her oral history, “gender is so important and so central. Because most of human history, and most of even environmental history and the history of science, has been concerned with the roles that men play. And I want to make the roles that women play and the importance of gender as an equal thing, so that the roles of women are not obscured—and that women and men are equal partners not only in an existing political economy and a social economy, but they are equal partners in every aspect of trying to work together as partners to make the whole planet continue to live on.”

Video clip from Carolyn Merchant’s oral history on gendered reproduction

In her oral history, Merchant also addressed some of the specific, interrelated research themes that she developed throughout her career. One of those themes focused on science and domination, especially Merchant’s attention to impacts on nature as both a mental construct and a physical reality when institutions of science emerged within a patriarchal society. She also spoke about women and nature through the lens of ecofeminism. “Ecofeminism comes from a woman named Françoise d’Eaubonne in France,” Merchant explained. “Ecofeminism asserts the power of women and also their interrelationships with nature, and how women can save nature, and how women themselves can become important forces in the whole role of the conservation of resources.” Merchant discussed her partnership ethic, a contribution she made to environmental ethics in which humans of all genders, along with nonhuman nature, would be valued as equal partners inhabiting a flourishing earth. “Partnership makes nature and humans equal, and interactive, and sharing and giving,” Merchant declared, “and we have to conserve nature if we are going to go ahead and live in the future with an active nature and an active humanity.” In light of her own politics to protect and conserve nature, Merchant also reflected on about the importance of gendered reproduction, and how control of women’s bodies and the unpaid labor of those bodies are essential to the material, social, and cultural maintenance of a capitalist and patriarchal society. In contrast to the modern world’s focus on production, Merchant emphasized the need for reproduction: “allowing the reproduction of nature and its systems to continue is what is going to allow humanity to reproduce itself and to continue. …Because if we don’t allow the natural resources of the world to keep reproducing themselves, if we don’t set aside land or pass laws that prevent us from using everything up, we won’t be able to continue reproduction.”

Color photograph of Carolyn Merchant seated in her office on campus behind a desk covered with stacks of paper, which sits in front of a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf entirely full of booksCarolyn Merchant’s oral history is now available to read online, even as the ever-worsening impacts of climate change create an interrelated set of crises for the Earth and all living organisms on it, including humanity. After her long career teaching and researching environmental topics at UC Berkeley, Merchant admitted, “of course, I’m distressed that we have all the environmental problems that we have now.” Yet, in the face of these crises, she also shared her optimism. “There’s also hope in the sense that there are laws being passed, there are people who are working continuously, and there are new societies and new organizations being formed. So we’re at a tipping point. And hopefully, we’ll go in the direction of conservation, and environmental justice, and environmental reform, and saving the Earth.”

Carolyn Merchant, “Carolyn Merchant: My Life Exploring Science, Environment, and Ethics” conducted by Roger Eardley-Pryor in 2022, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2023.

Video clip from Carolyn Merchant’s oral history on her partnership ethic for humanity and nature

Video clip from Carolyn Merchant’s oral history on becoming a national finalist in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, 1954

ABOUT THE ORAL HISTORY CENTER

The Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library preserves voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. We are committed to open access and our oral histories and interpretive materials are available online at no cost to scholars and the public. You can find our oral histories from the search feature on our home page. Search by name, keyword, and several other criteria. Sign up for our monthly newsletter featuring think pieces, new releases, podcasts, Q&As, and everything oral history. Access the most recent articles from our home page or go straight to our blog home.

If you’d like to see more interviews like this conducted and made freely available online, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the Oral History Center. While we receive modest institutional support, we are a predominantly self-funded research unit of The Bancroft Library. We must raise the funds to cover the cost of each oral history. You can give online, or contact us at ohc@berkeley.edu for more information about our funding needs for present and future projects.


Romance Language Collections Newsletter no. 8 (Fall 2023)

This year’s welcome back newsletter for those working in the Romance languages focuses on digital and print resources. For the most up-to-date information on the UC Berkeley Library’s services, please continue to check the Library’s Get Help page.

Cinegramas: Revista Semanal (1934-36)
A substantial run of the Spanish weekly film magazine Cinegramas: Revista Semanal (1934-36) was acquired months before the Covid pandemic hit but can now be consulted in The Bancroft Library. It ceased publication with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936.
What’s new in the Library for Fall 2023?

  • 2022-23 Serials Reductions
  • E-reserves & bCourses
  • Reference & Instruction
  • Library Workshops
  • Library Research Guides
  • New Books and More
  • Open Access Books
  • UC Library Search – 4 FAQs
  • Featured Digitized Work

See also:


Library Orientation for Art Practice and Art History Students

Welcome back students! If you are interested in learning more about the wonderful library arts resources, please join us at one of our upcoming library orientation sessions. Current sessions offered include:

Tuesday, September 5th 1-2
Tuesday, September 5th 4-5
Friday, September 8th 12-1
Friday, September 8th 3-4

Please rsvp at: http://ucblib.link/orientationAHC

Registration will be capped at 20 students per session. New dates/times will be added to the rsvp form if the current offerings reach capacity. We will meet in the Art History/Classics Library (room 308, 3rd floor Doe Library).

orientationflyer

 

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