Oral History Center

Listen to podcast episode 3, “Environmental Justice for All,” or read a written version of this podcast episode below.

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 3 is included below.

Listen to episode 3: “Environmental Justice for All” on SoundCloud.

PODCAST EPISODE SHOW NOTES:

Episode 3: “Environmental Justice for All.” This podcast episode accompanies a section of the Voices for the Environment exhibition that explores how, in the 1980s and 90s, communities of color in the Bay Area fought against environmental racism by creating new organizations, such as the Urban Habitat Program, to demand environmental justice—the equal treatment and meaningful involvement of all people in environmental decision-making. In the city of Richmond, activists in the West County Toxics Coalition and the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, or APEN, organized against toxic threats from the area’s petrochemical and hazardous waste facilities. Environmental justice activists helped transform the American environmental movement from one focused mostly on landscapes to one that increasingly includes the health and wellbeing of historically disenfranchised people.

This podcast episode features historic interviews from the Oral History Center archives in The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, including segments from oral history interviews with Carl Anthony, Pamela Tau Lee, Henry Clark, and Ahmadia Thomas, all recorded in 1999 and 2000. This episode was narrated by Sasha Khokha, with thanks to 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 3: “Environmental Justice for All”

Pamela Tau Lee: We cannot be afraid to talk about environmental racism. We cannot be afraid to discuss that, talk about what it means: the discrimination of communities in environmental policy and being left out of the process.

Sasha Khokha: What does justice look like? Whose lives matter? And how does that relate to the environment? In the 1980s and 90s, concerns about toxic industrial waste led communities of color in the Bay Area, and across the nation, to create new organizations and demand environmental justice—the equal treatment and meaningful involvement of all people in environmental decision-making.

Pamela Tau Lee: What we need to deal with is the racism that is the root cause of why industry was targeting communities of color: because communities of color would not have any power; that it’s much more acceptable to dump this stuff in communities of color. So if we shied away from talking about racism, we would then not be able to articulate the realities, and we felt it was racism.

[music]

Sasha Khokha: Welcome to Voices for the Environment: A Century of Bay Area Activism. This podcast accompanies an exhibition in The Bancroft Gallery at UC Berkeley that’s the first major effort to bring together both the oral history and archival collections of The Bancroft Library. The voices you’ll hear were 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 ways that Bay Area activists have been on the front lines of environmental change.

This is our third and final episode, called “Environmental Justice for All.” I’m your host, Sasha Khokha, from KQED.

[harmonica blues music]

Sasha Khokha: Communities of color have long confronted environmental racism—the disproportionate burden of toxic waste and industrial pollution in neighborhoods that are mostly low income and home to BIPOC folks. But up until the 1980s, the big players in the environmental movement focused on other issues, like preserving redwood groves or protecting bay shoreline from new construction.

Pamela Tau Lee: I think many of the mainstream organizations, you know, they don’t focus on people. They focus on the ecology and other natural resources.

Sasha Khokha: That’s Pamela Tau Lee, a environmental and labor activist from San Francisco whose oral history you’re hearing.

Pamela Tau Lee: These predominantly white organizations did not want to really acknowledge that there was a different experience felt by communities of color.

Sasha Khokha: Take the city of Richmond, where more than 75% of residents identified as people of color in the 2022 census. Located along the bay above Berkeley and Oakland, Richmond has been home to the Chevron oil refinery since 1902. A host of other polluting industries were established there, too. As a result, people in Richmond experience higher levels of pollution and toxins, and have less access to healthy environments to live and play. In the mid-1980s, Richmond residents formed the West County Toxics Coalition. It’s a multi-racial organization aimed at empowering the community to have a greater voice in the environmental issues impacting their neighborhoods.

Henry Clark: You know, like anyone born and raised in North Richmond, we know that there was environmental problems there, you know, over your whole lifetime. So it was quite only logical when the West County Toxics Coalition was formed and they began to organize in North Richmond.

Sasha Khokha: That’s Henry Clark, who grew up in North Richmond. In 1986, after earning his Ph.D. in religious studies, Clark became executive director of the West County Toxics Coalition, and he led it for more than three decades. As a kid in North Richmond, Henry Clark’s home was directly next door to the Chevron oil refinery.

Henry Clark: I can remember clearly waking up many mornings and finding the leaves on the tree burnt crisp overnight from chemical exposure, or you know, going outside and the air would be so foul that you would literally have to grab your nose and try to not breathe the air and go back in the house and wait until it was cleared up. Those type of situations, you know, were a common experience.

Sasha Khokha: Ahmadia Thomas also knows about the foul air in Richmond. She moved there in the mid-1970s and was active in community organizing. 

Ahmadia Thomas: Well, then I first came here, I didn’t know, but I used to smell these terrible odors. And I’d say, “What’s that?” And my husband said, “We all smelled it all the time, and we ain’t never made no kick about it.” But they didn’t know what they were smelling. And they were terrible odors: you know ones that smell like sulfur once in a while. Terrible odors out here, after I got out here. When I first came, I didn’t remember smelling all this stuff, but boy, after I was out here a while, I really got environmentally conscious.

Sasha Khokha: Thomas joined the West County Toxics Coalition, too, in part because she was concerned about how Richmond’s industrial pollution was affecting her health—and her neighbors’ health.

Ahmadia Thomas: Like a lot of people had long-term illnesses. Like, these illnesses we don’t know whether they’re short-term or long-term. But if you’ve been affected, say, five years ago and you’re still affected, well now that’s a long term. But, see, a lot of them has been affected. Children, too.

Sasha Khokha: Regular chemical exposures contributed to those illnesses, and so did the periodic accidents, fires, and explosions at the Chevron refinery.

Ahmadia Thomas: And then when they started having the accidents—whoo! There was always a fire or accident. It would be on the TV or in the paper: “There was an accident, but it wasn’t no harm to your health.” And that ain’t true! [laughs] Got to hearing that.

Sasha Khokha: Here’s Henry Clark again.

Henry Clark: You know, these chemical disasters, they do affect people’s lives and people do die from them. You usually don’t hear about the deaths that do occur. You now, they just end up being faceless people whose families may be aware of it, but most of the time you don’t hear about that. Nor do you really even get a good sense of the health impacts, because usually there’s no type of comprehensive health studies that are done or conducted after these disasters.

Sasha Khokha: But the health studies that have been conducted are clear.

Henry Clark: I do know that there’s a 33 percent higher than state average lung cancer rate throughout the Richmond area stretching actually throughout the county, stretching through the industrial corridor.

Sasha Khokha: Here’s Carl Anthony. He’s an architect, a city planner, and a former professor at UC Berkeley.

Carl Anthony: The communities get it. You don’t have to have a Ph.D. to figure out if you have asthma rates five or six times the regional average, it’s clearly symbolic of racism. It is an environmental racism.

Sasha Khokha: With so many other Bay Area groups focused on land, trees, and wildlife, Carl Anthony saw the need for a new organization to deal with the complex urban issues confronting communities of color.

[blues music]

In 1989, Anthony co-founded the Urban Habitat Program to focus on people who lived in cities. He envisioned it would be as multi-racial and multicultural as the Bay Area where he lived. And to better understand the connections between social injustice, economic inequality, and environmental racism, Anthony also helped create a groundbreaking journal, first published on Earth Day in 1990, called Race, Poverty, and the Environment.

Carl Anthony: When we began the Race, Poverty, and the Environment journal, we started looking at these. What is the energy cycle? We began to see that the whole system of extracting energy, distributing it, consuming it, and waste, at every step were huge social issues.

Sasha Khokha: Like the chemical pollution near oil refineries, or the health and safety issues for workers there, or the high cost of energy for low income people: all intertwined social and environmental issues. As executive director of the Urban Habitat Program, Carl Anthony built upon the Bay Area’s progressive and environmental traditions, with a focus on community-led decision making and public investment in historically disenfranchised neighborhoods. But, the more Anthony engaged with issues of environmental justice, the more problems he saw in the ways that mainstream, mostly white American environmental activists understood their own history.

Carl Anthony: There was a deep problem in the myth of the environmental movement, the story of the environmental movement, as having grown out of a certain understanding about the settlement of North America. Put really briefly, the settlement began in New England when the Puritans arrived, and then they found an empty wilderness, and they cleared the forests and built the dams and the towns, and came all the way across the country, and then they looked back and saw how much devastation they had made.

Sasha Khokha: By the start of the 20th century, that environmental devastation inspired the early conservation movement, led by preservationists like John Muir. But for Carl Anthony, this narrative focused too much on wilderness and the conservation of public lands, and not enough on the history of race and American expansion.

Carl Anthony: You know, if you look back a little bit, you say, “Wait a minute, hold it, what’s wrong with this model?” First of all, the North American continent wasn’t empty. There were ten million people here. So where do they fit in this story? And then, millions of people were brought from Africa who worked the land—now it has been eighteen generations—where do they fit in this story? And in particular, from the point of view of the racial issues, the things that were missing in the John Muir model was that this was the end of manifest destiny. It was the end of the frontier wars with the Indians. These were the years when there was rampant racism against Chinese people and against Japanese people in California; the years when Jim Crow was established, and the national parks were set up that were white only.

Sasha Khokha: If the old land-focused narrative of American environmentalism ignored social and racial issues, it also overlooked the urban issues that Carl Anthony was so passionate about.

Carl Anthony: So, the point I’m making about cities is that the environmental movement took off in many ways by saying, “We’re not connected with that whole thing, that mess around the cities. We’re not going to deal with that.” So there was this big hole. But in many ways, the issues that people are complaining about—whether it’s global warming, or whether it’s the squandering of, you know, chopping down the trees, whatever it is—are rooted in the way that we’re living in cities. So I felt that by setting up the Urban Habitat Program, we would then be in the position to be able to say, “This is how we need to think and act in relationship to restoring our cities. Here’s how we’re going to address the environmental issues; here’s how we’re going to address the social justice issues; here’s how we are going to address the economic issues. And because you care so much about biodiversity and energy efficiency and all these things, we would like to invite you to participate with us in doing that.”

[music]

Sasha Khokha: Bay Area activists soon discovered they weren’t alone in the fight for environmental justice. Shortly after starting the Urban Habitat Program, Anthony learned about the Toxic Wastes and Race report published in New York by the United Church of Christ’s Commission on Racial Justice. That analysis showed how government agencies across the nation consistently located toxic waste facilities in communities of color. And when the Church and other groups began to organize a national summit on environmental justice, the Bay Area sent a huge contingent.

Pamela Tau Lee: . . . 1991, in Washington DC, was so powerful to see people of color in this room talking about their struggles for justice in this country. I had not heard anything as dynamic and comprehensive since the Civil Rights [Movement] when I was young.

Sasha Khokha: Pamela Tau Lee, then a labor activist in San Francisco, attended that First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit.

Pamela Tau Lee: When you came into that room, you saw native people from Alaska, the deserts of Nevada, the Shoshone tribe. You saw African Americans who lived in small towns in the middle of Alabama, from the South, New Orleans, with African Americans from Harlem, and Detroit, and South Central Los Angeles. You saw brown people from Puerto Rico, from the border, together with Chicanos from New Mexico and California and farmworkers.

Sasha Khokha: At the summit, leaders of color shared examples of environmental racism from across the country, and they discussed what to do about it.

Pamela Tau Lee: People were there to articulate, what is it that we are experiencing? And what is it that we want? And what it is that we stand for? One is we cannot be afraid to talk about environmental racism. In many of the discussions when we start to talk with the traditional environmentalists, who are mainly white, or the government, they were very afraid of that term. And we said we cannot be afraid to discuss that, talk about what it means: the discrimination of communities in environmental policy and being left out of the process. The mainstream environmentalists, they didn’t want us to say anything about racism. They wanted us to use the word “equity.” And what we need to deal with is the racism that is the root cause of why industry was targeting communities of color: because communities of color would not have any power, that it’s much more acceptable to dump this stuff in communities of color. So if we shied away from talking about racism, we would then not be able to articulate the realities, and we felt it was racism.

Sasha Khokha: As Pamela Tau Lee recalled, activists at the summit also discussed a way forward: demanding justice and taking action.

Pamela Tau Lee: What we wanted industry and the government to use as the criteria for action was the facts: that there is a Superfund site there, that the soil is contaminated, that children are sick, that people have cancer, that the air quality here is bad. And therefore, do something! And what we were coming up against was, you know, “Prove it. Prove that the people are sick. Prove it.” And these communities don’t have the resources to do that. The government and industry knows these people are sick, knows the air quality is bad, knows the soil is contaminated, and should take action. So that was another key component, illustrated very wonderfully in the Principles of Environmental Justice.

Sasha Khokha: The First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, and the Principles of Environmental Justice created there, reshaped the trajectory of American environmentalism. It inspired a new generation of activists who put people—not just landscapes—within the environmental agenda. For Pamela Tau Lee, attending that 1991 summit motivated her and others to form a new Asian American organization for environmental justice that would work with people here, in the Bay Area.

Pamela Tau Lee: We came back, Asians came back, we talked together, networked together, and after three years, I think, we formed the Asian Pacific Environmental Network [APEN], which has done very powerful work . . . [with] the ability to begin to articulate what environmental justice looks like for the Asian communities in this country.

Sasha Khokha: The Asian Pacific Environmental Network, or APEN, formed in 1993, and its initial work began in Richmond. APEN helped the Laotian immigrant community from Southeast Asia gain a voice in the larger efforts to address the toxic pollution caused by the Chevron refinery and other industrial sites in the city. Today, APEN continues organizing communities for environmental justice throughout the Bay Area.

[music]

By the mid-1990s, the demands of the environmental justice movement reached the White House. On February 11, 1994, President Bill Clinton signed an Executive Order directing federal agencies to “identify and address the disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects of their actions on minority and low-income populations.” Here’s Carl Anthony reflecting on that moment.

Carl Anthony: Well, I think it was, first of all, an incredible achievement. And I can tell you, the ones that did it in the environmental justice movement were virtually uncompromising that the grassroots people have to be at the table. I mean, [they said], “To hell with all these experts and all these consultants and all these people.” They brought the people in who were suffering from the asthma, and respiratory conditions, and from the cancer.

Sasha Khokha: While the executive order didn’t mandate specific actions by law, Pamela Tau Lee thought it was an important benchmark.

Pamela Tau Lee: I think that President Clinton’s order had a very big impact. Many people want to have more, but there is no way that it was going to become law. But that executive order, I think, gave the movement opportunity to advocate the formation of a national environmental justice advisory committee within the EPA. That enabled the White House to call an interagency body to regularly discuss this. And I think that, you know, it’s not like spectacular changes, but I think that it has made a difference.

[music]

Sasha Khokha: By the late 1990s, when most of the oral histories you’ve heard here were recorded, several environmental justice groups had formed in the Bay Area. Like PODER, a Latinx-led group in San Francisco whose name stood for People Organizing to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights. And PUEBLO, which stood for People United for a Better Life in Oakland. And the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition in the south bay. These activists often supported each other’s efforts. Here’s Henry Clark.

Henry Clark: Here in the Bay Area, there’s different groups in Oakland or San Francisco that do similar type of work. And so when they have public hearings, or protests, demonstrations, or activities, we go and support their works, send people there to support their work. And when we would have activities here in the Richmond area, they send people over to support our work, so building relationships to mutual support.

Sasha Khokha: Working to integrate environmental, social, and economic change for justice is difficult. So activists celebrate their victories, large and small. Like in the year 2000, when APEN’s Asian Youth Advocates and its Laotian Organizing Project in Richmond were able to create community warning systems in multiple languages for when industrial accidents occur. Or in 1997, when the West County Toxics Coalition shut down the Chevron Ortho Chemical Company’s toxic waste incinerator, which had been belching out pollution for decades.

Henry Clark: That campaign was linked to the Chevron Ortho Chemical Company incinerator that had been operating since 19—I believe—67, on a temporary permit. And Chevron was in the process of getting a permit to expand the hazardous waste that was being burned in that incinerator. The West County Toxics Coalition felt that the company should not get a permit to expand their waste burning. In fact, they should actually decrease the waste that was being incinerated. So we organized a campaign to do public education. We received word that Chevron was withdrawing their permit application to expand the incinerator, and that the incinerator was going to be closing down. And so the incinerator has been closed and dismantled as of June of 1997.

[music]

Sasha Khokha: But creating change doesn’t happen quickly. Most of the big, mainstream and mostly white environmental organizations have been slow to expand their activism, their funding, their membership, and their leadership to include BIPOC folks. Even so, since the 1980s and 90s, activists for environmental justice have unequivocally transformed the U.S. Environmental movement from one focused on trees, and landscapes, and sensitive habitats, to one that increasingly includes the health and wellbeing of historically disenfranchised people.

Carl Anthony: What I consider the most important work that I’m involved in is reframing the environmental story.

Sasha Khokha: Here’s Carl Anthony again.

Carl Anthony: There will have to be a much more systematic acknowledgement that environmental and social issues are connected; they are not separate. In my view, that means the environmental justice movement in some fundamental way must become the mainstream of the environmental movement. And I think the environmental movement has had the enormous luxury of being a white movement. But if we’re really serious about changing the dynamics at a global scale, there’s no way that it can keep going as a white movement.

Sasha Khokha: Bay Area environmental justice organizations, like the Urban Habitat Program, have shown a way for activists to build upon their past while still moving forward, together.

Carl Anthony: We kind of represented that model. That yes, you could in fact be advocates of social justice, you could in fact be militant about social justice, and still be an advocate of environmental preservation.

Sasha Khokha: And Bay Area leaders like Henry Clark and Pamela Tau Lee were on the cutting edge of helping the public understand that environmental justice means justice for all.

Henry Clark: When you’re looking at it from an environmental justice perspective, or justice period, the bottom line is that you work out a situation where it will be just for everyone involved, and that’s really what you have to keep the major focus on, especially when you’re trying to deal with situations that have been historically unjust.

Pamela Tau Lee: Many wealthy whites were content for this to be in the back yards of poor communities of color. Well, we were not going to say, “No, we don’t want it. We’re going to put it in rich, white people’s backyards.” That’s not something that we were going to stand for. We were going to always fight for the protection of all, public health of all, the ecology for all.

Sasha Khokha: After all, as our shared world becomes more interconnected, these are issues that affect all of us. Here’s Carl Anthony again.

Carl Anthony: But ultimately, as we get into the twenty-first century, this is the story of how the whole human race is going to address the shadow side of the industrial revolution. It’s not just a Black story. The fact of the matter is that all of us who benefited from the way the industrial revolution had functioned, the gifts that it has given us, are participants in this problem of the shadow side of consumption and waste and all this. Black people just happen to have, you know, kind of an angle or an insight on a piece of this.

[music]

Sasha Khokha: Our relationships with the world around us define who we are. So do the relationships we have with each other. Over the last century, Bay Area activists helped advance our understanding of both of these kinds of relationships—from preserving California’s ancient forests, to regulating economic development, to pushing for the health of communities of color as an environmental issue. Today, the social and environmental challenges we face appear even more daunting than the ones earlier generations had to face. Only by working together and building on lessons from the past can we work toward the solutions we need to thrive in the twenty-first century and become the newest Voices for the Environment.

[music]

You’ve been listening to “Environmental Justice for All,” the third and final episode in the podcast accompanying Voices for the Environment: A Century of Bay Area Activism. It’s an exhibition in The Bancroft Gallery 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. It included segments from oral history interviews with: Carl Anthony, Pamela Tau Lee, Henry Clark, and Ahmadia Thomas. 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 so much for listening!

End of Podcast Episode 3: “Environmental Justice for All”

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.

Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the Oral History Center if you’d like to see more work like this conducted and made freely available online. 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 all the work we do, including 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.

Listen to podcast episode 2, “Tides of Conservation,” or read a written version of this podcast episode below.

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 2 is included below.

Listen to episode 2: “Tides of Conservation” on SoundCloud.

PODCAST EPISODE SHOW NOTES:

Episode 2: “Tides of Conservation.” This podcast episode accompanies a section of the Voices for the Environment exhibition that explores how three women in Berkeley formed the Save San Francisco Bay Association in the early 1960s to resist numerous land-fill projects that would have turned the waters of the San Francisco Bay into land. By 1965, advocacy from this association, later called Save The Bay, led to the creation of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, or BCDC, a new California state agency tasked with balancing the conflicting interests between economic development and environmental conservation. BCDC’s work helped bolster a rising tide of conservation that led eventually to similar state regulatory agencies, including the equally historic California Coastal Commission.

This podcast episode features historic interviews from the Oral History Center archives in The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, including segments from oral history interviews with Esther Gulick, Catherine “Kay” Kerr, and Sylvia McLaughlin recorded in 1985; with Joseph Bodovitz and with Melvin B. Lane, both recorded in 1984. This episode was narrated by Sasha Khokha, with thanks to 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 2: “Tides of Conservation”

Sylvia McLaughlin: And I was totally appalled, reading the [Berkeley] Gazette, of the city manager’s dream to fill over 2,000 acres in front of Berkeley. And this was one of the things that galvanized us into action.

Sasha Khokha: The San Francisco Bay Area is no stranger to development booms. From the Gold Rush to the rise of Silicon Valley, the region ‘s history has been marked by a steady stream of growth and development. In the decades after World War II, new industries and a roaring postwar economy brought millions of people to the Golden State. By 1962, California ranked as the most populated state in the union. State agencies built dams, universities, and a network of freeways matched only in its intricacy by a statewide aqueduct system stretching over 700 miles, north to south. In the Bay Area, this combined boom in both population and development meant space was at a premium, pushing developers to target building on the 1,600 square miles of the bay itself. By the late 1950s, city councils throughout the region considered a host of fill projects that would turn bay waters into habitable land. And that sparked environmentalists to push back.

Melvin B. Lane: Environmentalists should be extremists. They represent an extreme, and the people who are going to make a buck represent the other one. And the decision-maker should sweat it out in the middle.

[music]

Sasha Khokha: Welcome to Voices for the Environment: A Century of Bay Area Activism. 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. The voices you’re going to hear were 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. It highlights how Bay Area activists have long been on the front lines of environmental change—from efforts to preserve natural spaces in the wake of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, to the midcentury fight for state environmental protections, to demands to address the disproportionate burden of pollution that sickened communities of color around the bay.

You’re listening to the second episode of Voices for the Environment. We’re calling it “Tides of Conservation.” I’m your host, Sasha Khokha, from KQED.

[mid-century jazz music]

In 1961, Oakland Tribune reporter Ed Salzman published an article detailing the number of proposed projects to fill in parts of the San Francisco Bay. What sparked Salzman’s interest was not any one project in particular. But it was a 1959 Army Corp of Engineers map he had stumbled upon while working on another story in Sausalito. On the surface, the government map was a projection of the San Francisco Bay in the year 2000. To Salzman, it was a horrifying glimpse of the reality that awaited Bay Area residents if developers were allowed to keep filling in the Bay. What he saw took his breath away. On the map, the open bay had been reduced to a river. The article, published along with a graphic of the government map, sent shockwaves around the Bay Area, alarming three Berkeley residents: Catherine “Kay” Kerr, Esther Gulick, Sylvia McLaughlin, who talked about seeing that map in an oral history that all three women recorded together in 1985.

Catherine Kerr: There was no denying the fact that the visible destruction of the Bay had been, maybe, of unconscious concern, so that when the Army Corps map appeared in the Oakland Tribune showing that the Bay would end up being a river by 2020 because of all the fill, it was clear to me that this was certainly a possible train of events, and it needed to be stopped.

Sylvia McLaughlin: And I was totally appalled, reading in the [Berkeley] Gazette, of the city manager’s dream to fill over 2,000 acres in front of Berkeley. And this was one of the things that galvanized us into action.

Catherine Kerr: What happened was that the map that came out in the Tribune was brought to my attention. I went to a tea at the Town and Gown Club, and I said to Sylvia, “Did you see that terrible future of the Bay? And Sylvia said, “I certainly did. I think we should do something about it.” About two weeks later, Esther came over. We were sitting in the living room, and it was a beautiful day, and the Bay was very blue. I said to Esther, “I don’t know what’s going to happen to the bay. Did you see the map in the Tribune?” She said, “Yes. Wasn’t it awful?” I said, “Well,  do you think you would have time to do something about it?” Esther said, “Well, yes, I think I would.” So I said, “All right, good. There’s three.” I called Sylvia, and we got together, set a date for coffee, and decided how we would start. We decided to start with Berkeley.

Sasha Khokha: The three Berkeley women who started meeting in the spring of 1961 fit squarely within a well-established Bay Area tradition of women environmental activists. They were white, highly educated, and well-connected in local and state political circles. Kay Kerr, the initial organizer of the group, was a Stanford graduate who was regularly active on the Berkeley campus and in city affairs. Her husband, Clark Kerr, was a Berkeley professor and president of the UC system, a position that put Kay in regular contact with the UC Board of Regents, which included the Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and Speaker of the Assembly. Esther Gulick was a Berkeley graduate and wife of Berkeley economics professor, Charles Gulick. She, too, was active in campus and city affairs. Sylvia McLaughlin had graduated from Vassar College and later married Donald McLaughlin, president of a California gold mining company.

These three Berkeley residents bonded over a desire to save the Bay. They read city council plans, consulted with a host of academics on the Berkeley campus, and then called a meeting of the leading environmental organizations in the Bay Area. They were hoping that after they presented their information, the professional conservationists would take charge and spearhead the effort to save the Bay.

Esther Gulick: We had most of the leaders who were very influential in their own organizations.

Catherine Kerr: All of the conservationists that we could think of. The three of us had decided that we were not conservationists and this was a really terrible problem. We were going to tell them about the problem, and then we expected they would carry the ball.

Esther Gulick: We weren’t going to form an organization at all.

Catherine Kerr: We didn’t have any of the expertise. We explained about the Army Corps map. And everything that we could find out was that there were maybe eighty square miles of fill already proposed by various cities around the Bay. And so we said, “This is the problem.” And so, I remember Dave Brower saying. “Well, it’s just exceedingly important, but the Sierra Club is interested in wilderness and in trails.” Then the next guy, Newton Drury, said, “Well, this is very important, but we’re saving the redwoods, and we can’t save the Bay.” And then it went around the room to the point where there was dead silence. So we said, “Well, the Bay is going to go down the drain.” Dave Brower said, “Now there’s only one thing to do: start a new organization, and we’ll give you all our mailing lists.” And they all wished us a great deal of luck when they went out the door. Yes.

Sylvia McLaughlin: They said, “Someone should really do something about this.”

Esther Gulick: It turned out that we were the somebodies.

Sasha Khokha: When the meeting ended, the mission of saving San Francisco Bay stayed in the hands of these three Berkeley women. The new organization they formed that evening in the Berkeley Hills would be known as the Save San Francisco Bay Association. And the environmental groups who felt they couldn’t take on the Bay campaign? They did follow through on the promise to share their mailing lists with Kerr, Gulick, and McLaughlin. Out of the first 700 mailers the three women sent out, they received some 600 pledges of support. Within a month, Save San Francisco Bay had secured a solid membership base. And those members were starting to get vocal in their opposition to Berkeley’s plan to to fill in more than 2,000 acres of Bay shoreline. The expansion would have doubled the size of the university town.

Sylvia McLaughlin: Berkeley had gotten—their plan was at the stage of the planning commission. They were holding hearings, almost the last stage before it got to the city council itself.

Esther Gulick: I think that’s what made the people of Berkeley, when we once got organized and sent letters to about a thousand people in Berkeley to ask them if they were interested in joining Save The Bay and told them some of the things that were going to happen if this went through—like Berkeley being almost twice the size as it now is, with the other half out in the Bay, and there were things like maybe an airport going to be out there, there were going to be storage buildings and that kind of thing—they just couldn’t believe it. You know? They, like us, thought the Bay belonged to us, the Bay belonged to everybody.

Sasha Khokha: Thanks to the new Save San Francisco Bay Association, Berkeley city council meetings were soon inundated with objections to the plan. So were the mailboxes of elected officials.

Sylvia McLaughlin: We felt that numbers were very important. As an example, at the city council meetings we noticed that the people who stood up to represent themselves had no audience. The city council in those days was very polite. But if someone stood up and said they represented an organization of thus-and-so-many members, the city council was more inclined to lean forward and sit on the edge of their chairs and be a bit more responsive. So from those observations, we felt that it was important to get as many members as possible.

Catherine Kerr: I would say that was one of our very first lessons, that if you were going to save the Bay, you had to have the support, and you had to educate the politicians. And the second thing was that you couldn’t educate them or get their support without facts. So we spent a great deal of time on collecting facts and then educating everybody that would listen.

Esther Gulick: Also, the fact that we were getting members was very important. Because they listened to how many members we had and how many letters they got.

Sylvia McLaughlin: Our members were very responsive. We would suggest that they attend critical city council meetings and they would. Sometimes the following city council meeting would be wall to wall with chamber of commerce people. It went back and forth like that.

[music]

Sasha Khokha: Ultimately, the will of Bay Area residents trumped the aspirations of developers. In 1963, the Berkeley city council rescinded the plan to fill in the Bay from the city’s waterfront master plan. It was a big victory for city residents. And it would change Berkeley and the larger Bay forever. But with dozens of fill plans still pending on the dockets of other cities, the three Berkeley activists knew something had to be done in Sacramento to really save the Bay across the region. That opportunity came the following year when Kay Kerr was able to secure a meeting with state Senator Eugene McAteer.

[music]

A San Francisco native, McAteer was a powerhouse in Bay Area politics. He had served on the San Francisco board of supervisors throughout most of the 1950s before heading to the state senate in 1958. He quickly established himself in the legislature. He was close friends with fellow San Franciscan, Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown, and fostered good working relationships with the leadership of both houses. Like most California politicians of that era, McAteer was a builder and supported a range of development and state infrastructure projects, from freeways and universities to dams and other water projects. He also had a calculating eye when it came to climbing the political ladder. And he could tell that the Bay issue was a significant one for the state. He’d seen the legislature stall over the issue before. So, following his meeting with Kay Kerr, he proposed a different tact: a study commission on regulating bay development.

Joseph Bodovitz became one of the planners to lead that study. After an early career as a reporter  for the San Francisco Examiner, Bodovitz worked for many years with the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, also called  SPUR. In his oral history, he explained how Eugene McAteer’s involvement in the issue of bay regulation was both novel and key to why the plan succeeded

Joseph Bodovitz: I think what people tend to forget now is how unusual it was to have anybody of McAteer’s stature interested in an environmental issue in the sixties. It would be common now, but part of what was intriguing about it at the time was, here was a person who had not been identified with environmental causes at all, part of the establishment in the state senate, suddenly taking up a brand-new and obviously glamorous, important kind of issue. But, here was a big issue brought by conservationists for a couple of years, and here was the legislature not wanting to legislate. There was no consensus that would have let a bill pass. Yet, here was somebody with the power of McAteer able to say, “Well let’s have a study commission.” And McAteer obviously had enough clout with the governor and with both houses to get a relatively simple thing like that through. But as I say, the kind of political novelty of a McAteer being involved in a “do-gooder”, “posy-plucker” issue just made it a different kind of issue. I don’t know what would be a good example, like Ronald Reagan really being serious about protecting redwoods or something.

Sasha Khokha: The study bill that the legislature passed in 1964 gave McAteer’s team four years to develop a plan and show it could work. Their plan focused on three areas. First, a permit process for all proposed development and land use changes on the Bay. Second, a set of standards and criteria to judge the permit applications. Third, the development of an appointment commission that would hold monthly public hearings and decide on the applications. In the end, McAteer’s study group created what became known as the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, or BCDC.

These were uncharted waters. There was no precedent for this kind of environmental regulation back in 1965. In fact, BCDC was the first regulatory agency of its kind in the nation. For Joe Bodovitz, the chief architect of the Bay commission plan, this meant that the pressure was on and the clock was ticking.

Joseph Bodovitz: And here was the hand we were dealt in 1965: a temporary commission. Which means if you don’t score a touchdown, then the ballgame is over. Right? You don’t go on forever, so you don’t have the luxury of permanence. The goal was, “Let’s do something that will be the basis for successful legislation in 1969, that will both protect the Bay and encourage the kind of shoreline development you want to have. If you’ve shown, over the four years, that people were fairly treated; and that rational, necessary development was encouraged, not discouraged; and that the valuable bay-fill-in parts of the Bay were protected or whatever, you make a case for continuing. And finally, because the people that oppose you are going to be very strong, very well-financed and all, you have to maintain the public support that got the whole thing started. If you lose that, you’ve got nothing. You’ve got a plan and nobody who cares.

[music]

Sasha Khokha: While Bodovitz crafted the Bay plan and served as executive director of the commission’s staff, the operation of BCDC rested in the hands of founding chairman, Melvin B. Lane. Lane was the publisher of Sunset magazine. He fit the balanced approach McAteer and others envisioned for the new regulatory agency. He was a Republican and a successful businessman who could speak with authority to developers and real estate interests. At the same time, he was an environmentalist whose magazine had long celebrated the beauty of California and the West, and the importance of preserving natural lands. As Lane recalls in his oral history, he approached regulating bay development with a handful of basic policy concepts.

Melvin B. Lane: One of them was that, you don’t put something in the Bay that can just as well go on land. The next one was, you don’t put something next to the Bay that can just as well go inland. And that covered an awful lot of things. A house doesn’t have to be in the Bay, a yacht harbor does. [laughs] You know? So, if there’s a choice, okay, the things that are water-related get a priority over these others. Things that the general public can enjoy will get preference over things that just a limited group can enjoy. The things that a limited group of people can enjoy will get a preference over the something that only is for a single person, or a single owner. There are a lot of industries that need to be in the Bay, but if you fill it up with houses and warehouses, you don’t leave room for those things that really have to be there. 

Sasha Khokha: Lane talked about how BCDC took a perspective very different from the view of a  city council or a developer. 

Melvin B. Lane: I think looking at the resource, and what we thought it should be one hundred years from now, took priority over what somebody could do to make a short-term profit. One of the big theories I came out of it with is called “salami logic.” It’s very true, in my opinion, that if you look at a slice, you see something very different than if you look at the whole loaf. If somebody owns a piece of shoreline and some mud flats, and they go to the city council and they say, “Now I just want to fill in a little bit out here to help my building, but I’m going to put a little path around here, and there’s a picnic table. And I’ve got this architect that’s going to put ivy on my building, and I’m going to create fifty jobs, and I’m going to pay you twenty thousand a year in taxes, and on and on. And, I’ve only taken .0007 per cent of the bay.” A city council can’t turn that down. But if you looked at all of the privately-owned shallow parts of San Francisco Bay and said, “Now if this happens to even a large part of it, was that a good idea?” We’d say, “No.” If you looked at that one slice, you’d say, “Yes.” So as planners, we should be looking at the total, but a developer looks at only his thing. 

Sasha Khokha: Operating a commission that actually rejected permits for multi-million-dollar developments wasn’t easy. Almost immediately, BCDC found itself squaring off against all kinds of Bay Area business interests.

Melvin B. Lane: At the time BCDC was created there were some firms who were fighting it extremely hard, and they’d fought McAteer all the way through on the legislation. One of those certainly was Leslie Salt.

Sasha Khokha: Leslie Salt Company was the largest landowner on the San Francisco Bay, operating 26,000 acres of salt ponds at the southern tip of the Bay. By the time BCDC was created, however, this company was looking to develop large portions of their property as commercial and residential real estate. BCDC rejected the proposal. And that was a decision that impacted Mel Lane both personally and professionally, since he knew the family that owned Leslie Salt.

Melvin B. Lane: Aug Schilling, the president, was a friend of my family and my wife’s family. And they were a customer of my company. No, how do I say that? They bought things from us [laughs]. Or at least we were trying to sell them both advertising in our magazine, and one of the companies they owned was Spice Islands, and we published a book for Spice Islands. They were our biggest single customer in book publishing for a period of years right in the middle of all this fighting. So anyway, I knew them. They had decided a couple of years before BCDC came into being, that they were going to start making money on their real estate, because they were never going to do it in the salt business. So, they were off on these grandiose plans for filling in all the salt ponds, and therefore were scared to death of BCDC, as they should have been. And so, we did fight and scratch with them, and anything we ever had in Sacramento they were right there.

Sasha Khokha: We don’t know if Aug Schilling thought his company’s permit would get  preferential treatment because he knew Mel Lane. But he didn’t hide his disdain for the new agency regulating development in the Bay. After the decision, he referred to BCDC as “a bunch of Fabian socialists.”

BCDC also battled corporate giants, including US Steel and Castle & Cooke, better known by its two subsidiaries, C&H Sugar and Dole. The two companies proposed large fill projects on either side of the historic Ferry Building in downtown San Francisco. US Steel wanted to build an office complex in the harbor that would have included a 550-foot skyscraper, a structure more than  twice the size of the Ferry Building’s clock tower. Castle & Cooke’s project was even more ambitious. They had an idea for something called Ferry Port Plaza, a 42-acre fill that would house a hotel and an assortment of restaurants and shops. The footprint of the proposed plaza would have been 30% larger than Alcatraz Island. BCDC rejected both projects. And that sparked a bitter fight not just with the companies, but also their allies in City Hall, including Mayor Joseph Alioto.

Melvin B. Lane: Well, they wanted to put some big office buildings out in the Bay. And we did fight them on that, and everybody else took credit for it. But that U.S. Steel and Castle & Cook big building, we were the ones that stopped those. And they would have had those, because they had the city politics of San Francisco under control, and Alioto was right in the middle of it. We had awful fights with Joe Alioto over them.

Sasha Khokha: One of the more audacious proposals BCDC faced in its early years, was called the West Bay Project. It was backed by a real estate consortium that included David Rockefeller, Crocker Land company, and Ideal Cement. They wanted to fill in part of the Eastside of the Peninsula running from San Bruno to the San Mateo Bridge. Mel Lane recalls how the plan sought to remove 250 million cubic yards of dirt from San Bruno Mountain to fill in 27 square miles of the Bay.

Melvin B. Lane: They would cut down the mountain, push it in the Bay, and go right over Bayshore [Freeway] onto barges and take it down and fill in down there. And then, Rockefeller would put up the money and all the professional skills of planning the land and marketing it. Well, it’s like Candlestick Park, pushing land into the Bay. Developers just love that, God, they think that is so wonderful. Anyway, we finally wore them down, but they were tough and very able.

[music]

Sasha Khokha: In 1969, the California Legislature made BCDC, or San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, permanent. Sadly, Senator Eugene McAteer did not live to see the final vote. He suffered a fatal heart attack two years earlier. His vision, however—and the bold activism of people like Kay Kerr, Esther Gulick, and Sylvia McLaughlin—became enshrined in a regulatory agency that was the first of its kind in the country.

BCDC becoming an official state agency marked two milestones in the evolution of Bay Area environmentalism. First, it gave environmental considerations a permanent place in state government. Second, the agency aimed to strike a balance between economic development and environmental conservation. Here’s Joe Bodovitz:

Joseph Bodovitz: But see, it worked both ways, because the more development-minded people had to take a look at marshlands, but similarly, the dyed—absolute, if that’s the right term, conservationists, had to understand there was an economy in the Bay Area, and that shipping, after all, did depend on ports, and ports did depend on dredging and deep water access. People sort of had to confront the legitimate interests of both conservation and development. The idea, again, that Mel felt very strongly about is that reasonable, fair-minded people, confronted with facts in a reasonably unemotional way, are going to come out largely agreeing to the same kinds of things. They may disagree on a particular permit or a particular issue, but no fair-minded person can say marshlands aren’t important. Similarly, no fair-minded person can say ports aren’t important to the Bay Area economy.

Sasha Khokha: In fact, in his oral history, Mel Lane talked about exactly this: how what made BCDC historic was its role as government mediator. It created and enforced rules across the Bay; and it occupied a middle ground between activists and developers. Mel Lane said that was core to its mission.

Melvin B. Lane: I have a theory I inherited from Dave Brower actually. And that is, that environmentalists should be extremists. They represent an extreme, and the people who are going to make a buck represent the other one, and the decision-maker should sweat it out in the middle. These battles are ones that you don’t solve them ever, with the coast or bay or air or water or whatever it is, because tomorrow there is another group of citizens and voters and government leaders, so those battles just go on forever.

[music]

Sasha Khokha: What began with the activism of three women in Berkeley, and a brave proposal from a state senator, flourished into an environmental agency whose impact would be felt for decades to come. The work of BCDC certainly saved San Francisco Bay. It also helped bolster a rising tide of conservation that, in time, led to the creation of similar state regulatory agencies, like the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, the Delta Stewardship Council, and the equally historic California Coastal Commission, which both Joe Bodovitz and Mel Lane would also help steer in its formative years.

Yet, as the 20th century continued, the Bay Area once again found itself at a crossroads. Yes, environmental concerns now had a permanent place in government, but not everyone received equal treatment. Our next episode of Voices for the Environment explores how the disproportionate impact of pollution on communities of color led to calls for environmental justice.

You’ve been listening to “Tides of Conservation,” the second episode in the podcast for Voices for the Environment: A Century of Bay Area Activism. It’s an exhibition in The Bancroft Gallery at UC Berkeley that runs from October 2023 through November 2024. This segment featured historic interviews from the Oral History Center archives in The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. Interviews include Esther Gulick, Catherine “Kay’ Kerr, Sylvia McLaughlin, Joseph Bodovitz and Melvin B. Lane. 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 2: “Tides of Conservation.”

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.

Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the Oral History Center if you’d like to see more work like this conducted and made freely available online. 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 all the work we do, including for 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.

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

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.”

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