Episode 3: Environmental Justice for All
The podcasts for "Voices for the Environment: A Century of Bay Area Activism" are part of a Bancroft Library Gallery exhibition at UC Berkeley. This exhibit charts the twentieth-century evolution of environmentalism in the San Francisco Bay Area through the voices of activists who galvanized public opinion to advance their causes—from wilderness preservation, to economic regulation, to environmental justice. The "Voices for the Environment" exhibition was curated by UC Berkeley's Oral History Center and is free and open to the public from Oct. 6, 2023 to Nov. 15, 2024, in The Bancroft Library Gallery, located just inside the east entrance of The Bancroft Library. You can visit the "Voices for the Environment" exhibit website at ucberk.li/VoicesExhibit (case sensitive)
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 in order to demand environmental justice—the equal treatment and meaningful involvement of all people in environmental decision-making. In the city of Richmond, environmental justice 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, such as those in the Urban Habitat Program, 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.
A written version of this podcast is available at
https://update.lib.berkeley.edu/2023/10/03/podcast-episode-3-environmental-justice-for-all-in-the-bancroft-gallery-exhibit-voices-for-the-environment-a-century-of-bay-area-activism/
Visit the Oral History Center at ucblib.link/OralHistoryCenter (case sensitive)