Episode 2: Tides of Conservation
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 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 filled the waters of the San Francisco Bay and turned it into land. By 1965, advocacy by 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 like the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, the Delta Stewardship Council, and 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.
A written version of this podcast is available at
https://update.lib.berkeley.edu/2023/10/03/podcast-episode-2-tides-of-conservation-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)