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)

Voices for the Environment - Episode 2: Tides of Conservation

This episode takes a look at the medical community’s first encounter with AIDS in San Francisco. As reports began to circulate of a mysterious disease affecting gay men, fear spread even faster than the virus itself. Here medical researchers and healthcare professionals discuss how the health community grappled with this fear of the unknown: from medical institutions and staff refusing to treat patients, to the internal conflict of the health practitioners themselves as they faced the reality that their pursuit to save lives could very well risk their own. Ultimately, the management of fear—among patients, the public, and the health community itself—proved to be one of the first steps in the city’s medical response to AIDS.

Ep 2: The Virus of Fear

This episode charts the uphill battle medical researchers faced in securing the needed resources and funding to combat the AIDS epidemic. The discovery of the epidemic coincided with the rise of fiscal and social conservatism in national politics with the election of Ronald Reagan. Public health budgets were slashed and there was little sympathy or support to fight a disease affecting gay men. In this episode, medical researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and University of California San Francisco’s KS Clinic reveal how they had to improvise in this context to piece together the crucial resources needed to make headway against the epidemic.

Ep 5: The Fight For Resources

Our final episode looks at how the collaboration between community members and health officials ultimately came to redefine care for AIDS. We hear medical staff and community members describe the multi-pronged approach developed at San Francisco General Hospital’s Ward 5b, which  combined care, research, social work, and community involvement. Together, health officials and community members pioneered a new way of treating epidemic disease and human suffering—a new way that became known as the San Francisco Model.

EP 6: Ward 5b, or The San Francisco Model

The Oral History Center preserves voices of people from all walks of life, with varying political perspectives, national origins, and ethnic backgrounds. Our podcast, The Berkeley Remix, delves into pressing issues, making our vast archive accessible to scholars and the public. The UC Berkeley Oral History Center, a division of The Bancroft Library, was founded in 1953 and produces carefully researched, audio/video-recorded, and transcribed oral histories and interpretative historical materials for the widest possible use.

Voices for the Environment - Episode 2: Tides of Conservation

The Berkeley Remix

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