The history of Southwestern Pennsylvanians' relationship to the environment is one told in obvious contradictions and unlikely comrades. It's one of black smoke thickly clouding the skies, and of beautiful land stretching as far as the eye can see. It is of Cambria County's "coal is king" era, and Rachel Carson finding fossils in the grass of her backyard, across the river from Blakeian "dark, Satanic mills." So it can't be too surprising that when Allegheny Front, a Pittsburgh-based radio show focusing on environmental issues, went to interview employees at the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, they discovered people like Donna Davis -- a DEP sewage planning specialist supervisor.

"I wouldn't trade this job for anything in the world, even for more money," says Davis in an interview recorded and broadcast by Allegheny Front. "It's really the career I've dreamed of.

"I'd been working there maybe two or three years and one day we were slogging through mud up to our thighs to get to this break to sample it," Davis' interview continues. Her co-worker turned and said, "'I didn't know this job was going to be so glamorous!' It's not a job that a lot of people would do."

In her long employment at the DEP, Davis has overseen vast changes in Southwestern Pennsylvania's environment, from the industrial issues of the 1980s to today's more environ­mentally friendly culture. And within those stories are histories of a different sort, like Davis' anecdotes about being a woman inspecting the male-dominated world of the steel mills.

Glamorous, it may not be, but Davis' interview is just the kind of story that Allegheny Front Executive Producer Kathy Knauer hoped for when the group launched the Environmental Oral History Project, supported by a regional grant. Throughout 2008, Allegheny Front visited counties in the region, collecting interviews with people about their relationship with the environment.

For six months, the program's employees, interns and volunteers visited outdoor-related locations and events to record more than 125 stories of everyday Pennsylvanians. The result was a breadth of people, places, and stories from environ­mental professionals to ordinary citizens' recollections of their relationship to the outdoors. People like Glenn Helbling, a Squirrel Hill resident who constantly finds new things to enjoy in Pittsburgh's Schenley Park, or 10-year-old Brendan Glover of Rural Valley, Armstrong County, who loves to go fishing and "listen to the sounds, see nature, see how fish and birds act when they're just being left alone."

The message of these environmental oral histories is a simple one: Our everyday lives aren't just worthy of history, they're vital to history. And they're stories that must be told, heard and kept.

Nathan Schritter

Arnold Perry, project manager of Fisherman's Tale.

Sitting on the shore, Rodney Bryant points east, away from the boathouse and toward the deepest part of the lake in North Park, Allegheny County. That's where he used to catch catfish and trout on his weekly trips to the park, he explains, "until I had my first heart attack, three years ago. I haven't been here since. Not 'til today."

Bryant's most recent trip to North Park, on a made-to-order sunny summer's afternoon, wasn't necessarily about catching fish. With Fisherman's Tale, a grassroots project lead by the century-old senior-care organization Lemington Community Services (LCS), Bryant and over a dozen other African-American seniors -- largely from the Lincoln-Lemington neighborhood of Pittsburgh -- visited North Park to catch some rays, catch up with friends, and tell some stories. And if those stories happened to reflect on the state of their mental and physical health, LCS Executive Director Joy Starzl says, all the better.

"We've always had a guy's night at the center, where the seniors come in and play cards and talk," says Starzl. "We bring someone in to talk about an issue, but not to stand up and talk about it -- they just sit around and play cards with the guys, and bring up things like grieving and depression. But the men stopped coming, so we thought, we need to expose them to this information. We did a survey, and they said, 'We don't wanna play cards -- we want to go fishing!' "

Fisherman's Tale brought the guys' night outside. Along with the seniors, LCS took a few extra folks along on their trips: Doctors, psychologists, neighbors and friends who could casually chat with the fishermen and find out what's really going on with them.

Lincoln-Lemington, along with several other predominantly African-American neighborhoods in Pittsburgh from which LCS draws the majority of its clientele, is a rough place to be a senior citizen. A lack of amenities geared toward seniors, coupled with a high crime rate, tends to keep people isolated -- which allows them to slip through the cracks too often. With the success of Fisherman's Tale, LCS project coordinator Arnold Perry hoped that the project would help to stem that decline.

"We try to bring together people who too often stay in their homes," says Perry. "People need events like Fisherman's Tale so that they don't feel neglected and unwanted. Jesus told Peter to be a 'fisher of men,' and that's what we try to be."

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Old Bedford Village

Making history come alive -- with a new pan coupe redan

Roger Kirwin/Old Bedford Village

18th-century British military regalia from the commemoration the 250th anniversary of Bedford.

Motorcycling along the highways of Pennsylvania, Roger Kirwin sees the ghosts of Redcoats cutting paths across the state's landscape in 1758, laying the groundwork for a road still traveled today.

"The French and Indian War was all about movement," says Kirwin, executive director of Old Bedford Village, the living-history center on the site of the 18th-century fortress in Bedford County. "It was about, 'How do you move 7,000 soldiers back and forth across the state's woodlands?' And when you move around Pennsylvania today, you trace those movements. Look just off the turnpike, and you see woodlands that aren't much different than they were 250 years ago. There are very few places left where you can look at history like that."

What's not always so apparent is which history is on display at the village. Despite the center's direct link to the French and Indian War, visitors are just as likely to encounter people dressed in Confederate gray or Napoleonic-era uniforms.

"The thing about Old Bedford Village is its versatility," says Kirwin, known to don a red coat himself as a French and Indian War re-enactor.

And it's toward that end that the Village was awarded a Grassroots Grant to build its new pan coupe redan -- a type of defensive structure used in the U.S. and Europe from the 1750s through the early 20th century.

With the redan's addition, Old Bedford Village solidified itself as a premier location for living historians, no matter what era they cast themselves in.

Those historians and hobbyists have responded in kind. Not only did groups of re-enactors aid in the construction of the redan, the structure has attracted attention from hundreds who gleefully used this newly added authenticity and attended 2008's celebrations of Bedford's 250th anniversary. And drawing those people to Bedford, says Kirwin, makes the village a more dynamic educational and cultural amenity.

"When you can bring the places and characters of history to life, the public gets more interested," says Kirwin. "It takes things out of the realm of academia and into a tactile, tangible understanding of history. We give living historians a marvelous canvas for re-enactments, and, in return, they come here and give the public something to see."

First published on April 12, 2009 at 12:00 am