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 (DEP), 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.”

Sometimes, however, those memories are of surmounting the odds stacked by a legacy of industrialization. Diane Lindley of Lone Pine, Washington County, recounts the struggle her mother and father went through when their home was nearly destroyed by the collapse of an old longwall coal mine. “I believe that politicians won’t act until the people take a stand,” Lindley told Allegheny Front. “We have streams on our property that feed into a bigger stream, and then into a bigger river, and eventually, the water you see at the Point in Pittsburgh comes from all these little streams. Well, when the undermining destroys that, it’s a problem for everyone.”

Many of these interviews were edited and broadcast on Allegheny Front’s weekly radio program, produced at community-supported radio station WYEP-FM in Pittsburgh, and the vast majority of the interviews were made available for online listening on the program’s website.

The project took to heart Community Connections’ mission of building new relationships between disparate elements of the region by using other funded projects to uncover interview possibilities. Amongst their many outings, Allegheny Front used events held by Fisherman’s Tale, Wild Waterways Conservancy, Venture Outdoors, and the Mobile Agricultural Education Lab—all projects supported by Community Connections—to find unique perspectives on interactions between people and their environment.

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.

“Over the course of the Environmental Oral History Project, it became evident that these are ordinary people, and their normal lives involve the environment and nature every day,” says Knauer. “I think the message is that what we have here in Southwestern Pennsylvania is pretty wonderful and it belongs to everyone.”