This session engages the Pensacola Environmental Oral History Project (PEOH) as a robust case study of the role of oral history in biological/ecological monitoring, community investment in scientific assessment, and humanist methodologies as a catalyst for political action. The PEOH is an ongoing initiative of the University of Florida’s Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (SPOHP) that documents community stories of environmental change in Escambia County, Florida, with special attention to Pensacola’s histories of toxic superfund sites.
The Samuel Proctor Oral History Program is the University of Florida’s award-winning oral history program. SPOHP is committed to using critical historical inquiry and digital humanities production to encourage civic engagement and dialogue between the past, present and the future. Founded in 1967, SPOHP trains students, researchers, and community members in applied oral history methodologies and best practices. Our collections contain more than 8,000 interviews, many of which are archived and made publicly accessible through George A. Smathers Libraries’ Digital Collections (UFDC). SPOHP’s vast collections and ongoing research initiatives provide primary source materials for better understanding the lives of Floridians, Southerners, and Americans through personal recollection and memory.
Officially launched in June 2024, the PEOH builds off decades of SPOHP’s community-focused oral history work in the Florida panhandle region. Interviews in our archives attest to the continued inequity related to toxic exposure from superfund sites along racial and socioeconomic lines. “Superfund” is a designation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) referring to contaminated sites from manufacturing, processing, mining, and other activities that generate hazardous waste. Pensacola, Florida has had several superfund sites due to its history of industrial and military activities. Superfund sites are eligible for cleanup under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) of 1980, commonly known as the superfund law. Pensacola's superfund sites are in various stages of cleanup and monitoring. The efforts are coordinated between federal, state, and local agencies to address contamination and protect public health and the environment. Each site has a tailored cleanup plan based on its specific issues and risks.
A major goal of our ongoing work with the PEOH is to document citizen organizing, grassroots strategies, and community resilience related to enduring superfund toxicity. One site we focus on is the former Escambia Treating Company (ETC) site, which operated in Pensacola from 1943 to 1982, endangering nearby primarily Black communities with toxic dumping. Citizens Against Toxic Exposure (CATE) undertook a campaign in 1992, demanding relocation for affected households due to health issues like cancers and respiratory diseases. The EPA’s investigation in 1991 revealed high toxin levels, declaring the site a public health emergency. Cleanup efforts created “Mount Dioxin,” causing health problems for nearby residents. CATE protested legislative proposals favoring businesses over health concerns. CATE received support, leading to congressional hearings and Escambia’s placement on the superfund NPL in 1994. The EPA allocated $100 million for cleanup, but CATE continued advocating for full relocation. In 1996, the EPA agreed to relocate all 358 households, marking the first such relocation under the superfund program.
Despite this historic precedent, concerns about environmental racism and the ETC site’s cleanup persist, and there are few data sets and longterm studies assessing the social, cultural, and biological health of Pensacola communities that were relocated and/or impacted by superfund toxicity. While community members report high rates of cancer and other seemingly anomalous health problems, the lack of longterm biological/ecological monitoring has made it nearly impossible for residents to definitively establish a cause nor seek systemic help. So too does climate change and rapidly changing ecological and weather systems add urgency and precarity to studying and remediating superfund toxicity in Pensacola. In this case, oral history interviews help address that gap by recording resident’s experiences, challenges, successes, and observed changes in the environment for researchers, the historical record, and policymakers.
The important aspects of the PEOH are multifold and provide a model for a range of partnerships between oral historians and researchers in the geosciences: 1) the value of accounting for lived experience as data in natural and man-made disasters; 2) the role of the oral historical archive in bridging community organizing with data production; 3) the co-work oral historians and scientists can do in service of community equity; and 4) the critical insights community-based participatory research can garner for scientists. The PEOH offers lessons that are scalable to other projects in the geosciences, and we look forward to discussing them with our colleagues at the AMS oral history session.
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