The Pensacola Environmental History Project is a collaboration between the UF Gulf Scholars and the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program. The first student cohort of the PEHP traveled to Pensacola, a resplendent, historied port city located on the far west end of the Florida panhandle, in June 2024.
There, staff and students interviewed local Pensacolians who were (or are) in some way involved in the clean-up of Escambia County’s various industry-derived chemically polluted sites. Pensacola is famous for the beautiful white sand barrier island beaches protecting its bay system, the Naval Air Station, and the deep water port, all of which depend on industry. Seven Superfund sites are scattered across the city, and Escambia County has upwards of thirty Brownfield sites. Still more unrecognized polluted sites lie underwater at the bottom of the bays and bayous outlining the city.
Students involved:
- Hannah Bokor, environmental science major
- Sophia Cachaldora, advertising and public relations major
- Liya Johny, history major
- Mattison Mathews, history major
- Beckett Price, history major
- Caitlin Remmert, economics major
- Amelia Sewell, economics and sustainability studies major
- Tamia Aguirre, history major
- Isabella Castro, history major
- Sofia Izquierdo, history major
- Karissa Pudder, history major
- Grace Rudnick, history major
- Ryan Tenner, history major
- Peter Vinogradov, history major
Advisors
- Anna Hamilton, assistant director, Samuel Proctor Oral History Program
- Becca Burton, UF Gulf Scholars program coordinator
- Deborah Hendrix, digital humanities production coordinator, Samuel Proctor Oral History Program
Promoting Gulf Coast Voices Through Oral History
The Pensacola Environmental History Project documents the city’s history of human-environment interaction, an open secret among locals that lurked largely unacknowledged by the public until the 1990s. By recording all sorts of perspectives—from private residents, to city and county officials, to scientific experts—the PEHP team hopes to highlight the connection between Gulf coast settlements and their land, air, and water systems. They also aim to facilitate conversations about how to collaboratively take on complex environmental challenges, like disaster preparedness and Superfund remediation. The collection of interviews creates a visible digital space, a network of personal histories across town, and a platform to amplify the voices of those who have chosen to share their story.
In April 2025, the third cohort of Gulf Scholars Oral History interns returned to Pensacola. While there, they helped run an event inspired by the history harvest model in which students had a chance to lead interviews with residents who had an experience with environmental pollution that they wished to share. On its trips, the PEHP team works to establish connections with local people and groups who are interested in collaborating. It is a long-term goal of the project to host a public reception or exhibit in Pensacola that will bring together residents from different neighborhoods and establish an active dialog about what it means to navigate the interests of both people and the environment.
Digital Exhibit
This StoryMap, developed by Beckett Price, a recent UF graduate who studied history, gives readers a sense of the space, sights, sounds, and smells that make up the narrators’ recollections:
Frequently Asked Questions
The Superfund program, also known as the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), began as an entity of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1981. Its mission is to regulate harm to humans and the environment by remediating, or cleaning up, the worst sites of industrial contamination in the United States. The EPA evaluates Superfund sites regularly and assesses them for inclusion on the National Priorities List (NPL). Superfund sites are exorbitantly expensive to remediate: they often sit for decades without being cleaned up due to lack of funding. American Creosote Works in Pensacola has been listed as a National Priority site since 1983, but its cleanup wasn’t officially funded until 2022.
Pensacola, Florida, is one of the oldest ports on the Gulf coast. People have been doing the environmentally destructive work of heavy industry, like shipbuilding (which requires lumber, noxious preservation chemicals, and a dry docks), turpentining, steelmaking, and wood processing (which, in addition to using hazardous chemicals, logged out the nearby longleaf pine and cypress forests) since the city was first settled by Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Pensacola’s largest industries—fishing, tourism, and the Navy—have in the last century brought economic prosperity to the area, but not without cost.
Pensacola also happens to boast an extensive history of organizing for the health of the local and regional environment. Going back to the late 1960s (just as the global environmental movement began to take off) concerned fisherpeople and hunters (always the first to take notice of changes in the world around them) formed alliances with one another and created groups like the Bream Fishermen Association that fought for the health of the water and land.
UF’s Samuel Proctor Oral History Program offers the specialized resources and personnel that are essential to a successful oral history project. We are working with partners at the University of West Florida and organizations local to Pensacola to form a sustainable, region-wide network of collaboration that we hope will outlive the project.
The creation of a Gulf Scholars Program at UF, sixty miles away from the Gulf coast, exemplifies just how far inland a Gulf community can truly be; Gainesville, while not a port city like Pensacola, faces many of the same climate, weather, and geographic challenges, including its own Superfund site. Members of inland areas in Florida would do well to pay attention to the activities of coastal cities as they navigate a rapidly evolving Gulf environment.
The narrators for this project have each agreed to contribute an interview for their own reasons. Students and staff on the PEHP remain in contact with narrators after the interview, and one reason for making the interview collection freely and publicly accessible is so that residents have ready access to their own histories.
The PEHP organizes trips during the semester, and students of all disciplines are invited to participate. If you are a UF student, the easiest way to get involved is to apply for the associated internship offered by SPOHP, offered most fall and spring terms (not offered Fall 2025). Join the Student’s Oral History Club or enroll in the Gulf Scholars Program Medallion Program to stay connected and learn more!
If you are a member of the community—in Pensacola, Gainesville, or anywhere in between—and you are interested in getting involved, please reach out to Beckett Price at b.price@ufl.edu.