Fall 2008 - Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum

the U.S. Geological Survey Patuxent Wildlife Research
Center in Laurel, Md. She worked with the local Sierra
Club to create an environmental radio project called “Watershed
Radio.”
Buckley met Brown when she delivered the first demo
of Watershed Radio to WRNR. Buckley brought up the idea
for a recurring Chesapeake-based radio show, which led to a
number of brainstorming meetings about possible guests and
a format for the show. Brown suggested the name, “Voices of
the Chesapeake Bay” for the series, and the group began with
10 hour-long interviews.
They decided on in-the-field style interviews, going to visit
watermen, conservationists, and musicians in their element.
“I do not remember us ever mapping out a strategy for
how to tell the story of the Chesapeake Bay from beginning
to end,” says Buckley in the epilogue to his book. “We just
tried to think of people who had good stories to tell.”
To date, the Voices Project has recorded more than 250
oral history interviews with folks of all walks on the Bay.
The diversity of perspectives and viewpoints represented is a
point of pride for Buckley.
“The thing I like to communicate about the Voices Project
is the scope of the interviews, this method of telling stories
about the Bay by seeking out a variety of perspectives,” he
says. “We all tend to see life through our own particular interests.
This project encourages people to look beyond themselves,
to see the Bay through other eyes.”
The Voices book showcases more than 50 of the interviews
(three of which are excerpted here for WaterWays
Magazine), illustrated with black-and-white photographs by
renowned photographer David Harp. Buckley and publisher
Lenny Rudow can often be found taking the book on the road
to festivals, fish fries, crab feasts, and other gatherings where
people come together to celebrate the Chesapeake.
It was through his radio show that CBMM first encountered
Buckley. His interviews with Curator Pete Lesher and
former Boat Yard Manager Mike Vlahovich, which aired on
WRNR, both appear in the book. And as CBMM was de-
Photo by David Harp
Russell Train
Former Administrator,
US Environmental Protection Agency
Nixon was an enigma and he was strange in many
ways, brilliant in many ways, effective in many
ways and a disaster. He was his own worst enemy,
certainly the whole Watergate fiasco was an example
of that. When you’re at the pinnacle, you’re
vulnerable. Maybe it’s a good lesson for the rest of
us. Nixon was certainly not an environmentalist.
I’ve got to say, I don’t think he understood many
of the issues very well. However he knew one
thing about it and that was that the people of this
country were worried about the environment. I’m
talking about the late 60s and the early 70s. The
people of this country were worried. There were
huge oil spills, there were rivers catching on fire,
toxic chemical poisonings, a lot of things. It was
very scary. There was rudimentary regulation;
much of it was left to the states to handle. And it
was plain that the federal government had to get
more actively into the whole thing. Nixon seized
on it. He made it a central effort of his administration,
certainly in his first term. It was not only a
political choice on his part, in that sense. It was a
Democratic Congress whose environmental leader
was Edmund Muskie. Nixon recognized Muskie as
a potential Democratic candidate against him in
1972. Muskie’s track record for the public was basically
dealing with air and water pollution. Nixon
made up his mind he was going to trump Muskie
with his own issue, and I think he did. Hah—he
‘stole his clothes!’ I think somebody said that, and
I think it’s quite true.
“Whatever the motivations were, Nixon
grabbed the issue. He signed the National Environmental
Policy Act into law on January 1, 1970
as his first official act of the decade. A few days
later he sent his State of the Union message to
the Congress, and at least a third of that message
dealt with the environment.
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