Founder Lucy Laffitte on History and Sustainability

January 16, 2015

The Allegheny Front is almost 24-years-old, and owes its start to environmental educator and naturalist Lucy Laffitte. Jennifer Szweda Jordan met her last summer while Laffitte was visiting Pittsburgh for the first time in 20 years. They swapped stories about how each got started on The Allegheny Front, and Laffitte talked about the the evolution of the show and the environmental movement in Pittsburgh in the 1990s. Laffitte is now a producer for the television show North Carolina Science Now.

Below are highlights of Laffitte’s comments from their 2014 interview.

How the show was born out of a search for a job and community

So my first interview was with Paul Wigman, and he was from the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy. And he was the reason for this, but it’s not because he said,” It’s a great idea, go do it.” It was because when I landed in Pittsburgh in ‘88, I was just leaving the New England Wildflower Society and I was an environmental naturalist, looking for work and he had a naturalist position. I said. “well where can a girl get a job around here if they’re a naturalist?’ And he leaned back in his chair and said, “Well, I’ve got the only job there is.” And I thought, “No.” So I spent the next two years ramping up and working with the Earth Day 1990 group, and finding all sorts of environmentalists all over Pittsburgh. And really wanting to build the cohort, the Pittsburgh cohort of environmentalists/naturalists. I ended  up as their coordinator for environmental education, and then went to be the first director of the Rachel Carson Institute at Chatham College, now Chatham University. So that was a dream come true. And somewhere in there, after Earth Day 1990, where environmentalists came out of the woodwork for—forever, the idea for highlighting them.

Why a radio show?

I had a good friend in California, who was a librarian, and she started an environmental radio show in about, probably ‘89. She was in San Francisco. And she was a dear friend of mine, and I thought, “If she can do it, I can do it.” So I just did it. And I was, I had wandered into [W]YEP just as they were changing over—they used to have like the Hungarian Hour, and the German Hour on Sunday mornings and then they had this whole new venue, and I went in kind of interested in doing environmental folk music, and folk music that featured nature. And then I asked them, “Can I do a radio show?” And it was, there was a lot of buzz about the environment—they said yes, and off I went.

Her thoughts on Pittsburgh after having been away for 20 years

Pittsburgh has been always on my radar, and I’ve seen the transformation from afar. I mean I found out about the bike trails, and you know, I remember [former mayor] Tom Murphy came to my door as a candidate for mayor, and he did a lot. And the sustainability movement in Pittsburgh was—they were leaders in the country. I just know that there’s a lot of smart people here doing a lot of good work. And obviously you guys are part of that.

How her view of the environment has changed since leaving The Allegheny Front

Well in ‘91 I remember I did a stint at the National Chemical Day, which was the Association for Chemists, and they had it here in Pittsburgh. And I was brought in as an environmentalist, and I remember just going to my corner as the environmentalist, and requesting zero tolerance for any chemical leaks of any kind. And someone from the EPA was in the middle there, and she kind of rolled her eyes at me. But my motto at the time was Aldo Leopold’s. You know, a thing is right if it enhances the biological integrity of the ecosystem. That was like, ethics. That was--this is what’s right, and this is what’s wrong. And so I think I was pretty zero tolerance for any kind of negotiations. And that was a nice, self-righteous, full of rectitude position to be in. And then one of the things I’ve done in the last 20 years is get a Ph.D. and I did that in environmental policy. I remember telling my advisor, as we were beginning our studies together, “Well, the way you decide policy is if it enhances the biological integrity of the ecosystem.” And she said, “No, Lucy, that’s not how you decide the answer.” So that’s when I learned about the three spheres of sustainability, and that ecology is one of the crucial ones, but social is important, and so is economic. And so I kind of blew my head apart a little bit.