Catalyzing Climate Action in Claremont

Tovar teaching on Environmental Justice frameworks.

When Diego Tovar arrived in Claremont, California, in late September, the calendar said fall, but Southern California had other plans. Under a blazing sun and temperatures that felt more like July than the beginning of autumn, the campuses of Pomona and Pitzer Colleges offered a fitting backdrop for three days of conversations about environmental justice, storytelling, feminism, Indigenous sovereignty, and the power of students to turn ideas into action.

Tovar, Senior Director of Campus and Civic Engagement at the Rachel Carson Council (RCC), began his visit alongside students from across the Claremont Colleges. That first evening, members of Pitzer and Pomona student groups EcoReps and 5C Environmental Justice (5CEJ) gathered for an interactive workshop on the foundations of environmental justice.

Rather than stopping at definitions, Tovar challenged students to put environmental justice into practice. After examining how environmental harms intersect with race, class, health, political power, and access to decision-making, students developed environmental projects of their own, identifying issues they wanted to address and imagining campaigns that could take root across their campuses and surrounding communities. The conversation then moved from ideas to action. Tovar introduced students to RCC’s National Environmental Leadership Fellowship (NELF), which provides students with funding, mentorship, and a national network through which they can transform environmental ideas into sustained projects. For students gathered that evening, NELF offered a direct pathway to take the projects they had just imagined and begin making them real.

Tovar at the Women’s Union.

The following day shifted from organizing to the life and legacy of Rachel Carson herself. At a luncheon hosted by the Pomona College Women’s Union, Tovar explored Carson’s life through the intersecting lenses of science, social justice, and feminism. Moving from her childhood and early fascination with the natural world through her career as a scientist and writer, the publication of Silent Spring, and the final years of her life, the discussion examined Carson as an environmental icon and a woman navigating institutions and expectations that often sought to diminish her authority.

Carson’s example provided a natural bridge to Tovar’s next stop, Dr. Jordan Daniels’ Values and the Environment course. There, students considered storytelling, moral imagination, and one difficult question: how do we persuade people to care about lives radically different from their own?

Tovar at CSWIM.

Students were asked to temporarily abandon the human perspective altogether. Each selected a nonhuman animal and worked to imagine the world through its senses, vulnerabilities, needs, and relationship to its environment. From there, they transformed those perspectives into stories and considered how creative writing could become public advocacy—including through Letters to the Editor that bring environmental issues into community conversations.

Later that day, storytelling moved even further into the realm of imagination. Invited by the Pomona Student Union and the Center for Speaking, Writing, Image, and Media (CSWIM), Tovar led a science fiction storytelling workshop centered on using speculative fiction to examine environmental and social questions.

Tovar in Dr. Williams’ class.

Students developed original story concepts, characters, conflicts, and worlds, exploring how imagined futures can illuminate problems already unfolding in the present. Tovar also introduced RCC’s Voices of Carson Storytelling Award, offering students another avenue to develop their creative work and potentially see it published through the Rachel Carson Council.

By his last morning, the visit returned to the people at the center of RCC’s work. Over breakfast in Claremont Village, Tovar met with students who had participated in RCC’s Advocacy Day in Washington, D.C., and 2025-2027 NELF, Isha Raheja. The conversation offered a chance to reflect not only on environmental campaigns but on the movement itself. How can young advocates support one another, build lasting networks, and create an environmental movement that is more collaborative, inclusive, and resilient?

The final classroom visit brought those themes into the complicated politics of water.

Raheja and Tovar on Pomona College’s Campus.

In Dr. Heather Williams’ Global Politics of Water course, Tovar led a guest lecture examining Indigenous knowledge, tribal sovereignty, and the role of Native nations in intergovernmental water policy. Drawing on the Navajo Nation as a case study, students explored the complexities of water rights and the relationships among tribal nations, states, and the federal government. The discussion emphasized why Indigenous communities must be understood not simply as stakeholders in environmental policy, but as sovereign political nations whose knowledge, rights, and leadership are essential to the future of water governance.

Across Tovar’s visit, the conversations at Pomona and Pitzer moved between classrooms, student gatherings, workshops, and breakfast tables, but a common thread connected them all. Environmental leadership invovles the ability to imagine something different, communicate it to others, build relationships, and turn that vision into action

This visit would not have been possible without the leadership and support of RCC National Environmental Leadership Fellow Isha Raheja, whose work helped bring together students, faculty, organizations, and spaces across the Claremont Colleges. Pomona and Pitzer officially became the 96th and 97th Rachel Carson Campus Network members.