When Professor Char Miller teaches his Water in the West class each fall, he wants his students to get their feet wet—literally—in water systems.
The environmental analysis course explores how communities, states and the federal government created the laws, infrastructure and engineering needed to build water-control systems in the American West.
But Miller, W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History, doesn’t want his students just to read about places like the nearby Los Angeles River.
He wants his students to see and experience them firsthand.
Miller enlists the help of Tilly Hinton, a scholar and advocate for the L.A. River, to guide the students on an afternoon tour, imparting some of her passion for the cultural and historical significance of the river along the way.
“The students get a much richer feel for the river as a place, but also as an idea,” Miller says.
“Just put your feet in it,” he tells his students during the field trip, and inevitably they come to realize that the “river is alive,” he says, and not just a concrete drainage ditch.
The section of the river they visit, Glendale Narrows, has a soft bottom and is replete with islands, trees, ducks, coots, egrets and even crayfish.
“Our trip to the L.A. River completely changed my perception of it,” says Fiona Herbold ’26, an environmental analysis major on the environmental biology track.
“As somebody who’s interested in environmental science and biology, my biggest question was, ‘What kind of biodiversity can a river like this sustain?’” says Herbold, who hails from Alexandria, Virginia. “It was only a few minutes into our trip to the river that I realized there’s a lot of life there; you just can’t necessarily see it from the freeway.”
Shelby Stanton ’26, an environmental analysis major on the sustainability and built environment track, concurs on the impact of the visit.
“Professor Miller spoke about how this field trip is always a transformative moment for students to apply what we’ve learned about: how special Western water systems are due to the unique biomes of the West,” says Stanton, who is from Mountain Lakes, New Jersey. “He was right about that.”
Herbold is considering a career in environmental policy or environmental law and says experiences like the field trip are essential to climate action. She relays what Hinton told them: sensory experiences breed emotional responses, which in turn breed action.
“We took our shoes and socks off and stood in the river. It made me feel a lot more emotionally connected to the river,” says Herbold. Whereas prior to this experience, she was skeptical of the term “river” to describe the waterway, the sensation of water flowing past her ankles evoked memories of rivers back home.
Hinton also had students pick up trash as they walked along the river, which Sascha Weiss ’26, a science, technology, and society and environmental analysis major, says “fortified the connection” she had to the river. While her classes at Pomona have helped her to think about “lofty and big world problems,” she says this trip provided a way to give something back.
Going forward, Weiss, a Los Angeles native, hopes to bring about change through documentary filmmaking, specifically environmental documentaries.
Jude Iredell ’23, a history major from Los Angeles, took Miler’s class two years ago and appreciates how the class explored humanities, public policy, and environmental conservation issues “from a really tangible perspective.”
“It was very real for all of us,” says Iredell, “when I think a lot of college classes have the tendency to delve into the theoretical, into the esoteric.”
Recently, Herbold, Stanton and Weiss each published essays on the website LA River X (Iredell’s is forthcoming), a public humanities project curated by Hinton, reflecting on their visit.
Written originally as an assignment for his class, Miller encouraged the students to polish their essays for the website, along with artwork portraying the L.A. River that the students selected from the Western Water Archives, maintained by The Claremont Colleges Library.
In her essay, Weiss writes:
What does a “second chance” look like in practice for the L.A. River? Maybe it doesn’t mean perfect restoration or total ecological purity. … Maybe it means embracing contradictions; concrete and crayfish, graffiti and great blue herons, neighborhoods and nature braided together. … Maybe the river’s second chance begins with us choosing to see it, not as failure or infrastructure or afterthought, but as a living place, a shared story still and possibly forever in the process of being written.