Patty Vest: Welcome to Sagecast, the podcast of Pomona College. I'm Patty Vest. Mark Wood: And I Mark Wood. This season on Sagecast, we'll be talking to current and former Pomona faculty about the personal, professional and intellectual journeys that brought them to where they are today. Patty Vest: In these extraordinary times, we're coming to you from our various homes as we all shelter in place. Today we're delighted to talk to Char Miller, Director of Environmental Analysis and a W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History. Mark Wood: Welcome Char. Char Miller: Thank you. Glad to be here. Mark Wood: Thanks for taking the time. How are you adjusting to life as an online teacher during the coronavirus pandemic? Char Miller: I will have a much better sense of it after this week. I think the anticipation of it and the anxiety that comes with that anticipation is driving me crazy and I miss my students terribly so just to see them lined up on a small screen is going to be both weird and wonderful. I'll know next week whether this is actually something that's manageable, but I think it is. I mean, in many ways most of us have started to do so much online that teaching, which is so face-to-face is perhaps the last profession in some ways to fully not do that. Particularly a place like Pomona where it is so intense, your relationships with students and colleagues that I really, really miss that interaction, but lots of people do so this is not particular to this place and time. Mark Wood: How about personally? Char Miller: I'm taking a lot of walks. I'm up to about 12 and a half miles a day at various points. I actually took a six mile walk this morning through Claremont and there was no one out. I mean, it was mind blowing. In an hour, it'll be a traffic jam because so many people are out walking their dogs always. Mark Wood: What time was that? I need to know? I live in Claremont to. Char Miller: I left around six. It's a great time. I walked into Pomona, looped around, came back through the colleges and there was ... I actually saw five people on a two-hour walk. That seems a little excessive, but it's ... You got to do something just to make sure you're still healthy in a way, mentally more than physically. I hope everybody who's listening to this is also doing those kinds of things that give them pleasure. Patty Vest: Good, great tip Char. We're going to like they say, start from the beginning and ask you a little bit about your background. We understand you grew up in the East Coast. Char Miller: Yeah. Patty Vest: How did you find your way to Claremont to college for your undergrad studies? Char Miller: Well, it actually though I didn't remember it at the time, or I did but I didn't really think about it this way, my parents had actually ... I was born in St. Louis and within a couple of months, my family had moved from St. Louis to Palo Alto where my dad was working in the city. I've seen all of these wonderful photos and videos of me as a baby toddling around with a hose, so hence my interest in water [inaudible 00:03:28]. Mark Wood: Setting fires too? Char Miller: No. Best I know, not. That was a charmed period in my life, because what did I know? It was always sunny, and then we moved to Connecticut where it was always not sunny. I was very fortunate that I had a set of siblings, I have four sisters who are wonderful human beings, although I'm sure they didn't think that way about me. I was the only boy, totally treated differently. Male privilege everywhere, including a story my mother told that I half believe that she slept much better once I was born like I could've gotten out of the crib to defend her in some fashion. But, part of coming to California was as many people did in the late 60s early 70s, was as a form of reinvention. Char Miller: I had gone to boarding school in Connecticut, and in fact, this is my 50th anniversary of that process, 50th reunion which got canceled unfortunately. But I didn't come immediately, I actually went to NYU because as I've been flipping through my letters from my mom, I said to her, "Look, everything is happening in the cities. I need to be there. That's where the issues are," and I had gotten very comfortable with New York City from where I used to get in a train when I was 12 and 13 and just go. No one in their right minds would allow a child to do that today. So I spent a year at NYU, which was an absolute disaster as a university, but an extraordinary experience in terms of music. Char Miller: I was in music clubs and at the Fillmore East all the time and realized that A, I was wasting somebody's money, wasting the college's energy and my time and so went off and worked for a year flipping burgers, selling ski equipment. What was the other thing? Oh, I was a shipper receiver for a chemical plant, which was an absolute gas. Most of the people there were Vietnam veterans, and boy did I learn things I could never have learned otherwise from them. But, I also learned one thing very quickly. About six weeks into this grand experiment of being not in college I was like, "Damn, college was really fun." There were things I could do and things I should learn, and so I started applying. Char Miller: My sister had actually applied to Pitzer. One of my sisters had applied and whatever year that was, sometime in the mid 60s decided not to go. But I remembered that and I went, "Hmm California, that's where people change. So, that's what I should do." Because I heard all the music, I knew what was happening. And so, I drove my 1956 Volkswagen Bug across the country. It broke down in Bridgeport, California in the Eastern Sierra. It just could not take another mountain. And so, my wonderful introduction to Claremont was hitchhiking on an 18 Wheeler from Bridgeport to Indian Hill Boulevard. Walking up Indian Hill Boulevard to Pitzer and it was like, okay, I made it. Mark Wood: You survived. Char Miller: I survived. There were a couple of things that immediately were phenomenal to me about Claremont, one of which was that those mountains were mind blowing to me. They are still, the San Gabriels. They're not like any mountains I'd ever been to in the East Coast, which are a lot smaller. These were a lot more rugged, a lot more dangerous, but God they're beautiful and that was part of it. The other was being at Pitzer in its infancy when it had just flipped from being a women's college to coed. I think I was the third class of men. It meant that it had not made the transition fully. That was also important for me because I was in the first class of my boarding school to introduce women to an all male boarding environment and I got an immediate sense of what it must've been like for the women in my class. Char Miller: Since we're on our 50th anniversary, we've been talking about that a lot with them. We did not cover ourselves with glory let us just say. It was a really interesting place to be and Claremont was a really exciting intellectual environment. I was taking classes at CGU, then Claremont Graduate School and some of my mentors were at Scripps who I adored, still am in close contact with. There was this intellectual ferment in all of the colleges that I was able to luckily tap into. I didn't take classes at Harvey Mudd because I'm not that smart and decided that when I walked into a Pomona class, you will forgive me Pomona faculty, but I walked into seminars in which faculty stood up and lectured and I went, "I don't think that's what a seminar is supposed to be." Char Miller: But I did take classes at CMC and Scripps, and obviously at Pitzer and formed not only lifelong friends but also the realization that the academic life was something beguiling. I walked into Dan Horowitz, who was a professor at Scripps in American History in October of my junior year, so '73 and I said, "How did you become you? Because, I really like what you guys do. I don't know if I can do it, but I really ..." And he went, "Yeah ..." Dan was coy and he just went, "Well, you got to work your butt off and maybe you can do it." But, it was also in the air at Pitzer, that part of it is that you think about the world in broad ways. That's clearly part of its ethos still today, but then you try to figure out what's your place in that world and what do you do best? Char Miller: Part of it was to get to graduate school, you had to have a language and so I went to Santa Cruz for a summer to learn French or learn French more effectively, including playing soccer with all of our French teachers who were all French, which was a blast. But, they also would take me aside and say, "Well, what are you doing? What do you want to do?" And I said, "I think I really want to teach." They were really generous these folks and said, "If that's what you want to do, these are the things you need to do," which was confirming what I had heard at CMC and Pitzer and Scripps from faculty at each of those places. Char Miller: So, I got to graduate school and totally realized that I loved graduate school, which is not what everybody says. My advisor was awful, but I loved graduate school because he basically said, "Here's 500 books you need to read and I'll see you in two years." I went, "Oh, my God this is so fun." I was a very nerdy guy for two years and read like crazy, and worked in the Library of Congress to write papers and stuff. It really gave me an appreciation for what an intellectual life could look like. But more to the point, and this is really crucial, I realized how bad many of those teachers were at Johns Hopkins, they were terrible. Brilliant scholars, couldn't teach their way out of a paper bag. They might not even know they were in a paper bag. Char Miller: I realized that I hadn't paid attention to that in Claremont. They were just there. Not everybody was great and I knew that, but they gave you things to read, they asked you really important questions and as much as graduate school was intellectually challenging and fulfilling, it also was deadening in the sense that you had to become a specialist and then within that, a specialist, of a specialist, of a specialist. I realized that where Claremont you blew out wide because that's what you were asked to do, graduate school brought you down into a very thin slice of life that you needed to know and I get that, that's part of the profession. But, I couldn't wait to get out of graduate school so that I could like an accordion, flow back out again. Char Miller: And so, Judy and I hopped around. She went to graduate school at Cornell so I went up with her, which was great because I could just write and I didn't have to deal with the nuttiness of graduate school. We moved to Miami for my first job and our first child as it turned out was born there. Moved then to Trinity University in San Antonio where Gary Kates was, who was a dear friend at Pitzer. He said, "There's a job at Trinity. You should apply," and then totally backed off at the search. He couldn't be involved in it understandably, but I got the job which was great. And so, where we used to live in a house on Indian Hill together, we now half a mile apart in a small residential area near Trinity and today in Claremont, we're about a half a mile apart. Char Miller: As a biographer, some biographer is going to go, "Oh, this is too good. Let's go do this story." But, that's also part of it because Gary was, even in school, even in college, was probably the most astute not just thinker about the world, but also thinking about how to be a teacher. I mean, he was already teaching when he was an undergraduate. I remember watching him and going, "My God, this guy's ridiculously good." That's pretty much why I followed him around, so I could figure out what I was doing, but it worked out very nicely. So coming back to Claremont, which was something that Judy and I had talked about when we were undergraduates here in our senior year was like, "This is a nice place. It would be fun to come back." Char Miller: It took 30-something years, but okay, that's okay. We got back in 2007 when Gary was dean and he said, "You could come for a year," and it was like, "Okay, that sounds fun," and then, "You could stay for a second year," and it was like, "Okay, I could do that too." In part, because everybody in the history department took a leave and so I was like, "Okay, I'll fill into those positions." The other piece about coming back and full-time coming back, was that it completely gave me a regenerative experience that I didn't even know I needed. I could've stayed in San Antonio and loved every moment of it, but what I've done here is to dump every single course I ever taught in my career prior to coming to Claremont and totally reinvented things. That reinvention I didn't know A, it was possible, B I needed it or three, that it would be as much fun as it's been. Char Miller: But also, the students in Claremont like the kids I had in San Antonio, they just are driven. They push you like crazy which is a little daunting at first, and then you realize you're learning right along with them. That also changed the way I taught so that the seminars actually are seminars. I don't lecture anymore in any class because it seems to me that this way of learning face-to-face, hands on, in depth, lots of advising, lots of off campus coffees or whatever is such a privilege, but it's also probably the most effective way to do the work that we do as teachers, which is why the quarantine is so hard because it's robbing me of that. I feel like a vampire plug where I plug into my students and I get all of their energy, and now what do I do? Who do I take that from? But it's God, it's been a joy, an absolute joy being back in Claremont. Mark Wood: Let's talk about that reinvention a little bit. You started off in history and urban studies? Is that right? Char Miller: Yeah. Mark Wood: How did you move from there to environmental analysis? Are the two related somehow? Char Miller: They are related. When I approach environmental issues, I approach them as an historian thinking about change over time and how nature and human beings have interacted with one another over time and those interactions have changed radically across the millennia. That seems reasonable. One of the other things that really I had started to do in Santa Antonio was to write a lot about the city as a place and what its environmental and social issues were tied to that place. I'm writing a book right now on a massive flood that tore through San Antonio and then revealed all of these social issues, which would had always been there but when you have a disaster, you suddenly see them as we did with Katrina and other events. You go, "Oh, right, these aren't necessarily the nicest places to live," and there are people who bear disproportionately the burdens of living in those environments. Honestly, I've been working on this book for 30 years so it's got to come out because the centennial is next year. Char Miller: But, the part of what was interesting to me when I moved here is that those same issues are the same issues here. I could take those ways of thinking about environments and cities and the interplay between urban spaces and the natural systems in which they're located. In San Antonio, it's the San Antonio River Valley, which floods all the time. In LA, we get floods, we get mudslides, we get fires, we have earthquakes. Everything is about the natural world that we periodically forget we inhabit until it reminds us terribly like this virus, that we live in a biological world or we live in a world in which the earth actually moves and shakes us. I have to say, by moving to Los Angeles, my writing both as a scholar and as someone who loves to write for LA Times or whatever, I've never lacked for stories because those things are every single day in our face. Char Miller: If there's a way to use the historians gaze, that is to say that yes, these issues are issues and so when we think about this pandemic, let's think about other pandemics and what happened in those landscapes, and to those people, and what and why things occurred the way they did, then let's do that. I think that's also I would say it's something that I learned really at Pitzer, and truthfully in my boarding school where there was a minister who as my classmates have all been attesting over the last few weeks. We would never have the deep conversations that we're having now had we actually only met at reunion. But everyone is acknowledging that Tom Hanson who was the minister there, had really given us this notion of a social responsibility as children of privilege to be sure, but also as brains that we should be utilizing to better the humanity, to better the world at some level. Char Miller: I can draw a straight line that's convoluted, but fairly straight that goes from those various earlier experiences to the place now where for me and for many of my peers in the environmental analysis program across the five colleges, really what we're doing is talking about the environment as a landscape that's contested, that is unjust in its ways. And, that part of what we need to be thinking about is not just simply how to, for example, preserve the San Gabriel Mountains which we must do, but also to make them accessible to people for whom they are not accessible. Some of this is about nature yes, but also about the human interaction with that. Those are big changes that I had an inkling of maybe 15 years ago, but having been here and listened to my colleagues and listened to my students and thought more or less effectively about these problems, that I've been able to write and God, I have loved that. Patty Vest: Char, speaking of nature and landscape and relationships, you've had a long relationship with the US Forest Service. How did that happen, and how has that real world experience affected your academic work? Char Miller: Wow, that's a great question. That actually comes straight out of the first paper I ever wrote in graduate school which again, through a line of sorts, it was about Gifford Pinchot who was the first chief of the Forest Service. But the question I was asking about him had less to do with, much less to do with the Forest Service and much more to do with the kind of question that was interesting for biographers in the early 1980s, which is, why does someone of Pinchot's class status, and he was extraordinarily wealthy or his family was. Why did he become a reformer? Why did he think that his job was not to make more money, because he didn't, but to do good work? In this case, invent a profession, forestry, to create a Forest School at Yale, to become the first chief of the Forest Service, to be a public servant for his entire adult life. Char Miller: That's a good question, don't miss that, but it was not the question that ultimately would lead me to understand him. After I wrote the paper, I realized okay, there's way more to this guy than you imagine. I had another project that actually grew out of my senior thesis at Pitzer that I wanted to write, and so that became my dissertation and first book. But once I did that, it was like, wait, wait, wait, there was this guy, and you were reading about him, and you were spending time with his papers in the Library of Congress. And oh by the way, he was a Republican, and oh by the way, Ronald Reagan is in office, and oh by the way, this administration, the Reagan administration is nothing like the administration and had none of the environmental chops that Pinchot had. Char Miller: So maybe if you go back to him, you can actually be using him as a what? A metaphor, a foil for the contemporary world in which you live? That you can use Pinchot to talk about what Republicans once believed, and what we might want to think through more carefully. But, that meant all of a sudden that I needed to know something about the Forest Service about which I knew absolutely nothing and I'm embarrassed to say, but I suspect I'm not alone in this. I skied in various mountains in New England in the Green Mountain National Forest and the White Mountain National Forest and never knew I was in either place. I was just on a mountain and I was skiing, I had no idea. I suspect there are a lot of people who go ski in Colorado and don't know that virtually every single mountain is actually on a national forest property. Char Miller: But once I started realizing that, I somehow reached out to or was reached out to by the executive director of Gifford Pinchot's old home, it's called Grey Towers. It's in Milford, Pennsylvania and if anybody listening to this has a chance to go, go see what John Muir called a cottage. It is not a cottage. It is an astonishing house, mansion. So, they asked me up for a talk at the Forest Service headquarters in Washington, DC and I went, "Oh, this is fun," and totally had no idea what I was doing. But anyway, I gave this talk and from that has ... That was in like let's say '88, '89 and for the last 30 years, have been working with the Forest Service in ways that I could never have imagined. Most particularly, working with them on leadership training. Another thing one would be shocked to find me doing as I am. Char Miller: But again as the historian, I get to come into these workshops and lead workshops in which I help new employees, middle level employees and senior employees understand the context of their work. They're doing a job on a daily basis and they've got up to X, Y, and Z, but they don't have time. They can't possibly have time to pull back and look at how that work fits within a larger thread of human existence in the case of this agency. What I've been able to do, and I bless Pinchot every single day is he gave me a way to think about an institution and how institutions function, and then take that point and use that as a way to talk about leadership across time. Char Miller: Not to beat this horse too much to death, but what's really interesting is you can as I'm doing, I pluck out four or five moments in the Agency's time in which major leadership decision making occurred. Sometimes they did it right and sometimes it blew up in their faces. The point is, for people who want to be leaders is, look. You've got to be aware of these larger issues when you make decisions which seem to you to be small, but actually are going to have large ramifications. That public work has really fed the way in which I write about the Agency. It's still with a critical lens, but that's also part of it, it's teaching. Everything about this is teaching. And so, I can go into a room and talk to them about the fact that almost 50% of what we call the national forests and grasslands actually came from ancestral or treaty lands of the Native Americans. Char Miller: There's a great new story about land-grant universities where 11 million acres have been expropriated. I mean, everybody was expropriating those, so the very foundational institutions, the Park Service, the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Refuge, all of that stuff, a big chunk of it all came from lands that were once managed by, were ancestrally based in the Tongva or whomever. That's a story that they appreciate learning because it means When they walk into a room with tribal entities, they're a lot more savvy about their own role in that process. It's helped me enormously to go "Oh, yeah." I'm not complicit in this process, and that's been ... I've loved that too. Mark Wood: Char, recently you've focused a great deal, I guess it's certainly your most visible focus to the outside world on wildfires. Why do you think we have so many fires today and why they seem to have become so deadly? Char Miller: Well, I think ... God, that's a great ... If I had exactly the answer to that, I'd be a very smart guy. I would say there are a couple of things going on. Let's use Southern California as an example for other places, but obviously what happened in Australia this past winter for them this past year, has really made our story look tiny by comparison. But, we've got since the 1980s, the American Southwest from El Paso, West LA and north from there has gone through, has been effectively drying out. So the fires that started to erupt in New Mexico, Arizona, California, Colorado, Utah beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, many Forest Service scientists who I get the great privilege to meet and read have been pointing out that what those fires really are, are land conversion fires. And so, we're seeing the Sonoran and the Chihuahuan Desert moving north. Char Miller: So A, there's big issues involved with that. That drying out has not only led to the desiccation and desertification of parts of the Southwest, but also has huge implications for fire to be sure, but also water resources because as it dries out, and the Colorado which has been such a huge source for Southern California let alone Arizona and other places, we've got this tango of issues that are emerging. I think that's part of what also makes those wildfires so large because they are monstrous. That they're coming at a rate and over a period of time that is unusual, 12 months now is pretty much the norm depending on the year. This year that's not been the case because we actually got some rain, but over the long span. So again, another 40-year span. We're seeing this dramatic change in the climate that we know is related to global warming. That change in the climate is leading to pressures on water resources, on forest management, on chaparral management and fire is one of the mechanisms by which these things are managed by nature and us. Char Miller: Then to get at the intersection for me that's actually the most interesting is that, it's the Southwest that has grown the most over the last 40 years outside of places like Florida and Texas. It's just ballooned in size. Now we not only have more people demanding more water, demanding more land, demanding more housing, but where that housing tends to end up is up in these marginal areas, or what once were marginal that are not in the periphery any longer. If you look at Southern California and you think about Simi Valley or Sylmar, or up to Castaic into Ventura County, those areas in and around the San Gabriel Mountains that have gone up in flames over the last 10 years, we're also seeing this story as not just fire but people in fire and people being in places where they didn't use to live so if it burned, who cared? Char Miller: Well, now we care because it's the structures that are burning and people who were dying. To get back to your question, the danger is so manifold in its consequences about how we have chosen to live in this landscape, and the Australians are asking themselves the exact same set of questions. They're doing it in Israel and elsewhere, because these are all Mediterranean ecosystems. They all look alike, they burn alike. Different seasons because of depending on where they are, but that's a big chunk of the world's population trying to figure out how to live with fire in ways we've never had to because we'd never had seven and a half billion people on the planet. From my vantage point, trying to think about those big pictures even when there's a small fire in Sylmar say or, and Ventura wasn't small, or the campfire which was also not small, gets me back to the Forest Service and how it manages the land. Char Miller: It takes me in to questions of water, which I have loved working on in Southern California, because who doesn't? We don't have a lot of it so we got to think about it. It also leads me right back to the urban studies stuff that I did 25 years ago in San Antonio because in the end, all of those natural resources are as crucial as they can be and we have to learn to live within that bounty. Because, it is bountiful if you manage yourself well. And if you manage yourself well, then you start to think about conservation as a principle. A principle that Roosevelt, and Muir and Pinchot, and others in the late 19th century advocated in a way that was radical for their time. We've re-radicalized in different ways, but I don't want to miss those progenitors because they offered some very important ways of thinking about how to control our economic greed to maintain economic stability, a message that we need today. Patty Vest: Char, you've written a lot about this and feel strongly about this. What can we do about people building and sometimes building over and over again in places that are prone to fire? Char Miller: We now go from the issue and assess the fire, to the policy that allowed the fire to occur effectively. It's hard for planning commissions and zoning boards to own up to the fact that their willingness to as the default, promote growth because growth is good, into places which they know because they can't know this. It's not a good idea to build, is one of the conundrums that I've been trying, and I'm not alone in this, been trying to articulate in a way that makes sense such that mayors and city councils and commissions of one form or another at the county level, at the city level, at the local level, at the state level begin to understand that just because with your right hand you sign a bill that says yes, we're okaying this new subdivision. Then you pay for it on the left hand through increased costs to fire departments and first responders because you have to rescue those people and you don't see the connection between the two actions. That's what I think a large number of us have been trying to argue for the last maybe a decade or so. Char Miller: But here too is something that for me, I realized fairly quickly after moving here is that's exactly what San Antonio finally figured out. Here's a city that floods all the time and people lived in watersheds and in flood plains because county commissioners said it was okay to do so. Then sometime in the late 90s, early 2000s after yet another flood rip down another watershed that took out a number of houses, people didn't die but the houses just got devastated. The county decided that actually it was going to pull out of its own budget money, not do a bond but pull money out of its own budget to start to buy up the houses in the watershed and I went, "Ah, there's the answer for Southern California." Char Miller: Way more expensive to be sure, but why not think about that as an analogy, that you buy up watershed so that people can't live in danger? Why wouldn't you do the same thing with fire zones? And since we know where the fire zones are, CAL FIRE has got these great maps that lay out where they think fires are going to be. Go after those lands first before they burn. Buy them up, pull them into a county or city ownership much as Claremont has done. And in ways, the Pomona College has contributed to that process by donating Evey Canyon, 463 acres to the city with a codicil that said, "Anytime you try to sell, it comes right back to us." What you did in that process, what Pomona did was to pull 21 houses, potential houses out of the fire zone. When Johnson Pasture and all of these other Claremont Wilderness Park areas were developed, it was hundreds of potential homes that were not built. Char Miller: The advantage of that is Claremont Wilderness Park can burn, and it probably will burn again. It burned in '07, '03 excuse me, and it'll probably burn again at some other point. What it won't do is burn houses, and that's part of the ... That's the balancing act that you're trying to figure out. The counter to that is that or the response to that is, if we're not going to continue to move out and create low density housing in dangerous places, then what do you do? You build up in the valleys and you build greater density because when you build greater density, you also build customer base for mass transit and you get people out of cars as effectively as you can. Claremont is going through an argument about that right now with Village South as a potential housing development just south of the railroad tracks, which to my mind is the moonshot. Char Miller: This is such a great opportunity to demonstrate what Claremont was when it began as a transit oriented development. We would not be here without the Santa Fe Railroad that bought that land and sold that land. Everything was about that rail line and so everybody lived compactly down there so we're not straying from our history. In fact, we're recapitulating that history by building up higher density along that exact same rail track with new housing, new shopping on West Village, and then this would be South Village that would intersect in a way. All of these things are interconnected. If you want to shut down building in one place, then you're going to have to build somewhere else and if you do that, let's do that the best way we possibly can so that the life that people live is as rich as it can be. Char Miller: All of these things to me are in ways that are so interconnected and are I would say logical acceptance me saying it, so it may not be that logical, but are ways that when I get to work with my students on these projects that they're working on, is to see the way in which they bring all of these ideas that they've had from all sorts of faculty in Claremont and from their peers and start to reimagine a landscape, whether it's in Claremont or in LA or wherever it may be. And boy is that fun, because it means that, I think that whatever they do in their lives, they've actually been able to take the ideas that they have and apply them in some way, principled way to resolve, and what else are we here for? I think that's as true for us as faculty as it is for the students. Mark Wood: Char, let's shift from fire to another big concern of yours water, water policy. You've written a lot about it, including the book about the Ogallala Aquifer. Talk to us a little bit about water politics in america today. What should people know about it? Char Miller: Well, three years ago I would've given you a different answer. The current administration is quite interested in undoing everything bit of environmental regulation imaginable. Water policy is a perfect example of this, in which now polluters only have to voluntarily report their emissions to the EPA, that arsenic in water is okay for us, because it is apparently. Mark Wood: It's good for you. Char Miller: It's good for you, it's natural. They will make issues with and have been pounding the table on questions of salmon and dams in ways that earlier administrations were in some cases more careful about, not always. So I would say there are a couple of things, one of which is the federal policy has obviously moved dramatically in opposition to the kinds of legislation that Gifford Pinchot when he was governor of Pennsylvania enacted, the Clean Water Act. The first Clean Water Act in the United States came out of his office in Pennsylvania in the 1920s. That you don't see any longer. That's something that you undermine in a way that I find deeply troubling, largely because the downstream consequences of that are going to be felt by people who cannot insulate them from those toxins. This is a privileged and powered position that is going to devastate those who are often on the margins. Char Miller: Having said that, there are still ways in which individual states control their water. Any water that isn't trans-border, that is to say as California's is not. All of that water that falls here flows to the ocean, it doesn't flow to some other state. Colorado is a complicated place as we know that but even there, California has the capacity as a state, as does Washington, and Oregon, and those that don't abide by the president's decisions. They are still responsible for clean water for their citizens, and so here's where federalism has a role, has a huge role. State's rights in a sense has always been water. Char Miller: For example, one of the little known facts that it took me a long time to figure out is that any water that falls on a national forest, which is federal property, belongs to the states, just like any wildlife on a national forest belongs to the states. So whatever the Forest Service does, it has to do in conjunction with the states. In this case, the Sierra mountains are a huge reservoir for the state of California on the eastern slope and the western slope. And it's all national forest, or virtually all of it is national forest, and yet the Forest Service is not the player here. It's the states that are at the, in this case, the state of California that's the determining factor. Char Miller: So, I would say that we are in a pretty non-progressive, and I will use that with a capital P version of what environmental regulation should look like. In fact, in this administration's eyes there should be none. The states have the chance and the role, and I think the responsibility of being the bulwark against that national incentive. Someday states will do it and some states won't and that's one of the reasons why Theodore Roosevelt was insistent upon creating a National Environmental set of policies, because he didn't want individual states necessarily to do things to their citizens that other states weren't, right? That you can't protect some and then protect others, or not protect others. Char Miller: There was a commitment to the common wealth as that word actually means, common wealth. That we all own a piece of that pie and that we all have access to it on the one hand, but also should be controlling that access and have that across what's now 50 states. As this administration has shown with ventilators and masks, it doesn't believe in that policy. That there is a federal perspective that should reign and a transfer of funding to allow all states to get the ventilators, and the masks, and surgical equipment that they need to help us survive this particular pandemic. I think what the pandemic is showing us is that for all their faults and there were many of them, people like Pinchot and Muir, those in the FDR administration and blessedly, many Republicans in the 50s and 60s who fought like crazy for environmental protection, they were right. Char Miller: This administration is wrong and I think part of what we need to do as historians and as thinkers about this kind of stuff is okay, if you know that's the case and that's the context in which this is taking place, then it's up to us to blow that particular whistle. Patty Vest: Char, you mentioned earlier how much you enjoy working with your students and envisioning what the world could be. Could you tell us about some of the projects that you're working with your students? We have many of our prospective students who are very, very much interested in their environment and issues of sustainability. Can you paint the picture a little bit for us? Char Miller: Sure. Oh great, thank you. Yes, I can go back into the classroom for a moment. Let me tell you about some projects and theses that have taken place over the last couple of years. In the Environmental Analysis Program, the students have to senior capstones. I think it's the only program, department on campus that does. In the fall, students write a single-authored senior thesis. Their project, their question, their issue, their resolution and they have close reading from me and others as they go through it. Then we flip the script in the senior year, senior spring semester where they do a group project with a real client on a real issue that they help to identify and thus have to resolve in three months or whatever the timeframe is. Char Miller: The purpose of doing that is twofold, one of which is they have the chance to do serious intellectual research at a pretty intense level because it's only a semester. They hate it in September, and they love it in December because they're done. Also, because the work that we do in the world is always in group and how as it turns out, remotely. And so, you hone your skills, those individual skills that you then bring into a group setting. The first question that we ask them in the senior seminar, which is this clinic project, or that Jeff Groves, Harvey Mudd and I do in our Building Los Angeles classes like, when you sit in your group, the first thing you talk about are the skills you bring to the table. Char Miller: Some kids have digital skills and some kids have drawing skills, and some kids have one set of analytical frameworks that they really like using and could be useful in this process, but they have to identify it and it's so much fun to listen in. It's like, "Oh yeah, you do recognize this. You do have skills. Excellent. Check that box." But I would also say pragmatically what that does, and I find this out every spring and summer when I start getting calls from potential employers is they're blown away by the fact that the students could speak so persuasively about their own abilities like, "I did this thesis and here's what this thesis was about." And secondly, can then talk about when asked, "Well, what are you like as a team player?" "Oh, well I'll tell you what I'm like as a team player. I'm on a group right now. We're working on this project," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Char Miller: That's a thrill. That for me is the payback, or actually it's when I get to pay them back and give them the recommendations that they so clearly deserved. But, some of the projects and theses I think that really speak to these questions of environmental sustainability broadly imagined. It's going to look different from one group to another. In Building Los Angeles last spring that project is, you've got to rehab, or redo, or rebuild something on the campuses. I won't say it was ... It was a mind blowing project that one group did, a cross campus group did about Bixby Plaza, that space in front of Frary and also Walker Lounge, because they didn't like that either. Basically in one month, they completely redesigned Bixby Plaza to make it a place where people congregated and did that by extending Walker over those god awful steps. Char Miller: Nobody walks up them in any sense, so they took that over as a cafe and they created a two tier cafe that flowed into Bixby Plaza. They redesigned the whole interior of Walker. We gave them free rein to do whatever they wanted to do and it was astonishing. They were highly skilled with ArcGIS and others, so the designs were just beautifully done. I showed them to Bob Robinson and he went, "Ho, ho, ho," who's the Vice President for Facilities. We'll see if anything happens, but I'm less concerned about that than the fact that we said, "What do you want to do?" And they came up with this genius design. Char Miller: Other groups took the Mudd Quadrangle which lies between ... I think that's what it's called, between the library and Garrison Theater, which is this big, vast empty space where McAlister Religious Center is also and they went, "Why not build [6-C] buildings of some sort?" One of them built a rec center with a, I think it was a 30-foot climbing tower, multi-tiered. I mean, it was just beautiful. They were thinking about the worlds that they would like to occupy, right? They wanted to build something that would say to them, "Man, you had a great time at Claremont but if you had this, even better." It's fantasy on the one hand, but really cool on the other. Char Miller: Some of the really interesting theses in the fall last year revolved around environmental sustainability. Jordan Grimaldi who soon will be a Pomona grad did this really deep dive into what it means to build sustainably and used various ways by which he looked at organizations that were trying to think this out way beyond LEAD, way beyond LEAD. Really thinking more in depth about this process. Other groups were looking at and other individuals were looking at ways in which they could rethink justice and what that means. We've actually had some brilliant theses over the last 10 years in which students took questions of environmental justice and looked at small communities. In one case, island communities off of British Columbia and other cases in East LA, and in third cases looking ... Char Miller: Actually, there was a paired thesis in which a student looked at Ontario and East LA. She had spent time in both places working in both places, and wrote this beautiful thesis that looked at what it means to be in a largely Latinx community where you're trying to build urban gardens as both places were, did it very differently. Trying to build housing, did it very differently and they're separated by 30 miles. How does that happen and what does that mean? She is among a number of students who took those skills, and this will be really interesting for incoming students to know, or maybe just their parents at this point. Char Miller: But, California has this extraordinary postgraduate experience called CivicSpark, which is an AmeriCorps, federally funded entity. It has jobs all over the state. We have students all over the state who come right out of the EA Program with all of these really interesting skills as scientists, social scientists and humanists and they are immediately plugged into housing issues in San Bernardino, housing issues again, Vanessa Sanchez who I was just speaking of who did this Ontario, East LA. She's working for CivicSpark, a Scripps student working for CivicSpark in East LA. Frank [Lyles] who graduated three years ago, for the last two years has been basically the only planner Shasta County has. Char Miller: When he got there, he didn't know anything about planning. But Frank's are really smart kid who can run up steep mountains by the way, but also learning curves and he went, "All right." So they said, "We don't know where actually all of our water mains are." So, Frank has been diving, deep diving, literally deep diving to try to figure this out and to map it so that a small rural community has a better understanding of what it means to be literally sustainable. How could you be sustainable if you can't find your own resources? Those are huge challenges. Kids have worked on green bike programs in Seattle in Portland through CivicSparker or like-minded organizations in those states. Char Miller: From my vantage point, you think about a four-year career at a college. Some of it you have to be intentional about because we ask you to be like, what's your major? Who is your advisor? What are you studying? Let's figure out these requirements. But, others of it is to think through also the ways in which you can use the resources of this institution to make it easier for you to imagine yourself in different ways. For example, take the SURP Program, the Summer Undergraduate Research Program which is ... I am so jealous that that exists. I love it for our students, but why wasn't that around when I was in college? Char Miller: Really savvy students have figured out with some prodding that if you apply for it for your junior, senior summer, the college is paying you to do the research for your senior thesis. And so, you really are writing a two semester thesis that's underwritten by the college. Those are really rich because they've had that experience and that's true the other colleges also because we get kids from all five of the colleges in the EA Program. The other thing it teaches them is that there's money around and you got to figure out how to get it, and someone will give it to you if you write a really good proposal and that proposal will actually help you figure out yourself, which is really what this is about. Not just that I have skills, but why do I have these skills and why do these things make sense to me in ways that other things don't? Char Miller: For me, history made sense from the second grade on. It just was the way I wanted to think. Math not so much, but history, absolutely. So, know that about yourself, right? Figure out what those things are that sing to you and learn how to sing better. I think that's part of what Pomona has done so, so, so well for its students, which means that when I walk into a classroom, scared out of my mind because I've got ... A-game every second, not just happenstance, that I'm going to encounter kids who have not only done the reading, they've thought around the reading and they've done other reading that talks to that reading, even though they didn't know that when they walk into the classroom. And so all of a sudden, the things that explode at the table are about the entire curriculum and not just this piece of it. I think that's what we're really trying to do. And it could be an environmental analysis, it could be in math, it could be in physics, it could be an art, it could be in English, it can be anywhere. It happens everywhere. Mark Wood: Char, one last question. You do a lot of outreach through the media. I want to ask you about why you do that. But in particular, I'm curious about something I read in an interview you gave where you said, well, you cited one of the reasons for trying to reach a wider audience always was your mom. Can you tell us about that? Char Miller: Yeah. When I gave my mother my first academic article, because my mother was not always the nicest people, she said, "Who'd you write this for?" I went, "Well, really for me and maybe five other people," and she said, "Why are you doing that? Why is that the only audience you're trying to reach?" And I said, "Well, there's this profession and I got to do this if I want to maintain myself in it." But, I actually also took her seriously and began to imagine that there might be other audiences that I could talk to. And again, I give all credit to San Antonio as a place. It might've happened elsewhere, but I happened to live there. Char Miller: I was starting to think about all of these local issues that had deep histories behind them of social injustice, and housing problems, and flooding problems and the like. I could write about them for my academic peers, but I was thinking of my mother in that way, that Well, maybe there were other audiences if I wrote differently. And so in 1985 as newspapers started to open up what they now call op-ed columns, right? The possibility of different voices appearing on their pages. I don't know how, why, but I wrote a piece, I sent it in. It got totally devastated. They said, "Yeah, this is great," and then the copy that came back was totally different. Char Miller: I was looking at it and I put it side by side with the one I wrote and I went, "Okay, what are they seeing that I'm not seeing?" And I'm sitting there going, "Your students probably say the same thing to you, about you," like, what is he looking at that I'm not looking at? Man, that was a total change in both how I wrote and also how I taught writing. It really, I mean, I bless those editors at the San Antonio Light, which is now defunct and the San Antonio Express- Mark Wood: It's an editor. I can say editors are great. Char Miller: Yeah, editors are great. Mark Wood: Everybody needs. Char Miller: Totally right. So, it was like this light bulb just went off. Not just inverted paragraphs and the like, the inverted form of it, but also the words you choose and how you do it, and the way in which you try to convey a story in a moment and use that moment to play to larger issues, which I kind of knew. Actually, I just went back and looked at my high school journalism for sports, and I do the exact same thing. I had totally forgotten about it and I'm reading it going, "God, you told the story, and then you built off of that story and you did this other thing," and I was like, "So you did know this at some point in your life." Char Miller: All kudos to my mother but actually in truth, even though it's a much better story to tell from my mother's eyes, it was really these editors that just slashed and burned their way through this stuff and forced me to stop, look and go, "Oh, that's what they want." Then from that came the realization that when I would talk to the Lions Club or I would talk to the rotary because I loved doing that, still do, that those are different audiences. They're not my students, they're not my mother, thank God. They are someone else, so what do they need to know that I think I can convey to them and how to convey to them that piece? Char Miller: In some ways, teaching is teaching and giving talks is what it is, but there's an intentionality behind it also that also gets framed into pieces that I will write for the LA Times or whoever. It's had this reciprocal response which whenever I write one of those things, I start to think about what I do in class differently. When I'm talking with my students I'm thinking, "Huh, that's interesting. I wonder what that would look like if it became an essay." And so, I've started working with students on publications the last couple of years and have absolutely loved that in part because ... They go off and do different things. Char Miller: That isn't going to be what their careers are, but it's given them and me a chance to have this one-on-one like if we're going to publish in that journal, go look at that journal and let's think about what that requires because that's a different thing than this other thing over here. I think that part of what's been very helpful for me is that different audiences need different ways of speaking and that means I need different ways of writing. That has been as much fun as it is to write for my academic audiences, and I'd better say that as a close. In truth, I reach a lot more people by working on blogs and writing columns for newspapers and if my job is to speak to a larger audience, then that's part of the job I should be doing. Mark Wood: Okay Char, if we were going to cover all the different things you've written about, we'd be here all day so I think we'd better wrap it up here. Char Miller: Well, thanks for the chance. Mark Wood: We've been talking with Professor of History and Environmental Analysis Char Miller. Thanks Char. Char Miller: Thank you guys so much, appreciate it. Patty Vest: Thank you Char. Char Miller: Stay safe. Patty Vest: And to all who've stuck with us this far, thanks for listening to Sagecast, the podcast of Pomona College. Stay safe, and until next time.