On Oct. 17, Pitzer College and the Robert Redford Conservancy hosted an event launching SoCal Earth, an online interactive hub for environmental information on Southern California. The event consisted of a community dinner in the Founders Room at McConnell Center, followed by a tour of the website and speeches from the project’s contributors.
“This is one of our most important projects that we’ve put out. We really want to spread awareness of it,” Luca Davis PZ ’27, a project contributor and fellow at the Robert Redford Conservancy said. “It has so much potential to be a transformative thing.”
The Robert Redford Conservancy for Southern California Sustainability was founded in 2012 as a learning laboratory for instruction, research, policy work and advocacy for socio-ecological justice and sustainability.
SoCal Earth, the conservancy’s latest project, is a digital tool that provides users with mapping and spatial data to combat climate change and conserve Southern California’s communities and habitats. The resource is designed to be accessible to a wide array of demographics ranging from primary school students to policymakers.
“We want data in its raw form to be a call to action for community members, for students, for faculty, for anyone who has interest in taking environmental action in their community,” Nathan Lu PZ ’25, one of the project’s main contributors and a fellow at the conservancy, said.
According to Lu, Susan Phillips, a director at the conservancy, was initially the one to develop the concept for SoCal Earth.
Over 100 students from Pitzer have been involved in the creation of SoCal Earth over the past three years, from writing op-eds to working with Geographic Information System technology, which Pitzer offers classes on.
When envisioning the future of SoCal Earth, conservancy fellow Diego Tamayo PZ ’25 said that he hopes the project will expand to areas outside of the immediate Southern California region.
“The plan for the SoCal Earth is for these models to potentially be replicated in other places,” Tamayo said. “Hopefully students in the future will be able to take advantage of this [platform] in communities in the Bay Area and on the East Coast, wherever it may be.”
Lu expressed similar sentiments.
“San Diego needs to be included,” he said.“We want to do all of California and make an all-encompassing tool. I think the reach that we have will be very important going forward.”
Davis added that he hopes the 5C community will engage with SoCal Earth in their academic studies and personal projects.
“It’s going to be great for projects and research. I think it could become a mainstay at the 5Cs for research,” Davis said. “It will continue to be a great place to find data, make maps and find educational resources.”
Lu emphasized many ways the resource can be used.
“We envision this being used in a really interdisciplinary way,” Lu said. “Whether you want to incorporate a justice component in your work, or you’re looking for hard data and numbers, I think [SoCal Earth] can be used for any research curiosity that the Pitzer community might have.”
Tamayo built upon this sentiment, highlighting SoCal Earth’s potential for becoming a useful tool in Pitzer’s environmental analysis field group. “I really could see this as something that environmental analysis classes could use down the line,” he said. “I see this as something that could be potentially integrated into research projects and internships.”
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