Bio and Press kit

Tovar has been wondering about humans and other animals since he was a boy. He grew up in Vermont and New Hampshire, where he spent long summer days outdoors, exploring and swimming, gathering wild blueberries for breakfast and reeling in brook trout for dinner.

After college—at Dartmouth, in Japan, and at the New School in Manhattan—he headed back to nature, where his education had begun. He worked for several years as a carpenter. Then, having handled umpteen thousand board-feet of lumber and having burned dozens of cords of firewood, he bought a chain saw and took his ecological values for an enlightening walk in the woods, apprenticing with a forester-logger.

A few years later, having returned to omnivory after a decade as a vegetarian, he decided to take his dietary ethics for a walk in the woods, too, deer rifle in hand.

Tovar has written on hunting, forestry, wildlife, and conservation for Outdoor America, Northern Woodlands, and Massachusetts Wildlife, among others. The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian’s Hunt for Sustenance (Pegasus Books, 2012) is his first book.

He received his B.A. from Eugene Lang College of the New School for Social Research. In 2009, he was awarded a Graduate School Fellowship by the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he studies communication. His M.A. thesis, “Meat and Meanings: Adult-Onset Hunters’ Cultural Discourses of the Hunt,” was completed in 2011. He is currently enrolled at UMass as a Ph.D. student and continues to explore human relationships with wildlife and nature, focusing his dissertation research on the complex cultural perspectives surrounding wolf conservation, management, and hunting in the western Great Lakes region.

He lives in Vermont with his wife Catherine, their affectionate Labrador retriever, Kaia, and an eclectic mix of cookbooks.

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