For maximum impact, our university’s eventual goal is to go beyond one-off sustainability initiatives to leverage the power of a sustainability movement. Movements have momentum and power to effect lasting change. They are shaped and propelled by people with a vision for the future that often includes changes in cultural values, policy, and practice. Movements are fueled by people with a passion for change. The loudest voices promoting sustainability on our campus are those of students. Students care about the environment. They care about the world they’re inheriting and will leave to those who follow them. Students are asking decision-makers to factor in sustainability concerns ranging from environmental harm to natural resource depletion as they make decisions on strategic plans, master plans, construction, and campus operations. Although it will take some time to build a sustainability movement, we have committed to taking steps that move our campus toward a culture of sustainability, and our approach is to involve multiple departments to implement a variety of initiatives. Sam Houston State University’s sustainability committee has been inspired by the passionate voices of students who want to see progress, and our campus’s distributed approach to effect small campus-wide changes is expected to lead to a multiplied, significant impact.

It is easy to initiate a sustainability program that makes financial sense. Positive returns on investments are rational and easily justified. It is more challenging to take the “heart” approach by committing to effect change because it’s the right thing to do for the environment and for future generations if the financial return on investment is not readily apparent. Our university’s approach to sustainability is to blend the rationales from the head—what makes sense financially—and the heart—what makes sense to protect the environment. Those two sides support the concept known as the “triple bottom line,” bringing together people, planet, and profits. Another motivation is the pull from business and industry. I recently toured a lumber company that often hires our students and graduates. The company CEO told me sustainability is an important topic for the lumber industry and that knowledge of and value for sustainability are big pluses for new hires. This is just one example of a private company committed to an ideal valued by its owners and customers. On a larger scale, ESG—environmental, social, and corporate governance—is increasingly important to industries and their stockholders, and producing graduates who can join their new professions with some understanding of sustainability practices makes sense.

According to the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (Ezarik, 2023), few campuses are doing absolutely nothing, but many of their sustainability programs are more or less ad hoc. That is where Sam Houston State University found itself recently. We had an Energy Manager whose focus was heavily transactional, and efforts were spent analyzing utility bills for accuracy rather than analyzing the consumption activity that drove those bills. Until recently, our sustainability committee had not met since the COVID-19 pandemic shut down many campus operations. As we started to track our campus efforts, we realized that departments were engaged in sustainability efforts on their own. They were committed to doing what they could. We began looking for ways to put institutional commitment and support behind their efforts to see how we could amplify them 

 Buildings were operating as if they
were fully occupied at all times.