Walking the Sustainability Talk: If Not Us,Who? If Not Now,When?

Abstract

This essay centers on the personal sustainability behaviors of faculty as related to research, teaching, and service, as well as those behaviors that go far beyond these typical faculty responsibilities. We argue that faculty personal engagement with sustainability can lend credibility to this topic as faculty can set a good example for students, colleagues, and other stakeholders within their respective networks. We draw on the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals to suggest several ideas that faculty could adopt as part of their sustainability plans. Moreover, we offer multiple recommendations as to how faculty might leverage these experiences in the classroom and beyond.

Keywords

sustainability personal sustainability United Nations Sustainable Development Goals UN SDGs personal responsibility Principles for Responsible Management Education PRME activism sustainable development

Prologue

You have just returned from the latest management conference you attend every year, no matter the location or theme, with several ideas for your next sustainability research project. You are already thinking about upgrading your sustainability management course in preparation for the upcoming semester. As you arrive at your hometown airport, you overhear on the televisions in the terminal a story about another gloomy environmental report, this one a combination of climate-related firestorms, refugee victims, and species extinctions—all catastrophes in the making.

As you climb into a taxicab for the ride home, you think to yourself that, as a sustainability management academic, you are doing everything you can to help address climate crises. Your cabbie wants to talk and asks where you have been and what you do for a living. She hears you mention sustainability, wants to know if you know about the climate report that she just heard on the news and, looking at you in her rear-view mirror, asks about your ideas on what people can or should do to help solve the problem. You start giving her some tips on how she can save energy, help climate victims, and reduce her consumption of unhealthy and nonlocal food. She thanks you, appears impressed, and asks if you do all of those things you just suggested. You see your reflection in the mirror on the back of the passenger seat and tell her that you try, but that your sustainability research and teaching take a lot of time and, hopefully, make up for the deficit. You see her looking at you again in the rearview mirror. She only smiles.

Introduction: Why Management Faculty Need to Walk the Sustainability Talk

As scholars in management education, we recognize that sustainability challenges have almost exclusively increased in terms of quantity, intensity, and complexity during our careers, and that we could and probably should have lived more sustainable lives. We might have also done more to supplement and complement our sustainability research, teaching, and service by adopting more sustainable lifestyles and setting better examples for students, colleagues, and other stakeholders within our networks. Doing so might have helped us address at least some local sustainability issues more effectively while sending signals to our many stakeholders that we all need not just to talk the sustainability talk, but also walk the sustainability talk.

Management faculty play a significant role as we have the opportunity to directly contribute to the formation of ethical business leaders by increasing their awareness of sustainability issues (Dzuranin et al., 2013). Such recognition and comprehension of issues can enhance managers’ decision-making (and action-taking) skills as they evaluate and assess alternatives that affect all living beings, considering both short- and long-term horizons.

This essay is our collaborative effort to suggest that more of us may want—and need—to assess, increase, and share our personal sustainability actions, rather than relying only on our sustainability research, teaching, and service to have an impact. Here we define personal sustainability actions as individual efforts that demonstrate care for self and others, and especially the planet and its biosphere, while acknowledging the interconnectedness of all living entities at all levels. By impact, we mean our ability as faculty to model behavior, and to enlist other individuals to engage in, personal sustainability actions that will result in a positive, collective transformation.

Engaging in personal sustainability actions has progressively become more critical and complex, as environmental conditions have worsened, and our understanding and acceptance of the essential interdependence of the social and environmental components of sustainability have increased. Advancements in sustainability technologies can help us reduce our current ecological and social footprints. However, advancements in technologies alone are not likely to achieve a sufficient level of sustainability (Huesemann, 2003).

Similarly, public policies encouraging the development of eco-innovations have become vitally essential but are likely to require unacceptably lengthy time frames to develop and implement. For instance, efforts to increase the efficiency of air travel are currently being outpaced by growing demand, thus resulting in a continuous increase in air travel emissions (Tabuchi & Popovich, 2019). As such, a significant cultural shift is needed, including changes in consumption patterns that have the potential to initiate and inspire an immediate and large-scale transformation in individual behaviors. Indeed, various studies have shown that individual actions matter concerning climate change and other environmental and social sustainability problems (Druckman & Jackson, 2016; Hertwich & Peters, 2009; Wilson et al., 2013).

The rest of this essay is organized as follows. First, we highlight some of the sustainability impacts that faculty have accomplished in research, service, and teaching in the field of management. Then, we discuss the importance of faculty engaging in personal sustainability behavior and suggest ideas for how to leverage our sustainability actions in the classroom and beyond. Finally, we consider potential challenges and implications of attempting to enhance our sustainability actions and influence others to do the same.

The Sustainability Impact of Management Faculty Through Research, Service, and Teaching

Sustainability Impact Through Research

Beginning in the 1970s, and particularly since the mid-1990s, environmental sustainability has been a significant focus of management research. Scholars from various divisions within the Academy of Management, especially the Organizations and the Natural Environment division, have conducted substantial research on multiple questions relating to organizations’ environmental performance. Other academic associations devoted to this topic have arisen, including the Greening of Industry Network, the Group for Research on Organizations and the Natural Environment, and the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability. Members of these and other business academic organizations have published thousands of articles detailing their theories, models, and findings regarding organizations’ environmental and social sustainability. Yet how much has such research affected the sustainability practices of organizations around the world? This question needs to be further explored and documented. Although corporate donations to fund academic sustainability centers and professorships would suggest that companies are seeking research-based assistance to become more sustainable, the answer to this question has yet to be determined. However, faculty in our field have manifested the desire to increase research influence outside academia (Elangovan & Hoffman, 2019).

Sustainability Impact Through Service

Many faculty involved in the subfield of Sustainability in Management Education (SiME) have actively attempted to engage a wide range of sustainability stakeholders as part of their academic service responsibilities, both on campus and in their communities (Arevalo & Mitchell, 2017). These faculty practices have involved students, including faculty serving as advisors for student sustainability groups such as Net Impact, as well as other environmental and social change/diversity student groups. Other opportunities have arisen when faculty prepare students for sustainability-related case competitions (e.g., the Kellogg-Morgan Stanley Sustainable Investing Challenge), sustainable business plan competitions, and case study writing.

Many universities and colleges have full-time sustainability coordinators, as well as sustainability advisory committees made up of faculty, students, and staff (Krizek et al., 2012). Sustainability projects are often in need of student and faculty involvement, particularly individuals with analytic skills (Brinkhurst et al., 2011). For example, one of the coauthors of this essay has worked with students affiliated with the Wisconsin Sustainable Business Council and other sustainability-oriented associations, including those that are campus-specific and often associated with green university efforts. This coauthor and many other SiME faculty have helped students in business sustainability courses connect with businesses that have sustainability-related career positions, internships, and consulting projects (O’Brien & Sarkis, 2014). Some of these students have secured sustainability jobs in business organizations (e.g., Wal-Mart, Institutional Shareholders Services), government organizations (e.g., the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency), and nonprofit organizations (e.g., the World Resources Institute, and International Labor Organization).

Two of the coauthors have also participated in multiple academic and professional development workshops by co-organizing and coleading several such sessions, as well as cofounding an academic sustainability organization. One coauthor has served as the faculty advisor for multiple sustainability student groups at several universities and is also politically engaged with several nongovernmental organisations’ sustainability-related campaigns and promotions.

Finally, faculty can become active in several international organizations (e.g., United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education) that are charged with promoting sustainability in business schools interested in responsible leadership. In particular, in the United States, The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) was launched in 2005 to help students, staff, faculty, and administrators implement sustainability practices throughout their campuses. AASHE provides a self-assessment tool—Sustainability Tracking, Assessment, and Rating System—so colleges and universities can measure their sustainability performance and plan for the next steps. This tool promotes efforts of faculty developing and offering sustainability courses, guiding students in sustainability “immersive” experiences, and conducting sustainability research, including in centers dedicated to that topic, but also engaging in an “Employee Educators Program” in which faculty are encouraged to “educate and mobilize their peers around sustainability initiatives and programs” (AASHE, 2017, p. 95).

Sustainability Impact Through Teaching

Faculty personal commitment to sustainability research and service may considerably enrich sustainability teaching, the latter of which has gained increased visibility in the past three decades. Since the 1990s, globally, scores of business school sustainability programs have been created, hundreds of different sustainable business courses have been developed and taught, and tens of thousands of aspiring managers have been exposed to SiME in the classroom.

For example, one of the coauthors recently led an initiative to create a new major in Sustainability Management in their university’s business school. This multiyear effort was successful, despite initial faculty skepticism that questioned whether such a major would attract student interest and whether there is sufficient market demand for students with sustainability knowledge, skills, and attitudes.

Another coauthor has likewise proposed several different majors, minors, and sustainability-infused degree programs, thus far, without success. Nevertheless, for nearly two decades, this coauthor has annually offered a combined undergraduate and graduate-level elective course on managing organizations for sustainability. The course generally engages students in examining local organizations and making recommendations on how to improve their sustainability. Another coauthor, over the past three decades, has been actively engaged in building a sustainability center and institute, and in teaching more than a dozen sustainability courses, including at the undergraduate, graduate, doctoral, and executive levels. The courses have actively involved students in a wide range of sustainability projects through activities such as renewable energy site visits, consulting engagements, guest speakers, and local conference organizing and hosting.

These examples illustrate common scenarios and experiences faced by faculty members attempting to formally infuse sustainability in the academic curricula and culture. However, as explained by Painter-Morland et al. (2015) and Rusinko and Sama (2009), there is significant variation regarding how different schools embed sustainability into the business school depending on institutional support, availability of resources, and faculty initiative.

In terms of distinction among the educational needs of undergraduate, graduate, and executive education students, we find that students are generally interested in sustainability-related topics. However, undergraduate students are often overwhelmed by the challenge and need to be convinced that they can start sustainability activities on a small scale and that their individual actions matter (Savageau, 2013). Graduate students, on the other hand, are more likely to be interested in leveraging sustainability practices in their organizations and finding ways to build a business case for sustainability (Hesselbarth & Schaltegger, 2014; Roome, 2005). However, notwithstanding an overall interest in sustainability education, this coauthor has encountered major sustainability-related challenges in encouraging business students and others to practice sustainability. Some business students, faculty, and staff have said sustainability is inconvenient, not “cool,” too expensive in time or money, and otherwise have not perceived sustainability, including climate issues, to be either urgent or their responsibility for resolving (Eagle et al., 2015). What this coauthor has done in response is to persist in trying to gain their interest, enthusiasm, and participation in sustainability issues and solutions. This involves attempting to find innovative new ways to persuade students and other stakeholders of the value of sustainability practices while redoubling efforts to refine, upgrade, and make visible this coauthor’s own sustainability behavior.

According to the “theory of logic” addressing the issue of why environmental sustainability should be taught in business schools, student exposure to environmental issues and possible business responses to them will increase their understanding, concern, and relevant skills in this area. This will, in turn, bring about changes in these individuals’ abilities to broaden and deepen their respective organizations’ sustainability practices, and thus ultimately and hopefully lead to improvements in environmental quality (Rands, 1990) and social justice. Ultimately, students’ exposure to sustainability in management education has likely enabled some of them to promote positive environmental and social impacts within their respective organizations and enable them to become sustainability change agents (Hitchcock & Willard, 2015).

Walking the Talk: Faculty Personal Sustainability in Practice

As discussed in the previous section, management scholars interested in sustainability appear to have produced positive impacts through research, service, and teaching. However, we argue that there is a significant opportunity for faculty to engage in additional personal sustainability actions and thereby set a good example for our students, colleagues, and other stakeholders. We find it encouraging that there is an increasing amount of attention to some aspects of faculty personal environmental responsibility, which can be defined as faculty acting to reduce their own nonsustainable impacts. One of the most recent examples is the petition called Flying Less, launched in 2015 by a group of 56 scholars from more than a dozen countries. The petition was signed by over 720 individuals from various academic disciplines around the world committed to greatly reducing their flying trips and thus decreasing one of our most environmentally harmful activities (Dolšak & Prakash, 2018; Quack et al., 2019; “No Flights, a Four-day Week,” 2019).

Within our field, the Academy of Management Annual Meeting is the largest networking event for management faculty, attended by over 10,000 participants annually. These and similar professional meetings are premier locations for exchanging knowledge and developing teaching and research ideas. Yet such conferences can have large-scale negative sustainability affects due to air and other travel activities of attendees, as well as other factors (e.g., inadequate hotel sustainability-related practices). For example, to offset the carbon footprint of just the 451 Organizations and the Natural Environment division members at the conference in Chicago in 2018, we would need to plant approximately 16,800 tree seedlings and successfully grow them for the next 10 years (Sharma et al., 2019).

For the sake of sustainability, we humbly suggest that our profession rethink our participation in such academic meetings, including whether we need to attend every one of these gatherings (as we ourselves have generally done). We encourage not only individual faculty members but also faculty planning committees to consider sustainable options for academic conferences. Some ideas our profession could implement to reduce the negative environmental impact of attendance at such conferences include the following: (a) participation through the use of audio visual technologies (as is being done for academic conferences due to the coronavirus pandemic), (b) charging registration fees that account for and offset environmental impacts, (c) requesting schools or donors to purchase carbon offsets in combination with or in addition to airline tickets, (d) holding more regional conferences, and (e) encouraging train, bus, and carpool travel to and from conferences.

In the remainder of this section, we briefly review the concept of social learning theory and its application to encouraging the adoption of sustainable behaviors. We also share other examples of personal sustainability behaviors that the coauthors have adopted. Finally, we make use of the framework of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which includes ambitious targets to address climate, food and water crises, poverty, justice, and economic inequality by 2030.

Social Learning Theory and the Modeling of Personal Sustainable Behavior

Social learning theory has been applied to the adoption of proenvironmental behavior in both educational and workplace settings. Previous social learning theory scholars have argued that individuals can learn and acquire new behaviors either by engaging in actual experiences or by directly observing and imitating others’ actions, and that social norms are transmitted and can even emerge based on such observations and interactions (Bandura, 1977; Cangemi & Kahn, 1979; Manning, 2009; McMahon & Bharma, 2012; Pintrich & Schunk, 2002).

A comprehensive model of the adoption of voluntary proenvironmental behavior by employees in the workplace posits that supervisors are an important source of social norms regarding environmental behavior, and that supervisory provision of these norms can lead to the development of powerful personal norms for such behavior (Lulfs & Hahn, 2013). Empirical support for this notion has also been found (Ramus & Killmer, 2007; Robertson & Barling, 2013). Abrahamsie and Matthies (2012) determined that attempting to promote environmental behavior change through transmitting information is of limited effectiveness, but that adding the modeling of desired behavior increases the effectiveness of this strategy. Higgs and McMillan (2006) conducted a case study on four secondary schools’ modeling of sustainability practices. They concluded that teachers’ personal sustainability behaviors fostered sustainability understanding, as students learned from direct observations and were able to transfer sustainability values to personal and tangible applications.

These studies suggest that faculty modeling of personal sustainability behavior may be impactful, as teachers are in a privileged position to influence a wider audience because they are seen as experts in the field (Cavallaro et al., 2016; Nejati & Shafaei, 2018). Moreover, a faculty member’s ability to mobilize and inspire others is much stronger if these abilities are consistent with personal stories, as we illustrate below.

The Coauthors’ Efforts at “Walking Their Sustainability Talk”

Many students enjoy learning about their teachers’ lives and seek opportunities to relate to faculty as human beings, so the coauthors of this essay have regularly communicated a number of the practices described below to their respective students. In line with the findings from social learning theory, the coauthors shared their personal examples in the classroom to illustrate how individuals can engage in sustainability, from small to highly impactful actions.

For example, one of the coauthors has reduced their household energy consumption to less than 10% of the average utility consumer with a similarly sized residence in their region using weatherization materials, LED lighting, and a solar appliance charger. This coauthor regularly purchases solar renewable energy credits, invests in community solar bonds, maintains a low/no-carbon socially responsible investment portfolio, has driven a plug-in hybrid automobile for two decades, and uses buses and trains for nonemergency continental trips rather than flights. This coauthor, who does not have any children, maintains a 95% organic vegan diet, regularly uses a local farmers’ market and co-op, does patio solar cooking and gardening, and intensively recycles and composts, including the recycling of all plastic via TerraCycle (2020). Besides sharing these stories with the students, this coauthor has brought and circulated in the classroom packages of tree-free paper and 100% recycled paper, solar reusable battery charges, pictures of participation in environmental protests and celebrations, and has also demonstrated a solar cooking system.

Another coauthor has engaged in personal sustainability behaviors primarily relating to energy, water, and solid waste. Since 2001, this coauthor has driven hybrid vehicles and has pledged never to purchase another vehicle that is not fully electric. Since 2012, this coauthor has had a solar photovoltaic rooftop system and a three-well in-ground geothermal HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) system that students and regional media have toured. All lightbulbs in the home are either CFLs or LEDs, and all windows have been upgraded to high-efficiency ones. To reduce mower fuel use and to provide better wildlife habitat, roughly 30% of the large grounds has been converted to prairie, native shrubs, or wood-chipped areas. Reused and low-impact building materials were employed in a major home remodel, and all toilets have been replaced with 1.2 gallon per flush models. The water heater is kept on a low setting. Water is collected at the bathroom tap in milk jugs until it warms sufficiently for shaving, and this water is then used on house plants. Much of the family’s food comes from a cooperative specializing in local foods that this coauthor helped start. Much of the produce from the family garden is canned or frozen. All nonmeat food scraps are composted in a backyard compost bin, and grass clippings are mulched. This coauthor has hosted a news crew to talk about the sustainability initiatives implemented in their home and lives and has shared that video with students.

Despite these efforts, this coauthor acknowledges engaging in many unsustainable behaviors. The family is not vegetarian and family meals are not always cooked from scratch. This coauthor takes an average of one to two domestic round-trip flights a year and an international round trip flight every year or two, while the hybrid car is driven over 40,000 miles per year for professional, medical, volunteer, and family vacation purposes. Finally, efforts to adopt a voluntary simplicity lifestyle—one in which consumption of goods and services is substantially reduced, and nonmaterialistic sources of personal fulfillment are emphasized (The Simplicity Collective, 2019)—have not fully succeeded.

The third coauthor engages in many similar sustainability actions, including having a solar photovoltaic rooftop array, using energy-efficient appliances, and driving an electric vehicle. This coauthor set up a charitable trust fund for strategic and long-term philanthropic donations and invests exclusively in socially responsible mutual funds (e.g., Vanguard FTSE Social Index Fund, TIAA-CREF Social Choice Equity Fund) which comprise companies that meet high levels of environmental, social, and governance performance as assessed by rating agencies including MSCI, Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg, and others. This coauthor has invested personal funds in Kiva, an organization that provides micro loans to small entrepreneurs worldwide. As part of a class assignment, students had to invest those funds in a project of their choice, justify the selection, and monitor results. Finally, students are often amused to learn that this coauthor founded a nonprofit organization to empower women through drumming music and that their teacher has performed in over 50 humanitarian and environmental events. Students were invited to participate in some of the local events.

Faculty Personal Sustainability Behaviors Linked to the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals

The above stories are some examples of personal sustainability behaviors that we have adopted; we know that many of our colleagues have adopted similar behaviors. We believe that faculty members who are visibly committed to sustainability lend credibility to the topic and can inspire students and others (Higgs & McMillan, 2006; Kanashiro et al., 2020). This credibility arises from the perception that faculty personal actions are aligned with the values expressed in their research and defended in professional settings, in the classroom, and on campus (Pappas & Pappas, 2015). Faculty members have a strong potential to serve, in part, as activists who can challenge injustices and inequalities while demonstrating strong ethical commitment to their students.

We believe that faculty can leverage their own personal sustainability experiences to help inspire and motivate students. Appendix A provides a framework based on the U.N. SDGs to classify examples of faculty personal sustainability and ideas to leverage experiences in the classroom and beyond. This list is only a set of initial ideas and the examples are likely to apply to more than one SDG. Faculty are encouraged to consider the 17 broad SDGs, and to also review the 169 targets and 230 indicators that underlie these goals in order to identify additional ways to practice sustainability at the personal level (United Nations, 2015).¹

Some typical sustainability issues are only implied in the SDGs, as in the case of housing. Faculty personal sustainability on this issue could include supporting efforts to reduce homelessness, prevent discrimination, encourage the construction and retrofitting of green residential buildings, and participate in Habitat for Humanity construction projects, among other possible actions (Ashton, 2018).

During the editorial process of this essay, the world unexpectedly found itself in the midst of a fast-growing coronavirus pandemic crisis, which, among other impacts, has affected many of the SDG targets and projected outcomes. Most countries around the world were not prepared for this pandemic, and the global health crisis may significantly undermine the possibilities of meeting the SDGs by 2030 (Solberg & Akufo-Addo, 2020). This global catastrophe has resulted in significant financial depression and significantly affected universities around the world as faculty are faced with the prospect of furloughs, pay cuts, increased teaching and family responsibilities, and freeze in research funds. Nevertheless, we have observed several examples of faculty members going beyond their call of duty and volunteering their time to help local businesses navigate the crisis, engaging in food drive, and just providing much needed extra emotional support to students facing personal difficulties. The coronavirus crisis is also a learning opportunity as students can be engaged in reflection and action as they observe how the coronavirus impacts communities differently, based on race, income, gender, and other demographics. Students can explore the many ways the coronavirus has disrupted our social, economic, and environmental systems and how we are all, indeed, interconnected and dependent on each other.

The sustainability examples listed in Appendix A represent experiences from faculty trained and currently working in the United States. In contexts outside the United States, faculty personal sustainability can vary significantly, and some of these examples may not apply or may need to be adapted to specific social, political, economic, and cultural contexts. For instance, one coauthor lived in Brazil until graduate school, where some sustainability practices are already embedded (or imposed) in daily routines. During peak seasons (3 to 4 months per year), water supply is cut in most households for 1 to 2 days per week. Therefore, locals are used to saving water in buckets, pots, and bottles for later usage. When growing up with the fear of water scarcity, a 5-minute shower is quite standard. To reduce air pollution, every car is allowed to circulate only on certain days of the week, depending on the license plate number. Many other examples show that living sustainably is not simply an option but rather a way of life, sometimes government-mandated, in many communities around the globe. This may serve as a reminder that if we do not conserve resources, our governments may need to force us to do so.

Measuring Personal Sustainability Behavior

While we encourage faculty to engage in personal sustainability actions, conclusive evidence suggesting that such initiatives can change individual and social behaviors in the classroom and beyond still needs to be demonstrated. Nevertheless, planning for a change usually starts with a baseline or inventory, and we suggest that faculty consider conducting sustainability self-assessment using any one of several online sustainability footprint tools. A footprint is a quantitative indicator that measures the appropriation of natural resources by individuals or groups, including communities, events, businesses, and countries (Hoeskstra & Wiedmann, 2014; see Appendix B for a list of footprint calculators).

Using a footprint calculator is an excellent first step toward making the invisible visible and helping faculty (and their stakeholders) calculate their own consumption and usage of natural resources to generate reflections on their direct and indirect impacts on the world’s resources (Edstrand, 2015; Li et al., 2015). Sustainability self-assessment based on solid information can also provide blueprints and targets for what actions individuals can pursue next to address those impacts. Faculty may share their own footprints and their plans to reduce them and encourage students to track and decrease their own footprints as a class project. Students can brainstorm ideas on how their individual actions can collectively reduce the sustainability footprint of the class. One coauthor has students calculate and attempt to reduce their footprints over a semester, and many report this to be an eye-opening experience.

One caveat is that levels of carbon emissions around the globe vary significantly, and faculty should acknowledge that different contexts call for localized solutions. According to The World Bank (2014), the United States is one of the world’s largest carbon emitters in metric tons per person annually (16.5) compared with the world average (5), the European Union (6.4), Latin America and the Caribbean (3.1), and East Asia and the Pacific (6.3). Even if some critics may see American personal sustainability attempts as environmental hypocrisy (Williams, 2019), the discussion needs to focus on how individuals and households, regardless of where they reside, can change their personal lifestyles to contribute to societal and sustainable change.

Although measuring personal sustainability can be challenging, such difficulties are not an excuse for not doing any measurement at all. Sustainability has been defined and perceived in a multitude of ways, and trying to convince others to acknowledge those measures as relevant and legitimate can be difficult. Moreover, a lack of transparency exists regarding the methods employed in footprint calculations (Padgett et al., 2008). Much work is needed to achieve a universal standardization of footprint tools with the goal of developing a quantitative measure of how individual behaviors are progressing toward a more sustainable world (Cucek et al., 2012). However, how many of us have said or heard the management maxim “You can’t manage what you don’t measure”? While footprint self-assessments lack consistency and generate different results for the same individual, they are nonetheless powerful and important tools for at least raising awareness.

Some individuals and households may be challenged and discouraged by the effort required to measure sustainability and may believe that their individual choices will not make a dent in the sustainability crisis. Yet household consumption accounts for over 70% of the carbon emissions on a global basis and, therefore, personal choices can make a significant difference (Druckman & Jackson, 2016; Hertwich & Peters, 2009; Wilson et al., 2013). For instance, Wynes and Nicholas (2017) have suggested that just four individual lifestyle choices can significantly lower household carbon emissions: having one fewer child, living car-free, avoiding airplane travel, and adopting a plant-based diet. While these and other recommendations may require a significant change in cultural norms and personal behavior, they may encourage serious engagement in high-impact actions by individuals and households.

Finally, faculty colleagues are encouraged to practice salient sustainability in which they communicate their sustainability efforts and outcomes widely, as opposed to stealth sustainability in which such communication is limited and with subsequent limitations on social impact and learning. For example, one of the coauthors uses a simple log to measure personal sustainable and unsustainable household expenditures, household waste, and recycling. The coauthor practices salient sustainability by sharing the information with students (and others) on a regular basis and inviting discussion on how to improve the coauthor’s sustainability practices and recording. Salient sustainability can also be practiced by ensuring that sustainability efforts occur at multiple levels (e.g., individual, organizational, communities; Starik, 2015; Starik & Rands, 1995), since several levels are evidenced in public domains.

The idea that our sustainability behaviors would likely be more effective if we drew others’ attention to them is basically a form of social marketing, that is, ensuring that our commitments and actions are not hidden from others (in other words, that we are not stealthy) when we are practicing them, but rather that our sustainability behaviors are salient to numerous people in our networks. If our actions are done matter-of-factly, without boasting about or over-selling them, they can serve as effective examples of what people in our networks can do themselves. Humans tend to imitate one another if they see other people acting in new and different ways to solve problems. So, one way to encourage others to be sustainable, say, more energy-efficient, is to practice and make visible one’s own energy efficiency practices, such as riding a bike rather than driving a gas vehicle in one’s commute.

Challenges of Walking the Talk

Faculty will likely face numerous challenges as we consider having an impact on others by engaging in and leveraging our own sustainability behaviors. First, inertia may exist among faculty who feel that their teaching and researching sustainability are sufficient. We argue that living more sustainable lives is not only the right thing to do but also results in the added benefit of enhancing our teaching, service, and research. However, to our knowledge, no research has been published on this topic, so we cannot conclusively state that engaging in and sharing our sustainability behaviors will make us more effective teachers, colleagues, or researchers. Therefore, a need for such research exists, including studies on the extent to which SiME faculty engage in personal sustainability behaviors. We suspect that all who are involved in this field should be living far more sustainable lives as soon as possible, and we believe that visibly doing so could increase our classroom effectiveness and impact. We think that faculty who strive to lead sustainable lives are more likely, among other things, to utilize assignments that require students to attempt to create change in their own sustainability behaviors, and in those of their organizations and communities. Until such research has been conducted, however, faculty might consider how powerful their own personal behaviors can be to model, create, and sustain social norms around sustainability (Cavallaro et al., 2016; Nejati & Shafaei, 2018). In this way, they can support students and other stakeholders as individuals attempt to change their own behaviors in both their personal and professional lives.

Second, being a scholar–activist is sometimes frowned on in academia (Divinsky et al., 1994; Wells, 2018). Critics say that faculty should engage in value-free education and leave their views of the world outside the classroom, as it is inappropriate for faculty to be (or be perceived as) one-sided, biased, and dogmatic. In particular, because climate crisis skepticism is a reality, faculty should be wary of trying to impose their own activist perspectives or punishing students for not sharing their same views. However, as academics, faculty need to support science and to communicate with students and the public when science can inform sustainability-related decisions and actions. In addition, as many have argued (e.g., Gouldner, 1962; Grey, 2004; Pathak, 2018), value-free education is itself a myth; our values always enter into our teaching, and values and ideologies underlie and support all existing systems. Effective teachers help their students recognize this fact and then consider which values they wish to adopt. We need not be apologetic for encouraging students to consider whether sustainability-oriented values are, in fact, critical to the future well-being of themselves, their descendants, and all other species on this planet.

A third challenge is that opportunities for tenure and promotion are bound by the publish-or-perish system, which significantly favors top tier publications that can take 5 to 7 years to produce and are often too complex to interest a wider audience. In addition, the pressures for promotion and tenure may lead junior faculty to feel that they cannot attempt to live a balanced life, including the adoption of prosustainability behaviors, such as flying to conferences less often. Junior faculty and doctoral students should be aware that putting off adopting such behaviors, such as delaying research on important but difficult topics until one has tenure, can result in the establishment of habits and life patterns that are very difficult to change once one finally has the freedom to do so. Ideally, faculty would be incentivized and recognized for engaging in personal sustainability actions. At least in the short-term, such change in the reward system is likely to face general resistance from faculty and administrative staff, as it will be challenging to agree that personal sustainability represents an institutional strategic goal.

A fourth challenge is staying up-to-date on which actions are the most appropriate for adoption or continued implementation and being aware of possible trade-offs. For instance, biodegradable plastics were once considered a solution to the plastic crisis, but recent studies have found that biodegradable microplastics are ingested by living species, including humans, and may cause physiological transformations (Straub et al., 2017). Faculty need to be aware that new discoveries could affect the advisability of any given set of practices. Another example involves the housing problem, both in terms of greater availability and sustainability. Nonetheless, building housing can also increase the carbon footprint, even when construction meets the highest environmental standards. One suggestion that could be applied in the classroom is to ask students to consult up-to-date research resources that indicate potential trade-offs of sustainability solutions. For example, the website Drawdown.org (Hawken, 2017) identifies and discusses 80 solutions to address climate change. The takeaway from this challenge is that we all need to do what we can with the technologies available to us. While we should remain vigilant for potential improvements, drawbacks, and trade-offs, we should not delay our “walking the talk” in the hopes that a better future will arrive without us taking action.

A fifth challenge is that faculty may view sustainability behaviors as inconvenient and less socially acceptable and attractive than typical behaviors (i.e., buying new items, having larger homes, driving alone, traveling long distances frequently, and regularly eating meat). However, our goal is to encourage as many faculty members as possible to become involved and engaged in sustainable change as soon as possible. Indeed, small changes made by many individuals can add up and be more impactful than a few individuals adopting an all-or-nothing approach. We are advocating this sustainability maxim: start small but start now!

Finally, we recognize that sustainable actions must be not only environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable, but individuals need to perceive that they can successfully carry out a sustainable action (Rands et al., 2007). Faculty and others who attempt to practice sustainable actions in their personal lives may be restricted to some extent from taking those actions because they are physically or otherwise incapable of doing so. For instance, if one’s geographic area is not served by mass transit, implementing that sustainability action on a personal level is just not possible, at least in the short-term. Similarly, if a faculty member is physically unable to bicycle or walk, those sustainability actions as alternatives to automobile driving may not be feasible, although ride sharing may be a viable alternative in both cases. Even so, there are multiple ways that faculty may consider starting small. For example, the United Nations provides a sustainability beginner guide titled “The Lazy Person’s Guide to Saving the World,” which includes small but impactful actions such as stopping paper bank statements, paying bills online, and unplugging devices when not in use (United Nations, 2020).

In order to build good habits (Parker-Pope, 2020), one common approach is indeed to select a behavior that does not require much additional effort, and that is relatively obstacle-free, but that can be repeated on a regular basis, such as household waste recycling. Making the recycling system convenient and visible, or at least noticeable, can provide us with cues of our commitment and progress. Finally, ensuring a reward is present, even if it is only a tic-mark on a tally sheet, indicating the result of our effort, which can either be kept private or shown to others whose opinion we value. One potential advantage to telling others about our new recycling habit is that it becomes part of our self-identity and reinforces our commitment to continue the habit if others we respect are made aware of the change and if we think they might ask us about our recycling habit in the future (McKenzie-Mohr, 2011).

Many other sustainability actions may be possible, however, even for those individuals who experience restrictions on some actions. Such capacity limits may call for increased collaboration and innovation to eventually increase sustainability, at least at the community or other higher levels of human organizations. All of us need to honestly assess whether we actually cannot manage to engage in a sustainable action or whether we are simply rationalizing and perceiving an action as not manageable, when, in fact, it is. If those of us researching and teaching organizational sustainability are not going to strive to adopt sustainable behaviors, who will?

Implications and Future Research

We hope to have made clear that the major implication of this essay is that more of us can and need to be more sustainable in our personal and professional behaviors. What we have found, however, is that research on the topics of personal sustainability plans, in general, and faculty sustainability goals and behaviors, in particular, is unidentifiable. Therefore, we encourage our research colleagues to join us in beginning to conduct such research.

For example, one question that was not directly addressed in this essay but could be further investigated is as follows: How do we motivate and inspire faculty to engage in personal sustainability behavior? We hope that individual sustainability actions will eventually add up and contribute to cultural shifts similar to or greater than those that generated, for instance, antismoking campaigns and the subsequent reduction in tobacco use. Smoking was once considered a rite of passage to adulthood and the construction of social identity (Young & Banwell, 1993). However, increasing public pressure and media campaigns highlighting the health consequences of smoking have significantly contributed to a reduction in tobacco use among the youth (Cummings & Proctor, 2014).

Moreover, researchers are invited to investigate the kinds of personal sustainability practices that are most common, particularly among those faculty who are actively involved in sustainability research, teaching, and service. Finally, researchers may examine how faculty members leverage their personal practices in their research, teaching, and service, and, of course, what additional practices faculty members need to and intend to take in the future. One possible research project toward this goal would be conducting interviews with individual faculty members to better understand why, how, and when faculty engage in personal sustainability behavior.

Epilogue

As your taxicab approaches your home, your cabbie lets you know that you are neighbors, and she mentions that she and her family are members of a solar co-op that shares investments in neighborhood solar projects. She also says her family is a member of a neighborhood Global Action Plan team, which meets monthly to encourage one another to advance household energy, water, food, and waste sustainability. She asks if you might be interested in joining either effort, and when you tell her you might, she gives you her business card. You thank her and exit the cab, and you notice she’s driving a hybrid taxi and that her business card has a dozen sustainability tips printed on the back. As you walk up to your front door, you drift off thinking about your own desire to be more sustainably consistent and what you can do to be more effective as a sustainability academic and advocate. Just before you open the door, you glance at the back of her card, and the tip that grabs your attention is “Try to practice what you preach.”

Footnotes

Appendix A

Faculty Contributions to the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

SDGs	Examples of faculty personal sustainability actions	Ways to leverage personal sustainability actions for students’ learning and other stakeholders’ consideration
1. No poverty	• Donate to charities and share material wealth with those who are living below subsistence levels. • Volunteer at homeless shelters. • Engage in housing rehabilitation efforts. • Organize food and clothing drives. • Use birthdays and other celebratory occasions to ask for donations to charities instead of gifts.	• Ask students to develop criteria for selecting charities to donate to or volunteer at. • Challenge students to design and implement a campaign by getting inspirations from the do.something.org website and the U.N. The Lazy Person’s Guide to Saving the World. • Explain the many concepts of poverty in all of its dimensions, beyond low income. • Develop a service-learning course or assignment to support a local charity. • Promote charities among colleagues and alumni.
2. Zero hunger	• Donate nonperishable foods and volunteer in communities addressing hunger issues. • Support sustainable rural and urban agriculture, and advocate for addressing “food deserts” and “food miles.” • Reduce food waste. • Use clean cookstoves and solar ovens. • Support reforestation, farmland restoration, and regenerative agriculture. • Shop at restaurants, food co-ops and farmers’ markets that source local foods.	• Take action with students: find out what is going on in the local community and enlist help to support food banks, homeless shelters, and other local charities. • Survey how businesses, governments, community organizations, and individuals can address potential food scarcity due to climate crises. • Develop a plan to reduce food waste on campus and donate excess food to local charities.
3. Good health and well being	• Be active, use stairs rather than elevators, run/walk for charity. Hold walking meetings instead of sitting meetings. • Refrain from smoking, vaping or using any recreational drugs, eat healthy, donate blood, limit screen time, and get medical checkups and screenings. • Support other individuals’, organizations’, and communities’ health-related efforts. • Reduce use of toxics at home and work. • Support people who are disabled.	• Compare challenges and opportunities to achieve universal health care services with quality and affordability, on a global scale. • Get involved with students in preparing a community garden. • Build healthy activities (such as walks, runs, etc.) into course activities. • Select local health care nongovernmental organizations as a live case study. • Promote these practices among colleagues and alumni
4. Quality education	• Share sustainability skills and information with those in need, and donate books and educational materials. • Explore and identify additional sustainability actions and inform others. • Support global education for women and girls. • Participate in textbook collections (i.e., Books4Cause²)	• Evaluate how partnerships, technology, and public policies can improve literacy rates, especially in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. • Plan and execute a textbook donation program. • Help students start a Net Impact chapter. • Encourage schools to join sustainability-related communities such as The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education and the Principles for Responsible Management Education.
5. Gender equality	• Examine our gender biases and treat everyone with respect and kindness (including students). • Participate in protests demanding gender equality, and encourage language and behaviors that are gender neutral. • Support equal pay initiatives and family planning. • Mentor colleagues of a different gender.	• Ask students to identify gender biases in advertisements, workplace, public speeches. • Invite students to start or join a social justice or gender equality group, such as the UN HeForShe campaign.
6. Clean water and sanitation	• Collect rainwater in barrels and “warm up” tap water in milk jugs to water plants. • Conserve water: take five-minute showers, turn off tap when brushing teeth, advocate for waterless toilets, and install low-flow water devices and appliances and greywater recycling systems. • Practice efficient irrigation. • Adopt/support rain gardens and bioswales.	• Identify and assess business opportunities for water stewardship, especially in the global south. • Conduct tours of water supply and water treatment facilities, as well as demonstration projects of sustainable water facilities, if available. • Challenge students to keep a log of their water usage and think of ways that they can conserve water.
7. Affordable and clean energy	• Calculate personal carbon footprint and plan to reduce it (see calculators in Appendix B) • Drive less, walk/bike more, use an electric vehicle if not going carless, telecommute, fly less. • Support or install solar and energy-efficiency projects, purchase renewable energy, increase efficiency in lighting and HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning; e.g., with in-ground geothermal). Support microgrids, “solar gardens,” cogeneration, micro hydro, and biofuels. • Reduce housing and vehicle size. • Invest in fossil fuel-free stocks, bonds, and other financial instruments. • Read, write, and recommend science-based “cli-fi.”	• Design incentives and opportunities for societies to move away from fossil fuel and toward clean energy. • Assess policies to include carbon fees and rebates and investments in carbon alternatives. • Encourage students to calculate their respective personal carbon footprints and to develop plans to reduce them. • Share data about carbon and cost savings from our initiatives. • Challenge colleagues and alumni to energy-efficiency competitions and contests
8. Decent work and economic growth	• Support immigrant communities, including undocumented workers • Promote justice for indigenous people • Provide job assistance, and advocate for unemployment compensation. • Do business with B Corps, Benefit Corporations, cooperatives, and credit unions.	• Develop a micro lending project with the students. • Create a B-Corp in partnership with students and support local and state B Corps, Benefit Corporations, cooperatives, and credit unions. • Assign students to provide career counseling (resume building) and computer skills to job seekers experiencing homelessness.
9. Industry innovation and infrastructure	• Work with community groups to help make cities healthy: turn empty spaces into communal gardens, parks, empty roofs into green roofs. • Support green building construction and retrofitting for residential, commercial, industrial, and institutional properties. • Support farmers’ markets, gardening, refurbishing, recycling, and reuse.	• Illustrate how sustainability can be a source of innovation. • Tour campus and interview facilities management to assess infrastructure needs, including redesign for a net-zero carbon emission. • Tour both fossil fuel and renewable energy projects, if available.
10. Reduction of inequalities	• Reject stereotypes about other countries and cultures. • Study other languages, religions, music, dance. • Support the physically and mentally challenged individuals. • Advocate for income/wealth redistribution policies. • Support indigenous peoples’ rights.	• Challenge students to identify stereotypes in their everyday language, T.V. shows, and movies. • Invest in microlending projects (i.e., Kiva.org). • Identify and design business solutions that improve equality in all of its dimensions.
11. Sustainable cities and communities	• Create a communal garden, share rides, install green roofs and vertical forests. • Work with/reside in eco-villages. • Support sustainable transportation and residential policies to address urban sprawl. • Support the arts, music, literature, humor, and other positive cultural values. • Discuss sustainability with those in religious and other communities to which one belongs.	• Ask students to imagine a city in 2050: how can technology be leveraged and resources be shared to accommodate the fact that 70% of the world’s population will live in urban areas? • Help students view campus as a community and become involved in campus sustainability projects. • Challenge students to seek out or start a local sustainability behavior group. • Ask colleagues and alumni to help mentor these student groups.
12. Responsible consumption and production	• Reduce, reuse, repair, repurpose, recycle, and donate items not being used. Record and share own consumption, waste, and recycling volume. Pass on 1 or 2-day shipping for online purchases. • Reduce use of packaging; use reusable shopping bags. • Purchase recycled and organic products. • Consider limiting family size; support global family planning. • Buy/rent/hire local.	• During move-in move-out days, organize clothing, household items, and packaged food collection. • Challenge student clubs to organize zero waste events on campus. • Assess opportunities to improve campus recycling, menus, vending, and food markets. • Write and submit letters-to-the-editor encouraging more responsible consumption.
13. Climate action	• Drive less, use mass transit, efficient vehicles, and ride sharing. • Engage others to fight climate change, join ActNow Bot, a call from the U.N. for individuals to share their actions. • Join/start a climate-related book club; participate in a climate-action group, such as Climate Reality, 350.org, or Citizens Climate Lobby. • Support public officials and candidates at all levels of governance who propose to combat climate change.	• Assign students to collect and rate best apps related to climate action. • Collect and monitor sustainability indicators on campus. • Promote a student competition to reward innovative projects that promote climate action on campus. • Start a campus neighborhood Global Action Program or group. • Participate in and encourage climate strike efforts.
14. Life below water	• Use fewer and recycle plastic products. • Refrain from consuming and harming endangered marine life. • Support protections for endangered species and both natural and artificial reefs. • Practice responsible tourism, including virtual travel experiences.	• Predict how overfishing, acidification of oceans and other forms of marine pollution can introduce significant challenges to several supply chains and disrupt our lives. Apply a simulation game (e.g., Fishing for the Future³) so students can experience the “Tragedy of the Commons” concept and elaborate action project ideas to explore sustainable fishing practices
15. Life on land	• Go paperless, adopt a plant-based diet, produce or join an urban farming project, plant trees, and compost. • Support protections for endangered species. • Practice and support humaneness and pet sterilization. • Turn part of the lawn into a prairie or butterfly garden, create brush piles for micro-habitats. • Support conservation organizations, consider alternatives to products with animal-derived ingredients.	• Encourage students to use their electronic devices to complete assignments, do not request hard copies from students. • Host a class session in a park nearby (or campus) to explore the local biodiversity. • Assess business risks and opportunities associated with deforestation, desertification, and decreasing productivity of land. • Encourage colleagues and alumni to join related efforts.
16. Peace, justice, and strong institutions	• Contact representatives to pass gun law regulations. • Vote in local and national elections. • Stop violence against kids, women, animals, the elderly, and minorities (upstander active role). • Write to legislators in support of prison and criminal justice reform.	• Ask students to investigate a case of corporate human rights violation and identify the suggested actions to prevent and stop it. • Organize an advocacy campaign where students send letters and call local representatives to show support for fight against violence. • Assist students to speak up and act if they witness in person or online bullying.
17. Partnership for the goals	• Be part of a movement by personally leading/attending local movements, or engagement with social and traditional media. • Do extensive, in-depth sustainability networking and collaboration.	• Connect with stakeholders in other universities, colleges, and schools. • Invite students to participate in local events related to sustainability. • Invite students (especially generation Z) to join the #LittlexLittle campaign, which aims to gather 2 billion 15-24 year olds to engage in small acts that would represent the largest collection of positive acts assembled.

Appendix B

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Patricia Kanashiro

Notes

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