Kenzi Garner

Alternative Transportation Coordinator

Sustainability storyteller and student Kenzi Garner, the Alternative Transportation Coordinator at Western Washington University, was asked what sustainability means to her.

Kenzi Garner in front of a blooming tree

“These days, sustainability means periodically collecting the coffee mugs, tea mugs, mugs with salty crumbs stuck to the bottom, and the occasional ice cream-stained mugs from various windowsills and side tables they get abandoned on to be washed. Sustainability has been combining the remnants of tomato soup with some vegetables verging on withering and an old cheese stick to produce stuffed peppers. Sustainability has been house meetings to negotiate quarantine guidelines between seven housemates and gentle reminders to clean the growing stack of dirty dishes. Sustainability is video chats and air hugs and looking-forward-to’s.

My first introduction to sustainability was none of those things. It was a lifeboat with a hole in the bottom and seven billion people fighting over the spots with a view. I was a high school student learning for the first time that the glaciers were melting and polar bears were going extinct. My logic said to throw anyone overboard who wasn’t installing water-efficient toilets immediately. I was mad and ready to act. I think I searched 'sustainable universities' online and WWU popped up on a list; this ultimately beckoned me 1,407 miles away from my childhood home in Lone Tree, Colorado to Bellingham.

Here, I was asked, 'What is wilderness?' and 'Who is disproportionately harmed by environmental injustices?'. I learned the culprit of climate change isn’t bathroom lights left on or what’s for dinner. It is historically-produced and institutionalized power dynamics. Social issues and environmental issues were revealed to be inextricably tangled, despite their deceptively simple linguistic separation. I feel like I’ve met the man behind the curtain, who the Scarecrow rightly dubs as a 'humbug.'

I’m still mad and ready to act, but now sustainability to me means manifesting justice.”