Sustainability And Storytelling Lab (SAS Lab)

The Colorado Environmental Justice Digital Storytelling Project is a partnership with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) to pilot five StoryMaps, which are used to better understand the environmental challenges communities face and which communities and people are disproportionately impacted by environmental crises. The pilot’s impact was published in the Environmental Justice journal. The lab is expanding the scope of this partnership through student interns, workers and fellows. For a two-page summary of this project and what we’re working on now, click here.

Tune into the Communicating Care podcast, which discusses the ways environmental and climate justice advocacy are motivated by, express and foster care. Publicly launched in 2022, this podcast offers listeners the chance to learn from people who have made headlines for their successful storytelling, organizing and thinking about plastics, climate, social justice and much more. This show became the basis of the director’s award-winning book, Beyond Straw Men: Plastic Pollution and Networked Cultures of Care (University of California Press, 2023). The podcast continues to interview a range of advocates and experts.

The SAS Lab sometimes partners with organizations such as The Just Transition Alliance and Once and Future Green to amplify their grassroots expertise and co-create stories as part of our Imagining Just Transitions initiatives. The lab’s director contributed to a Pulitzer Center report on how journalists around the world might improve storytelling on this vital topic, as well as helped establish criteria for the Boulder County Climate Equity Fund. The Director also regularly publishes with an interdisciplinary group of scholars on climate injustices, especially as climate disaster planning can address carceral infrastructure.

Preventing plastic pollution is one of the SAS Lab’s project areas. In addition to the podcast and award-winning book, we work with students, staff and faculty across campus on solutions to reducing plastic waste. For more resources on advocacy against plastic pollution, check out these videos and links about the plastics-industrial complex, as well as more Podcasts on plastics, environmental and disability justice, & care. We have been proud supporters of reducing single-use plastics on campus and on July 1, 2025, the campus began a ten-year pouring rights contract committing eliminating single-use plastic (SUP) beverage containers in vending machines on campus! 

International and interdisciplinary networks for environmental communication research and publishing. The SAS Lab Director teaches undergraduate courses on environmental communication and climate justice storytelling. She co-directs and teaches the foundational course of the Graduate Certificate in Environmental Justice. Pezzullo also coedits a book series at University of California Press titled Environmental Communication, Power, and Culture, edits the journal Environmental Communication and in Fall 2025, published the 7th edition of her coauthored textbook Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere. Follow us on LinkedIn. 

Creative Climate Communication Consulting and Capacity Building happens through interlocking directorate organizations, such as the Buckley Center, Inside the Greenhouse and C3BC. We have co-facilitated trainings for arctic scientists, climate scientists, educators, government employees, engineers, journalists and media creatives. For the Project Drawdown Climate Solutions for Kids, Pezzullo facilitated a peer review process by fourth-graders for fourth-graders. In 2022 Climate Across the Curriculum Training, Pezzullo served as the lead faculty coordinator. Through this network, students in the SAS Lab can develop what the Carnegie Foundation calls “Skills for the Future.”