Our Climate Journey with Lawrence Wishard
“To me, sustainability is all about transition, at a big scale but also on the small scale.”
Lawrence Wishard
General Manager
Lawrence Wishard joined Zum in 2022. Today, he serves as General Manager for the company’s Santa Barbara bus yard. Originally from southwest Arkansas, Lawrence enjoys traveling, spending quality time with family and close friends, and trying new and exotic foods.
At Zum, we’re revolutionizing student transportation in order to build a green, sustainable future. What does sustainability mean to you?
To me, sustainability is all about transition, at a big scale but also on the small scale.
I grew up in southwest Arkansas. There, we weren’t as conscious of waste and the environment as people are on the west coast, where I am now (I split time between Southern California and the Pacific Northwest). As a kid, we used a lot of plastic bags—we’d use them once, bringing home our groceries, and they would immediately end up in the trash. As a kid, I also drank out of plastic water bottles. A lot. Those are two things I remember clearly—the plastic bags, and the plastic bottles.
Now, I very consciously use reusable bags, and reusable cups. It’s a small thing, but that transition is what sustainability is all about. And of course it matters on the large scale, too—at Zum, we’re in the process of transitioning our entire fleet of diesel buses to EVs, which will make a much bigger difference.
Climate change is the single greatest threat to our way of life, but it can sometimes feel abstract, far away, a problem for another time. How has climate change affected you personally?
Like I said, I grew up in Arkansas. It was hot there, and the winters were cold, but the summers are hotter now and the winters are colder. The weather is just more extreme.
Living in that part of the States also meant my family and I vacationed in Cabo San Lucas. I remember the beautiful beaches, mostly, how they would stretch on for miles.
Just last year I went back to Cabo, with my partner. The timing wasn’t great—Cabo had just experienced a hurricane, and the towns were in the middle of their recovery effort. So part of what we experienced was because of that. But even outside that, it was startling to go back to the same resort, the same beach, and see how much things had changed. The beach was just smaller than it used to be. There was simply less of it. The coast had eroded so much since I’d gone there as a kid. That’s alarming—and I’m not sure if the hurricane Cabo experienced is more severe than normal, or if those weather events are more frequent, but I do know how long it takes for places to recover from those sorts of things.
Coastal erosion, extreme weather—that’s how I’ve experienced climate change personally.
What can Zum do to be a leader in sustainability, to spearhead the charge in the fight against climate change?
As the yard manager in Santa Barbara, I’m definitely always thinking about ways we can be more efficient, to help in the fight against climate change.
And there are a lot of things we can do at the yard level. This one immediately comes to mind: we just took over the contract here a few months ago, in August. When we did, I met a student who had been riding the bus all his years as a student in the district. And for all of those years, the former transportation provider had sent a large yellow school bus to pick him up—alone. There were no other students on his route. For years, this student rode the enormous yellow school bus all by himself.
When I heard that, I was floored. I couldn’t believe how wasteful that was. So we reconfigured things and sent a minivan to get him instead. Now, we’re still getting that student to and from school, and still employing that driver, we’re just saving the school district a lot of money and burning way less fuel to get the same result.
It’s a small thing, but those are the sorts of decisions we can constantly be making to fight against climate change.