Christina Matzl: When Art Meets Sustainability

Christina Matzl didn’t set out to study sustainability. Instead, she started college as an art student at the University of Wisconsin.

“Within art, there’s a lot of ideas around sustainability and preserving nature, so I got my base there,” she explains. Midway through her degree she moved to Colorado with her husband and started a family, pausing college while continuing to explore her growing interest in the environment.

When it came time to consider going back to school, Colorado Mountain College’s Integrated Sustainability program was the perfect fit.

During the program, Christina and her fellow students put a close eye on CMC itself as a case study project. She collected data on water usage across the college. She began to see the potential of sharing data and the changes it could bring.

“I found I was interested in data tracking and empowering people to make changes with all that information,” she says. “This idea of a community-based organization being like a third party to help connect people with higher resources was really powerful.” Her capstone project focused on the impact such a “middleman” agency could have.

Then, Christina met the director of the Carbondale-based, energy-economizing powerhouse CLEER (Clean Energy Economy for the Region). Focused on energy savings, clean mobility, and renewable energy, CLEER is that kind of resourceful community organization her hands-on student work was leading her toward.

Before graduating, Christina was offered a job at CLEER and now serves as Data & Energy Analyst. Through her work with Garfield Clean Energy, she helps households and businesses understand their energy use and tap into major savings.

Her clients include schools, municipalities, counties, and other organizations that are substantial energy consumers. Using CLEER’s Advanced Energy Management program, she tracks useand recommends energy-reducing upgrades that ultimately save clients over six figures annually.

Christina also works on climate action plans which outline greenhouse emissions and set reduction targets for areas such as electricity, transportation, wastewater treatment, and more. She was one of the key people who worked with the City of Rifle to develop their plan and it’s been rewarding for her to see tangible benefits to emissions reductions.

“CMC made it possible to move in this direction. I wouldn’t have known how to do it without having the sustainability program,” she says.