In addition to big hats, friendly people and great barbecue, Texas is probably most associated with the fossil fuel industry—in particular, the gush of the oil well in the vast, productive Permian basin and the west and the buzz of refining and shipping terminals in Houston and the east.

But in the beating heart of oil country, environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) investing is taking hold, said Chris Knapp, Robertson Stephens managing director, who in February helped open the RIA’s Houston office.

“ESG is now in the mainstream, while five to six years ago it seemed exotic,” said Knapp, who works with many high- and ultra-high-net-worth, multigenerational clients. “People love to do studies on wealth creation and wealth participation and why families go from shirtsleeves to shirtless in three generations. A lot of the reasons that family wealth dissipates is a lack of a cohesive investment philosophy that can be shared across generations.”

That’s why Robertson Stephens charged Knapp with creating a Texas-based office with a specialization in ESG investing.

Knapp came to ESG through personal and professional experience. On the personal side, he grew up in a family of community bankers in Houston and grew up with an appreciation for the role that access to credit plays in creating jobs and prosperity in communities. As he went to work in the wealth management industry at Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), he came into contact with faith-based investors and other groups that wanted their portfolios screened for social responsibility at an early stage in his career.

Then, in 1996, Knapp co-founded Chilton Capital Management, which has since blossomed into a nearly $1.6 billion RIA powerhouse. While there, a client came to him with an interest in more socially conscious investing, and he was exposed to the world of micro-financing and micro-lending, which harkened back to his knowledge of community banking.

“I landed on a team of guys who were lending to women in emerging markets, who showed that you could build a scalable, core process microlending model, and that became my first move from traditional office investments to ESG,” said Knapp. “When 2008 and 2009 happened, this happened to be one of our best performing investments during that period, the default rate was zero. That was my personal epiphany.”

When Knapp discovered methods and managers applying positive investment screens—including and assigning more weight to companies that had sound ESG practices—he realized that investing for both ESG and financial returns simultaneously was going to be the future, and that he had plenty of reasons to bring prospects and clients into the ESG conversation.

Personally, Knapp started to become interested in urban green spaces and parks, soon recognizing that creating and maintaining these spaces required a tremendous collaboration of professionals with different types of expertise, including government, science, finance, health, design and construction. He became interested in translating this collaborative concept to investing and wealth management.

To that end, Knapp in 2016 founded Collaboration Capital, a wealth management and investment firm founded on ESG strategies created by collaborations of professionals with different expertise to address problems like climate change, equality and water quality.

Now, Knapp challenges the assumption that Texans have been somehow hostile towards ESG principles.

“I see in Texas the culture of possibility. My view on Texas was informed by the space program,” he said. “Texas is seen as the land with no rules, but that  can create extraordinary accomplishments. We saw a lot of leadership in ESG on the East and West coasts, it was time to turn up the volume in the middle of the country.”

Texas is still an energy state, but there’s a shift happening in Texas towards more renewable energy, said Knapp.

But because wealth management deals primarily with the senior members of families, some resistance persists.

“Conversationally, if I go in to meet a family with a traditional viewpoint, let’s say a family whose business has been brick-and-mortar retail, I’ll tell them that they don’t have to like Amazon, but it’s turning companies upside down, causing disruption and a massive industry shift,” he said. “It makes sense to look to allocate capital into those areas. We can still adhere to investment principles in terms of quality, but we can also point the needle towards where the world is going.”

Climate issues have also come home to Texas, not just in the recent deep freeze that paralyzed much of the state’s energy grid, but also in tropical cyclones like 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, which dropped more than three feet of rain on areas adjacent to Houston, causing catastrophic flooding and over $40 billion in damage.

Texas is also diverse, and the multigenerational families Knapp works with are now often a blend of ethnicities and races, especially in younger generations.

“When I am challenged by someone skeptical, I ask them if they would ever want their daughter or granddaughter to work for a company that had never promoted a woman, that never had a woman in their corporate leadership, that didn’t have women on their board,” he said. “Diversity also gives people more connections to ESG issues. A family with four generations often has someone going to the University of Texas or Texas A&M who has a classmate, best friend or roommate from places like Bangladesh or India, so families are more likely to have contact with someone who has experienced living with little access to clean water, or have been affected by climate issues.”

At Collaboration and now at Robertson Stephens, Knapp creates teams that can pitch forward-looking strategies to skeptical senior generations of client families while embracing the ideas that most appeal to younger generations, which requires a collaboration of professionals with differentiated expertise and communication skills.

And Texans are responding, said Knapp.

“Increasingly, people are calling us, they’re saying we’re the first people to talk to them about ESG, and they’re telling us that they want to see and hear more,” said Knapp. “Our job as financial advisors is to try to help our clients feel better about their investments and their financial lives, and that does mean that we need to deliver across the spectrum of risk and return, but it also means that we need to key into this global phenomenon.

“This is how we are now thinking about the future of Western-style capitalism and for-profit enterprise itself. It survives by becoming sustainable, and then getting more people on the bus to be part of the system," he said. "That message resonates with clients.”