The ECO Guide to Careers that Make a Difference: Environmental Work For A Sustainable World

By Kevin Environmental Careers Organization and Kevin Doyle

How can you make a real difference in the world and make a good living at the same time? The ECO Guide to Careers That Make a Difference: Environmental Work for a Sustainable World provides the answer.

Developed by The Environmental Careers Organization (ECO, the creators of the popular Complete Guide to Environmental Careers), this new volume is unlike any careers book you've seen before. Reaching far beyond job titles and resume tips, The ECO Guide immerses you in the strategies and tactics that leading edge professionals are using to tackle pressing problems and create innovative solutions.

To bring you definitive information from the real world of environmental problem-solving, The ECO Guide has engaged some of the nation's most respected experts to explain the issues and describe what's being done about them today. You'll explore: Global climate change with Eileen Claussen, Pew Center for Global Climate Change; Biodiversity loss with Stuart Pimm, Nicholas School for the Environment at Duke University; Green Business with Stuart Hart, Kenan-Flager Business School at University of North Carolina; Ecotourism with Martha Honey, The International Ecotourism Society; Environmental Justice with Robert Bullard, Environmental Justice Center at Clark Atlanta University; Alternative Energy with Seth Dunn, Worldwatch Institute; Water Quality with Sandra Postel, Global Water Policy Project; Green Architecture with William McDonough, McDonough + Partners; and twelve other critical issues.

To demonstrate even more clearly what eco-work feels like on the ground, The ECO Guide offers vivid "Career Snapshots" of selected employers and the professionals that work there. You'll visit government agencies like the USDA Forest Service, nonprofit organizations like Conservation International and Project Wild, and local advocates like Alternatives for Community and Environment. You'll go inside environmental businesses like Wildland Adventures and Stonyfield Farms. And you'll learn from academic institutions like the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics.

ECO also identifies and describes forty specific jobs that are representative of environmental career opportunities in the twenty-first century. It provides dozens of the best Internet resources. And most importantly, The ECO Guide offers all of the insight about current trends you expect from ECO, the acknowledged leaders in environmental career information.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Apr 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9781597262545

Book preview

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Introduction

Inventing the Twenty-First-Century Sustainable Economy

As an aspiring environmental professional, by now you’ve probably heard many calls for sustainable development around the world. And those calls will get only more urgent. The next fifty years represent a critical period in our efforts to protect what remains of wild nature, restore ecological health to places that are critically out of balance, and reverse long-standing trends that threaten both people and wildlife.

If, however, you have a hard time imagining exactly how your career might unfold in the twenty-first-century sustainable economy—or even what such an economy might look like—don’t worry. You’re not alone. The concept of sustainability is hotly debated and hard to define, even by its most ardent supporters. One study found over sixty different definitions of the term. And conflicting visions of a sustainable future come attached to starkly different recommendations for policies and institutional changes that might get us there. Scholars and advocates may speak in confident agreement about a future economy measured by the triple bottom line—where environmental, economic, and social issues are integrated and given equal weight—but real progress on the ground is much less clear, especially in the United States.

Even so, the vision of a sustainable economy is rapidly being accepted as the primary goal of environmental work and as the conceptual framework within which scientists, engineers, businesspeople, policy experts, educators, and others will work together. With this in mind, an essential first step for every aspiring environmental professional is to develop your own conception of sustainability —what it is and what it means for your professional and career choices.

One could do worse than to begin with the definition from Our Common Future, an influential 1987 report from the United Nations that defined sustainable development as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

In creating a twenty-first-century economy that will bring this definition into the forefront of our society, what might such development look like in a real community? Jeff Hollender, CEO of Seventh Generation, the nation’s leading marketer of natural household products, urges us to take a look at an experiment called EcoPark in Burlington, Vermont, in a chapter contributed to the 2002 book Sustainable Planet. EcoPark is a joint project of the Intervale Foundation and the city of Burlington. Located on an 800-acre floodplain along the banks of the Winooski River, EcoPark seeks to emulate what Hollender calls a natural paradise, in which the river drains distant mountain rains into Lake Champlain and cattail, heron, oak, and blackbirds coexist within a marsh, forest, river and field. It is modeled on the self-regulating ecosystems that supported and enhanced the planet long before human interference began to degrade their capacities; its designers call it agriculture-based industrial ecology.

But how does it work? By definition, an eco-park is a cluster of profitable businesses that collaborate on waste, energy, water, and materials management to minimize their environmental impact. According to Hollender, the EcoPark experiment exemplifies such ideas, as the wastes of one business on the lot are fed into another. Among the project’s most important innovations is a Living Machine, in which a labyrinth of enormously connected water tanks, each containing a marine ecosystem, transforms wastes normally discharged into the air, soil, and water, into useful things. For example, a local brewer uses grains grown in the fields. The brewer’s by-products become raw materials for a local baker. The baker’s wastes become fuel for the Living Machine, which cleans EcoPark’s wastewater and produces fish for the city of Burlington.

This experiment and our vision for a sustainable society are very different, of course, from the current world in which the pursuit of economic growth and material goods dominates both individual and institutional actions and accomplishments, and that also leads to the degradation of both the natural environment and the social services and infrastructures that ensure people’s basic needs are met.

In the sustainable world we seek to create, people and the continual effort to improve their physical, social, environmental, and economic well-being are at the center of development efforts. Well-being is the measurement of global progress. Natural resources are protected and valued. Infrastructure design prioritizes efficient energy and water use, and reduces waste. Mixed-use, compact development brings people together and preserves open space. Strong local economies guide human activities and decision making. Looking at the larger picture, the imagined world is one in which we collectively manage local and global resources within ecological limits and also where we enable citizens to meet their economic needs while promoting equity and justice.

This is a world that rests on the tenets of sustainability. And it is not as far away as you might think. The modern environmental movement that began in the 1960s and 1970s is now changing to reflect a more integrated and holistic approach to problem solving. In fact, the dream of a sustainable global society and economy is causing profound changes in how we think about environmental issues and environmental work.

Environmental professionals are now thinking about questions that might at first seem unrelated to environmental concerns. Questions like: At what cost is environmental devastation occurring? What is the link between environmental degradation and national security? Do more material assets mean more happiness? How does the gap between the wealthy and the poverty-stricken affect larger global issues? In answering such questions, we realize that, as Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, says in Eco-Economy, If we want economic progress to continue, we have little choice but to systematically restructure the global economy in order to make it environmentally sustainable.

This type of thinking embodies the starter seeds for growing an environmental movement that values equity, justice, empowerment, and traditional environmental protection, preservation, and conservation. Environmental professionals will help accomplish the changes necessary to achieve a newly envisioned world.

By definition, building a sustainable world involves the participation of all people—citizens and professionals. For example, when Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) senior scientist Allen Hershkowitz proposed a world-scale recycled-paper mill in the South Bronx, he employed many different professionals and community members to create the infrastructure and innovation necessary to create the plant itself and its recycled outputs. He knew that without land use planners, his engineers could not plan sewer infrastructure necessary for reclaiming the sewage treatment plant wastewater to improve the area watershed quality. Without environmental regulators, water resource managers would not be able to ensure the water quality in the newly developed brownfield. Without responsible business people and entrepreneurs to market and sell environmentally sound products effectively, it wouldn’t matter that industrial ecologists could design, build, and operate a facility that would help heal a scarred part of the planet. And without citizen participation, it could not be responsive to community needs.

It’s informative that Hershkowitz’s dream hasn’t come to fruition. Often, many more businesses fail than succeed in our current unsustainable society. We can expect that the same will be true in one based on ecological principles. However, the central theme of Vermont’s work-in-progress EcoPark, Lester Brown’s research, and Allen Hershkowitz’s experiment in the Bronx is that environmental work in the twenty-first century is inextricably linked with developing a sustainable economy.

Today, there are thousands of environmental professionals pursuing this dream. They are learning from what works and what doesn’t. Instead of working to control and regulate as they did in the past, they’re now working to preserve our natural capital as well as collectively rethink and reinvent the way we live. They are working to create dramatic improvements in technology, protect plant and animal habitats, conserve energy sources, develop renewables, establish market incentives that complement government action, construct better education and ecological understanding, and form greater social and racial justice. In this regard, every area of work—agriculture, transportation, manufacturing, energy, services, housing, construction, health care, mining, fisheries, forestry, water management, finance, education, urban design—has an environmental component.

Environmental work is also no longer thought of as an add-on, to be tackled separately from other factors. For example, fisheries depletion is no longer a separate problem from climate change, as we have seen ocean warming threaten the habitats of cold-water fish like trout and salmon. Similarly, poor air quality cannot be discussed without some relation to transportation and land use patterns. Norco, Louisiana, is a good example; here, parks are located across the street from big refineries where diesel vehicles are constantly trucking materials back and forth, significantly contributing to child respiratory problems in the area.

There are other connections. Biodiversity loss can be traced directly back to agricultural chemical use, as we have seen in the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico, an area where excess runoff of nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and fertilizers cause algal blooms that use up all the oxygen in the water. Our mounting waste problems must be considered a reflection of the way we use the very resources we should be protecting—like virgin forests in the Pacific Northwest that we are denuding rather than protecting, only to have them be turned into paper that is thrown away rather than recycled; or depleting nonrenewable energy sources like coal rather than devoting resources to developing alternatives. There are many, many more examples—and you’ll find them throughout this book.

Before exploring in detail how environmental professionals can help guide us to a more sustainable world, a little history is in order. How did we get here?

Five Waves of the Environmental Movement

Our current focus on creating a sustainable global economy is the latest wave for an evolving environmental movement in the United States that is over 150 years old. Historians of environmentalism have used many different labels and dates to characterize the movement’s past waves, but the periods identified by Sherburne Abbott, chief international officer at the American Institute for the Advancement of Science, are particularly well-suited to understanding how environmental careers have evolved along with the political and cultural changes that have fueled environmental concern in this country.

The first wave, which began in the 1850s and peaked in the 1890s, was inspired by a romantic notion of wild nature and the role that wilderness played in forming our nation’s character. As wilderness disappeared, poets, painters, politicians, and prophets pushed for the protection of the natural wonders they loved—and feared might be lost. In 1872, Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming became the nation’s first national park, and other designations were soon to follow. Venerable organizations like the Sierra Club were born, and Congress set aside the refuges that would later become part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

If concern about protecting areas of spectacular scenic beauty formed the basis of the first environmental era, the second wave focused on less spiritual worries. It has been labeled the era of natural resource management because of its focus on unbridled misuse of nature’s economic bounty. From the 1890s until as late as the 1950s, ever-greater attention was paid to the need for long-term thinking about the use of resources like water, forests, agricultural land, and wildlife habitat. Many of the scientific and expert management professions that are labeled environmental careers today emerged and institutionalized themselves as separate academic fields and professions during this period—often accompanied by the creation or expansion of federal government action. The U.S. Geological Survey, for example, received resources to deliver on the mission Congress imagined in 1879 when it charged the new agency with serving the nation by providing reliable scientific information to describe and understand the earth, minimize loss of life and property, manage water, biological, energy, and mineral resources, and enhance and protect our quality of life.

Progress was fast and far-reaching. In 1905, the U.S. Forest Service was established within the Department of Agriculture to manage forest reserves. The 1911 Weeks Act appropriated nine million dollars to purchase six million acres of land in the eastern United States; and in 1916, the National Park Organic Act officially created the National Park Service to conserve scenery, wildlife, and historic objects for future generations.

The Great Depression and the dust bowl of the 1930s spurred investment in the growing environmental infrastructure. In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt established the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to reduce unemployment and preserve the nation’s natural resources. Foresters and laymen were among the first of two million professionals who began to work on forestry, flood control, soil erosion, and beautification projects through Roosevelt’s attempt to boost the economy and address the needs of the land. Expansion of environmental activity continued immediately after the war with the creation of the Bureau of Land Management in 1946 and increases in the budgets and employee ranks of natural resource management agencies and companies.

Abbott calls the third wave of environmentalism the ecological movement —the period between the 1950s and 1970. During this two-decade span, increased scientific and ecological understanding transformed our hopes for and approaches to environmental work. Beyond protecting scenic vistas and using nature’s bounty more wisely, many events demonstrated that human activities were threatening both environmental and human health in ways that could no longer be ignored. In 1952, smog was blamed for 4,000 deaths in London, leading to calls for air quality analysis. The year 1955 saw the establishment of a link between asbestos and lung cancer, further connecting environmental issues to health problems. In 1962, Rachel Carson—biologist, writer, ecologist, and advocate for nature—put out a clarion call by writing Silent Spring, the book that first exposed the dangers of pesticides to the general public. Carson’s book, and the subsequent public outcry, brought words like ecology to millions of citizens for the first time. This directed the environmental agenda into areas that could not be addressed by relatively nonthreatening actions like creating a park or encouraging windbreaks on farms to slow erosion. Environmentalism now pointed directly to the unintended side effects of our way of life and the daily activities of people in cities and towns.

The legislative activity that would later explode in the soon-to-arrive fourth wave of environmentalism began to appear. In 1963, Congress passed the first Clean Air Act, allocating $95 million to local, state, and national air pollution control efforts. In 1965, the Water Quality Act arrived, giving federal government power to set water standards in absence of state action. The Solid Waste Disposal Act, the first major solid waste legislation, was passed in the same year. The third wave also brought with it new support for the gains of the previous two environmental eras. In 1964, for example, the Wilderness Act designated 9.1 million acres as wilderness in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming.

The fourth wave in the history of environmentalism has been called the regulatory movement. Begun in 1970, it blazed across the nation for twenty-five remarkable years and is still largely with us today. This phase brought with it a veritable alphabet soup of legislation and regulation aimed at pollution control and, to a lesser extent, pollution prevention. In 1970, Congress established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Clean Air Act was signed into law. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was also signed during this time, requiring all federal actions to have environmental impact analyses. This law was widely copied at the state level, and the nation was introduced to the need for environmental impact statements.

A host of other important environmental legislation was signed into law by a series of exceptionally concerned classes of Congress. In a short time, we were given the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, Toxic Substances Control Act, National Forest Management Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, Superfund, and Federal Lands Policy and Management Act. Wilderness bills were also passed in almost every state throughout these decades, designating thousands of acres as protected land throughout the country.

As the environmental movement passed through the first four waves of action and legislation, professionals consistently worked to bring new ideas and priorities to the institutional creations of the past, adding scientific rigor and the lessons learned from experience to improve results. In 1997, for example, Congress passed the National Wildlife Refuge Improvement Act and set wildlife conservation as the top priority in 500 national refuges to protect these areas against military exercises, jet skiing, livestock grazing, and other activities. The new law provided for more science-based management and long-term