NEW WORLD NEW WORK
January 2000

The Work to be Done
by Melissa Everett

http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/jobs/Column.cfm

[Fair Use: For Educational/Research Purposes Only]

Healthy Basics
You walk into the supermarket and a luscious red apple catches your eye. It's locally grown. It's organic. And it's affordable. When this happens (or even two out of three of these victories), it is thanks to the work of a long and complex chain of people. The produce manager who made the selection in the store. The distributors and marketing people who built the bridge between orchard and store. The inspector in the state certification program who determined the orchard land was fit for organic growing. The state assembly staffers who drafted the legislation for the certification program. The citizen activists who showed them the public support for doing it. The county extension agents who taught local farmers organic farming techniques to help farmers. The bankers who maintained farm-friendly credit practices. Oh, and of course, the farmers.

There is an explosion of concern about personal health, and environmental sources of illness are a major component. These range from sick buildings to unsafe drinking water to unhealthy personal care products to foods produced in ways that are hazardous to people or the environment. The natural foods industry is growing at annual rates between 10% and 20%, with natural food sections appearing in many mega-supermarkets because large numbers of people are concerned and becoming educated about the food they eat. National food companies are developing their own organic product lines -- yogurts from General Foods and Dannon for instance, -- and are buying organic food businesses to enter these markets. This trend creates new jobs and alters the nature of others, including those in agriculture, distribution, marketing, regulation and agricultural products and services. And the growth of the natural food industry dovetails with a host of other trends that could be grouped together as "nontoxic living," from carpets without toxic glue to cosmetics without formaldehyde. Finding healthy ways of meeting basic human needs -- food, shelter, personal care and health products -- is an enormous emerging area of work to be done.

Livable Communities
You are walking down to the corner cafe at dusk to buy a local newspaper, and you notice: how pleasant it is to have a corner cafe and to be near it, rather than in traffic, as the sun sets; how reassuring it is to feel safe strolling in your own neighborhood, since you remember years when the streets were less welcoming. Finally, you give thanks that there is a local paper available, owned by people you've met, to give you a flavor of news and commentary not available from the newspaper chains.

"Livable communities" is an intentionally broad category -- broad enough to represent the range of concerns that might be important to you, from safety to health to containment of sprawl so that residences and commerce are arranged for a mix of utility and beauty. Writing in the San Antonio Express in 1998, Mike Greenberg reports:

In the 50 years after World War II, worry about suburban sprawl was the specialty of a small band of architects, critics and other intellectuals, largely on aesthetic and cultural grounds. Suddenly, the anti-sprawl voice has become mainstream. In recent years, voters across the country have passed measures to fight sprawl, rebuild inner cities and protect rural areas from suburban encroachment. Prominent centrist politicians of both parties, notably Vice President Al Gore among the Democrats and Christine Todd Whitman among the Republicans, see sprawl as among today's top issues.

The coalition of people and organizations working on some version of livability -- sometimes called Smart Growth -- is enormous, and reflects a wide spectrum of views on how much growth can be smart in the final analysis. New Jersey's Governor Whitman created an Office of Sustainable Development within the Department of Commerce to preserve land and help a greener business sector come to life through targeted state investment. Worldwide, people working on creating more livable communities may be elected officials and their staffs, employees of regulatory agencies, architects, designers, community and transportation planners, managers of public or private lands, bankers and venture capitalists, local entrepreneurs and staffers in business associations, labor representatives, or advocates focusing on safer streets, housing, planning and zoning, public transportation, and more.

Planet Protection
While it may be harder to visualize concretely, the global environmental challenges such as climate change, habitat loss and species extinction are also creating a large agenda for human labor to turn around a sobering situation. Here, too, there are emerging specialties and enormous ramifications for new ways of doing work. There's work to be done by wildlife biologists, both in basic research and in consultation with biodiversity protection programs; rangers and maintenance staff in parks and preserves; professionals and support staff in land trusts; governmental planning departments and private consulting firms; attorneys, advocates, and policy experts who understand the intricacies of the Endangered Species Act, international biodiversity conventions, and the like; environmental education and science museum staff who educate the public to build a consensus for conservation; resource economists who figure out how to place a fair dollar value on natural resources lost or preserved; environmental reporters who translate the global picture into locally meaningful terms; and more.

Protecting threatened and endangered species and their habitats is increasingly linked by scientific evidence to a second pressing global issue, climate protection. Starting in 1998 with the negotiation of the Kyoto climate change convention, the first voices from large U.S.-based industries acknowledged that climate change is real. Companies like British Petroleum and Shell Oil announced large investments in renewable energy as a way of reducing dependence on fossil fuels -- $1 billion and $500 million respectively. This means real work for engineers and technicians in solar, wind, biomass, cogeneration, fuel cells and other low-impact energy technologies. It means roles for research and development groups in universities, industry and government; installation and repair technicians; marketing firms and venture capital companies; trade association staff people and union organizers; vice presidents of marketing and sales managers; customer service representatives and quality assurance people; wholesalers and retailers -- for these large companies and the thousands of entrepreneurial businesses that will sell to them, subcontract for them, and at times compete with them.

Most people may prefer not to think about energy when they're not flipping a switch or changing a fuse. But the energy base of a society reveals much about where it is placing its bets for the future, and it drives a great deal of the technological innovations that play out in the rest of the economy. The more business development thinkers chew on this fact, the more they come to grips with the enormous economic potential in creating solutions to a problem of this scope.

Consider some of the heretical thoughts that have been circulating in the financial and business communities in my home state, New York. One is the idea that responding to the challenge of climate protection -- conventionally held to be an economic stretch of the highest order -- could actually be a catalyst for a healthier economy, smarter technological innovation, and more rewarding partnerships between the environmental and economic communities. In 1998, a task force representing respected organizations like the Association of the Bar of the City of New York and the state's Environmental Business Association carried out an extended study of opportunities to be had by stepping out in front -- in their language, becoming the Silicon Valley of climate protection innovation.

The vision was of a technological and financial center organized around innovation in energy efficiency, transportation efficiency, urban reforestation, ecotourism, and the policy tools that would encourage movement in all these directions. From factories producing alternative fuel vehicles in reclaimed "brownfields," to an "energy job corps," the proposal showed the potential of building a new infrastructure and creating financial incentives for institutional players. Since the Kyoto agreement is built on a system of "emissions credits" that can be bought and sold, providing a financial benefit for early cleanup, the proposal also calls for establishing Wall Street as an emissions trading center -- initially for the region, and ultimately for the global economy.

This scenario shows how far we have come since the era when it was taken for granted that environmental protection was a threat to jobs. It's getting easier to see how environmental initiatives can be as profitable as any other form of problem-solving. How fast the New York scenario (or any other) could be built up to its full potential depends greatly on policy decisions in the overlapping realms of environment, technology, social well-being and economics.

Each of these great goals -- healthy basics, livable communities, and planet protection -- is a priority shared by a majority in the United States and much of the earth's population. And there is a growing movement of towns, counties, cities, and states -- as well as the inhabitants of forests, valleys, and deserts who identify with their natural areas more than with political structures -- who are taking concerted action at a community level. Starting with their own work, they are beginning to reorient their economies and expand local control of their futures by coming up with economic development strategies that focus directly on the social and ecological benefit that people value, rather than leaving it to chance.

Melissa Everett is a career counselor and author of the new book Making a Living While Making a Difference: The Expanded Guide to Creating Careers with a Conscience (New Society Publishers, 1999). Contact her by email at: melissae@ulster.net

-- Anonymous, February 16, 2000

Answers

See also related thread...
(British Petroleum mentioned in above article)

Case Study: BP Amoco Plans to Go Solar At The Gas Pump (Plug In The Sun)

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id= 002ZT8

-- Anonymous, February 16, 2000