Green jobs are the new hot jobs. Opportunities for employment are opening up as a paradigm shift in the job market develops. You can get a sense of the dramatic shift in thinking about green jobs by reading how businesses are getting it: Amazon.com: Good to Green: Managing Business Risks and… Where recently only environmental engineer (janitor) opportunities populated the job boards, now you see: building retrofitting, renewable energy generation, alternative transportation , energy efficiency, green construction, energy trading, energy and carbon capture and storage, environment protection, agriculture and forestry, green manufacturing, recycling and waste reduction, and governmental and regulatory administration.
You can find these jobs by checking all the various green job sites, including the recently updated Green Careers New York: “GreenCareersNY was launched in a parternship [sic] between the State Department of Labor and NYSERDA, under the Green Jobs/Green New York Bill to match job seekers with green job and training opportunities.” Check this resource as it represents your tax dollars at work.
But while these jobs present new opportunities, they still represent thinking ‘inside the box’: traditional career choices retrofitted onto existing career fields. Nothing wrong with that—as far as it goes. In fact, what we now consider green jobs rising out of the construction and transportation fields will soon be merely jobs. Constructing green buildings and infrastructures will be the norm.
However, not everyone is mechanically inclined. Not everyone has the resources (or desire) to re-educate themselves from, say, a liberal arts background to being adept at developing, fixing, or selling new technology. There truly doesn’t seem to be any widespread attempt to leverage our available talents in today’s green market.
To get everyone employed, we need to think outside the box. We need all people in all walks of life addressing concerns about our environment and employment. A sustainable world is one where what we do doesn’t trash our environment. We need to shake up the status quo, even in the emerging green job market.
How is that possible? Don’t we just check all the available job boards and match our skills with what’s out here?
Not always. Some create new businesses and employment opportunities based not on some wild gadget they invented, but on a more realistic appraisal of reality. I think it odd when someone says environmentalists are idealists because they want an environmentally healthy world regardless of the constraints this puts on businesses. Actually, it’s the other way around. Groups, businesses, and political ideologues who think we can survive in any environment but a sustainable one are the dreamers. (How are our environment and our economy going? Not so good. )
Out-of-the-box thinking on green jobs: What if artists painted for the public what a sustainable environment looked like? What if historians reevaluated historical events in light of how we got off the track of living sustainably, instead of rehashing all those great wars? What if novelists reflected our newly-realized position on the planet (we’re now running the place) instead of ‘boy meets girl’? What if advertisers pushed a healthy planet, thus creating a world-wide desire for a sustainable planet, instead of some crazy online job scheme to rob us of all our money and our senses? What if someone created a business that hired the plethora of unskilled, uneducated, and undeterred unemployed workers to whip our environment back into shape and get its act together? The industrial revolution created a sea change in the job market. Before, the 1900’s most worked on farms, and then they came into cities and worked in factories. We need another sea change.
If you’re thinking that harping on greening up our jobs is just one of the ‘new’ ideas out there for creating jobs, think again. If we are to have a sustainable existence all jobs will have to be green. Like it or not, we have to move towards a mode of behavior (our economic system) that doesn’t ravage the environment and bring every facet of our environment to the brink of destruction. Otherwise, we’ll be like the vanishingly large number of species who have ever existed on this planet (99.9%) -- extinct.
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