A Green Living
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 07.27.07
Looking for a job? According to Newsweek, this year's graduates are finding that being green is a growth industry. They write: " As public awareness of global warming grows, companies are scrambling to put in place greener practices, to present themselves as more eco-friendly and to develop products and services to fill a new demand for all things green. The phenomenon is creating jobs in fields like urban planning, carbon trading, green building and environmental consulting." The fastest-growing professions, according to [President of Green Economy Inc.] Doyle's analysis of recent U.S. Department of Labor figures, include environmental engineers, hydrologists, environmental-health scientists and urban and regional planners. ::Newsweek
Consultants. Planners. Carbon traders. Of course, nobody grows or makes anything any more. James Howard Kunstler suggests that "The giant universities are exactly the kinds of institutions that will prove unwieldy and unsupportable in the Long Emergency. College will cease to be the mass consumer activity it became in the cheap energy heyday. If it survives at all, it is likely to be - as earlier in history - an activity for a much smaller economic elite." and that we need to "work side-by-side with our neighbors, on things that are meaningful." ::Kunstler: We must imagine a future without cars
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Kustler is dead right. Speaking as a former corporate env staffer, careers go no where and budgets end unless one of two but preferably both the following conditions are met.
Serious regulatory enforcement is consistently being applied at Federal, state, and local levels.
Corporate staffs are empowered to create (not just enhance) business value, working with businesses directly. For this to occur sustainably, environmental staff personnel must be involved in the design and materials selection process early in the "product ideation" stage: not as an afterthought.
Surveys such as these are pablum created to sell market research reports to university job centers. Much nonesense