Every Job is Green.
We have this remarkable chance to reinvent our economy and pursue a green, sustainable path.
The question is, will we take it? It’s unimaginable—yet easily imagined: every job must transform into a green job, solely for a green purpose.
The debate over economic theory can wait—let’s reimagine these jobs now.
Which institutions give us the best chance to practice environmentalism? What positions are already in place to foster change in the system we already have? What practical changes can we anticipate, and where do they fall short? If they do, can we skip the wringing of hands, and just reevaluate our efforts?
What will it take to develop and support lab and plant meat firms?
What dynamics can shift this entire industry from “traditional” to “sustainable?” Is it a matter of knowledge, marketing, or investment? There are plenty of marketing geniuses in our society who can stimulate demand. Automobile companies are pledging to sell only environmental vehicles by a certain date.
Can we set a date for phasing out cattle, as well?
Think of the jobs required for this new industry to grow. Consider the benefits of distributing emission-less meat labs throughout a local community, rather than relying on giant polluting meat-processing plants in disadvantaged areas. How much carbon would we save deconstructing the central distribution system of transporting meat throughout the country?
Then, there is a further benefit—beyond the expansive issue of animal rights. We can reduce an army of low wage, exploited workers, as the slaughterhouse becomes an artifact of the past.
With solar, we need a massive technological review, shrewd forecasting, and a policy change.
We must align investment with practice, balancing the speed of implementation against the risk of obsolescence. Where will solar work best, and can we understand, communicate, and accomplish a plan quickly enough, with the necessary scale?
How do we create a flexible grid in a multitude of jurisdictions that is both resilient and coherent? The scope of policy and technical planning is stratospheric. Think of the jobs, from planner to developer, financier to engineer, installer to technician.
Consider the requirements for engineering.
It’s one thing to create a class of engineers to maintain the structures of our past (or our Capitalistic future). It’s another to develop skilled leaders who will pioneer environmental change.
Geothermal, wind, wave, solar, hydrogen, nuclear—on a global scale—could change the role of engineer from solely serving business, to becoming indispensable stewards of a sustainable world.
Will engineers follow or lead, and if they lead, will they also be able to listen?
Consider organizing within the realm of politics.
Which schools are best for shepherding political action? How can we shift from the self-serving universe of politics to a system that advocates true benefits for everyone?
A series of self-serving interests is not the same as a common goal. As admirable as many of the efforts of these groups are, advocacy for a common goal is stronger than a set of narrowly-crafted concessions.
The technology involved in these efforts is inspiring: STEM on steroids, but where will the encouragement and focus come from to expand beyond “market-driven solutions?” What policy and funding will develop the solutions we need?
Does our current system have the proper emphasis and focus, or is it designed simply to update the processes of our past? A shift is required, from “profit” to “sustainability.”
Where will that shift begin?
Data Visualization and Social Media are the lubricants of our future. What do they “connect” and “visualize”—right now—and for what purpose?
How do we propel our vast cycles of communication towards a green end? Currently, schools teach students and share knowledge primarily for commercial purposes.
How can we change that emphasis?
Rather than argue about accuracy and distrust the statistics, we need to manage a blizzard of relentless data. We must strengthen our systems of measurement to foster understanding and relieve the sense of being overwhelmed.
So many jobs concern the physical world, beyond energy and education.
Will plastics change through insect shells, plants, or algae? Can we plan a transformation on such a global scale? Will we emerge from the trance of fossil fuels, unable even to imagine the size of our efforts?
The jobs are mind-boggling: cultivating materials, rethinking containers, growing plastics, developing supply chains, maintaining a closer relationship between needs and means. This is a reinvention as profound as food, interwoven in our lives as tightly as fossil fuel. You may drive an electric vehicle, powered by electricity from the sun, but what will you wrap your food in?
The plastics themselves are just a beginning. The world needs repackaging and our products themselves need re-envisioning.
We can’t rely—as we have—on fossil fuel to package every item and snack, and our clothing and appliances need to last much longer than they do today—“forever” being a good measure. This is a seismic shift and it will take a generation of designers to make it happen.
Then, there are the very spaces in which we live and work.
Where are the best green schools for architecture and construction? What will it take to support them?
We must reinvent these industries down to their very last detail. It’s yet another industry with its imagination in transition. Once freed solely from the constructs of Capitalism, it can reshape its services to the dictates of the earth.
I know this sounds naive and “earth-motherly,” but when one goal is “profit” and the other is “life,” there is a question as to whether either is sustainable. Driving off a cliff with record profits is still driving off a cliff.
The effort extends far beyond the issues of green concrete and energy efficient buildings, to the very nature of how space affects our lives.
What army of workers, engineers, and technicians are needed to sequester carbon?
What systems of management, maintenance, and compliance will the world use? Will we all have competing systems—with conflicting differences intact—or symbiotic cooperation?
How will Forestry and Oceanography become involved? The management of resources just became the management of impacts—something rarely seen in human history, except when defined in terms of risk and profit.
How many millions of workers will we need to reverse the current use of the rainforest?
Clear-cutting must become conservation, through policy, education, economics, and protection. Interacting with the rainforest in a sustainable manner is the polar opposite of simply cutting down trees.
This shift from consumption to conservation—up and down the supply chain—will require millions of new jobs.
For a green world to prosper, we must address every form of imbalance.
The cascading effects that lead to famine mean that green economies have not taken root at every level. Currently, people survive due to the top down attention of their governments (i.e. having functioning governments to protect their economies).
What if we addressed famine as a wholistic concern, with a shared set of remedies practiced all over the world? Think of the jobs and infrastructure needed to propel this effort beyond the World Health Organization, the Foreign Service, ambassadors and NGOs.
War is built around resources.
If resources are no longer for exploitation, but management, what becomes of war? Does it shift its purpose, or does it lose its reason for being? Is the state of our world’s governments the best we can do to manage human impulses and greed?
If the world takes unlimited energy from the sun, what will become the new resources in short supply?
How can we move from exploitation to cooperation, and what education, research, policy, and development becomes necessary to achieve this goal? Are our existing systems of education producing enlightened solutions, or simply colonial, nationalist, and capitalistic outputs?
Will any of these lead to positive environmental change?
There are so many other sectors from which green jobs can evolve. How much law will be written? How far will educational practices extend and expand? What will it take to reframe finance—or must there always be a conflict between sustainability and profit?
Each area has the potential to create millions of jobs befitting this new direction.
Our practices and occupations will no longer strive to claim a piece of the pie, but instead, share the whole amongst ourselves—all of ourselves.
This may seem a radical or simply naive notion, but the alternative is failure. Nature has determined that “our” game is “off,” and it moves to cancel us as we bicker.
We must move beyond taking from the other to providing betterment for all, or we can wear ourselves down to an environmental nub.
What will it take to choose one and not the other?
Jobs. Millions of green jobs.
Right now, as quickly as we can.
Illustration by Paul Antoniades
