But I Want to Work on Environmental Stuff!

One of the horrible existential challenges of being a student is that, in most cases, one must at some point leave school and begin work, presumably in an area for which one has been training these many years. For those reading this column, the area of interest is likely environmental, usually expanded these days to include sustainability. Put bluntly, the relevant questions are likely to be: How do I do good — and what is the job market like? Recognizing that planning your career on the basis of a 750-word column is probably not a great idea, here are some late-summer thoughts before you hit the books.

First, the good news. There are plenty of opportunities to do great things: to help your employer (be it a private firm, government, or NGO), help the world, and feed yourself. Now, the bad news: Most of these opportunities are disguised, most have nothing to do with environment as currently taught and thought about at most schools, many of the opportunities have yet to be invented, and almost any worthwhile job will require that you develop it yourself, from inside.

To begin with, traditional environmental jobs — that is, those based on current regulatory and policy structures, primarily cleanup and end-of-pipe emissions control — will be with us for a long time, especially in developing countries. They are necessary. But this field is not growing, offers few intellectual challenges, and will have little to do with solving the larger problems of the anthropogenic world (albeit improving health significantly in developing countries). So if you really want to help the environment in the broader sense — perturbed climatic and oceanic systems; anthropogenic carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and hydrologic system changes; biosphere disruptions — this is not the place for you.

The next step up is a position in the “sustainability industry.” Superficially, at least, such jobs, which are frequently with niche consulting firms, are broader in scope and offer more intellectual opportunities. But caution is in order. The term “sustainability” has now grown to be so politically correct, and at the same time flown so far beyond mere ambiguity, that there is no substantive content to much of this work. In too many cases, it now amounts to a somewhat patronizing, highly ingrown dialog within a small circle of friends that tend to regard themselves as the great and the good, and spend a lot of time reinforcing one another’s mental models.

The result is a nouveau utopianism that has tenuous connections with the real world, except for the few that are already True Believers. Thus, for example, I recently participated in a sustainability workshop where one conclusion was that firms should exist not for profit, but only to redistribute income (and that, by the way, money should be banned). Those with any historical background will recognize that this proposed policy closely tracks that of the early Leninist/Marxist Soviet Union: They did ban money — and the economy collapsed. Moreover, you can imagine how the typical executive would greet such a proposal as a model for how his/her firm could be “sustainable.”

So, be careful if you want to work in this area. Before you jump in, you may want to work inside a firm first to get an idea of what companies really are like. It will help you maintain perspective. There are a few real opportunities — but caveat emptor.

What to do? Back to first principles. The challenge of environmental (and related social) issues is precisely that they have become so all-encompassing: They are not separable from the messy, multidisciplinary worlds of commerce, of ordinary life, of birth and death, of long natural cycles. So the kinds of things that contribute most to social and environmental progress — employee telework options, efficient network routing algorithms for air and ground transport systems, low-energy and reduced-water manufacturing technologies — come not from the environmental staff, but from the core operating competencies — engineers, business planners, product designers, and others.

So, by all means remain committed to sustainability — but get expertise in international business, chemical engineering, or finance. Then, when you get your non-environmental, line position — you can start to change the world.

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Brad Allenby is Environment, Health and Safety Vice President, AT&T, an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and Princeton Theological Seminary, and Batten Fellow at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business. The opinions expressed herein are those of the author, and not necessarily any entity with which he is associated.