Something from the Cherry Tree and the Week's Daily Poems

The cherry tree has popped
overnight, more greeting
than bloom as a traveler
lately arrived. Inside,
philodendron thirsts more
regularly, the urgency
of water in summer.
Climate change as imminent
as a long overdue meeting
impends. A mother
puts away her son's
childish things and waits
for a signal from the sun-
scorched earth, wind
whipping around corners
where stillness used to be.

The Work of the Weekend

I tend to get overly emotional about work. Invest heavily in how well the job I'm doing is perceived. So I'm glad God invented the weekend.

Today the cherry tree is near full bloom, a symbol for figuring out how to do things efficiently, how to let the blossoms come and drop like confetti. How to take those long drinks from deep down and bring them up to all the parts.

The tree outside my window, in front of the house on the road in the neighbor, city, continent, planet, beyond. Telescope and microscope out/in to what's important. Focus and zoom.

On Green Jobs

What's A Green Job?

As a career development professional focusing on environmental jobs, I hear the term green jobs thrown around a lot--and it's used to describe everything from assembling parts for wind turbines to directing an environmental think tank. Green jobs, green-collar jobs, sustainability jobs, corporate environmental and social responsibility (CESR) and the sustainability, energy and environmental space are just a few terms used to identify environment-related jobs and fields. With positions like "Corporate Sustainability Director" only appearing in the last few years, identifying positions and gauging the job market is new territory, and it's a challenge to sort through the buzz.

Green Collar Jobs
"Most green-collar jobs are middle-skill jobs requiring more education than high school, but less than a four-year degree -- and are well within reach for lower-skilled and low-income workers as long as they have access to effective training programs and appropriate supports. We must ensure that all green-collar jobs strategies provide opportunities for low-income people to take the first step on a pathway from poverty to economic self-sufficiency." -- Green For All website

Van Jones is the founder of Green For All, an organization that promotes green-collar jobs and opportunities for the disadvantaged. Its mission? "Build an inclusive, green economy - strong enough to resolve the ecological crisis and lift millions of people out of poverty." The idea is simple: train new workers to implement green initiatives across the country, from weatherizing to manufacturing to clean up, and offer them a living wage.

Jones's idea is not unlike FDR's Works Progress Administration, implemented on the heels of the Great Depression to spur an ailing economy and rebuild the country's infrastructure. The bonus for green-collar work and the economy is that there is a quick and tangible payoff--energy efficiency is the single most effective initiative to reduce operating costs and energy consumption, whether it be for municipalities, homeowners or corporations. Alternative energy development has a slower but no less tangible payoff--economically, environmentally and in terms of national security. According to the Energy Efficiency Global Forum, "Energy efficiency is the quickest, cheapest and cleanest solution for addressing the world’s increasing energy demand and mitigating climate change." The green-collar economy, still more idea than reality, is a key element of Barack Obama's stimulus package, with 5 million jobs being integral to the New Energy for America plan. (See Environmental Defense Fund's story, What Exactly Are These Green Jobs We're Hearing About? for a discussion and report on green-collar jobs.)

The Accidental, Self-Initiated and Purposeful: Can Any Job Be Green?
"Maybe you're a chef who wants to be green or a master's student who wants to do something water-related or an accountant whose love of green doesn't stop with cash. Don't define your opportunities narrowly -- these days, any job can be green." --Kevin Doyle, Apply Yourself: Find A Green Job, Grist.com

The term "green job" defies easy description, because as Kevin Doyle suggest, any job can be green. I suggest the following shades:

While You're Up, Get Me A Green Job. I, for instance, with no background in environmental science or policy, have a green job. Most of my work is of a general career services nature, communications and job seeking are my strong suits, and the focus happens to be on the environmental job market and environmental careers. Accidental green job.

Make Yourself A Green Job. I recently met a young man at the vendor expo at a career services conference with no academic or work background in anything resembling green. He was well on his way to creating his own new green position in his organization after pitching a company-wide recycling and sustainability initiative. Self-initiated green job.

The Green Leaders. The students I work with pursue careers across all sectors with a broad spectrum of "green" expertise: environmental science, policy, and education; forestry and forest science; green architecture and engineering; environmental management, law and finance; industrial ecology, communications, urban planning, et. al. Purposefully green jobs.

Friends Help Friends Drive Green
Recent collaborations among environmental scientists, corporations, economists, and managers across non-profit, for-profit, government and educational sectors have led to remarkable cooperative problem-solving and innovative strategies targeting climate change and short-term environmental issues. Some of this impetus has to do with organizations jumping on the green bandwagon. Some of it has to do with the simple fact that greening business (the right way, see Dan Esty and Andrew Winston's Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage) is profitable. All of it is further driving green.

Notable examples are the recent appointment of Mark Tercek, former managing director at Goldman Sachs, to the leadership of The Nature Conservancy, the largest conservation organization in the world, which is employing a triple bottom line (economics, environment, justice) approach in its reforestation projects; collaborative work between World Wildlife Fund and The Coca-Cola Company to improve efficiency and reduce carbon emissions as well as working to protect seven of the world's most important fresh water river basins; and the appointment in 2007 of Jon Anda, former Vice Chairman of Morgan Stanley, as President of Environmental Defense Fund's New Environmental Markets Network. Anda's appointment as a chief financial director marks a first for the think tank focused on science and policy, founded 40 years ago by research scientists. Organizations like NetImpact! and CERES bring together investors, corporations and environmentalists for tough discussions, new jobs creation and the search for win-win solutions. And Walmart, a company with arguably the largest manufacturing and distribution footprint on the planet (the irony here is that because they have such a huge footprint their sustainability initiatives have an enormous impact), has taken the lead in the corporate sustainability movement, employing a strategy (among others) heretofore unheard of--holding brainstorming meetings with all of the players in any given supply-chain line, from suppliers to investors to environmental activists such as Greenpeace (although critics suggest "co-optation" rather than cooperation, see Jeffrey Goldberg's Selling Wal-Mart).

Towards A Suitable Definition In Support of Spaceship Earth
"All humanity now has the option to become enduringly successful." -- Buckminster Fuller

The growth rate of the green economy and the green job market remains to be seen, but by most accounts there has been substantial growth in the past five years. The level of interest in green jobs and jobs with environmentally conscious companies and organizations is at an all-time high among undergraduates--a new generation focused more on issues like work/life balance, organic organizational structures and concern for the planet than on money-making as a bottom line. The current financial crisis may curtail some of this holistic/idealist approach to careers, or perhaps, conversely, soon ALL jobs will fall under the green umbrella. I don't think we all have to run out and build ourselves geodesic domes, but I do remain optimistic that, as a species, we will continue to bend more of our remarkable intellect and ingenuity towards the "livingry" Buckminster Fuller called for--"Livingry is juxtaposed to weaponry and killingry, and means that which is in support of all human, plant, and Earth life." In the end, I consider a job focused on livingry a suitable definition for a green job.

The Work of Decision-Making

It Had to Be You

Faults were passed around
our home of nine like heaping
plates provided

mouths never knowing
want. With all of your faults
is how the song my father

engraved on my mother's
engagement ring goes, I love
you still, reminding a marriage

with sultry confirmation
of decisions made by teens
in a time of war,

each one planted, by parents
who remembered what is was like
to go hungry, on American soil.

The Work of Keeping Small Children Off Rooftops

30 Girard

My mother was 28 and afraid
of heights when my father left

leaning on the house the ladder
Bobby and Richy climbed

to view the boats floating
on the Great South Bay.

This was just the beginning
of children leading one

or another to a greater vantage
from the two-story colonial

by the swamp and woods
designated forever wild,

of deciding which one
would be caught if two fell,

of lollipops proffered like bait
luring small children

with wide eyes and sweet tooths
back to terra firma.

The Work of Living Rooms

The living room
is not exactly an ironic place

to be, looking back at me
from strategically hung

mirrors holding
not what lives here,

but what passes
for living. The top

of a head, a corner
admiring itself, jade

receiving dawn next
to aloe, philodendron,

just like my mother's
mantel before me held

trailing vines and my father's
closet door mirrored

lives passing loud
and humble.

On The Work of Men

Miracle of Pipes

They run beneath everything,
laid mainly by men
with families, sweating

joints in trenches dug,
some by hand. Once
in a while there's a burst

and those great grand-
children come and excavate
like plans also laid

that don't quite work out.
Not exactly foundations,
unless you count water

which we mainly are,
afterall, like the veins
of civilization at it's best

pumping something like blood
for the assembled starting,
at the tap,

another day in other trenches
drinking in infrastructure born
of tears and genius.

The Work of Change