Sector by Sector Snapshot of Environmental Careers Today

What is the current status of "green" employment in the United States? As we've seen, the movement for a more sustainable economy has begun to reach beyond traditional conservation, environmental protection, and natural resource management institutions. The basic ideas of sustainability, however, are still far from being fully incorporated into our mainstream society. With this in mind, where are the jobs today for people who want to combine ecological and social goals? The overview below provides a snapshot of current trends at some leading public and private environmental employers, and suggests directions for job seekers and career planners.

Public Sector

• Federal Government

From the 1970s through the early 1990s, the federal government was clearly a primary source of national environmental progress. Since that time, environmental concerns seem to have slipped from the top of Washington's priority list. Congressional leaders appear to be skeptical about (if not hostile to) the expansion of environmental regulatory power and the purchase of new public lands. Moreover, the federal conservation workforce is not as big as it used to be.

Even in its somewhat diminished state, however, the federal government remains the largest single employer in the world of environmental careers. Over 200,000 people worked in full-time, permanent positions for federal environmental and conservation agencies in 2004, most of them at the small collection of well-known agencies detailed in Table 1.

The sheer size and authority of the government, coupled with the huge amounts of money it spends on state and local government, nonprofit groups, and private contractors, guarantee a prominent role for Washington on every sustainability issue. It's the U.S. government, after all, that owns and runs the national forests, wildlife refuges, parks, and other protected areas. Congress ultimately controls the direction of national policy on air, water, climate, toxics, agriculture, and energy issues. Federal priorities in environmental science dominate research funding for scholars and graduate students. And, in a global world, it's important to note that only Washington can commit the nation to critical international environmental and trade agreements.

Finally, it makes sense to examine the federal government's environmental workforce at length because much of the nation's public and private eco-employment has grown up in reaction or as a complement to the federal role in environmental protection and natural resource management. Understanding the federal workforce is a window into environmental career opportunities everywhere.

• Environmental Protection Agency

Through rule making and regulatory enforcement, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) assures that business, industry, and government agencies comply with the National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (for hazardous waste management), Toxic Substances Control Act, and Pollution Prevention Act, among others. In this role, the agency often sets the standards that become our national environmental goals. Since much of this authority for on-the-ground pollution control work has been delegated to the fifty states, the EPA's role is often one of management and oversight.

In addition to responsibility for enforcing major laws, the EPA is also charged with running the "Superfund" program to clean up the nation's most toxic sites, and it has major responsibilities for environmental education, environmental justice, and brownfields redevelopment. Finally, the EPA conducts and supports scientific research.

Although the agency can be thought of as a "national cop on the environmental beat," it has shown a strong interest in additional methods for improving environmental quality. A 2004 EPA report entitled Innovating for Better Environmental Results reviews a long list of initiatives involving experimental technologies (such as nanotechnology), integrated environmental management systems, "sector strategies" that target the unique environmental concerns of specific industries, voluntary programs, and market-based incentives for pollution prevention. The search for innovative and less costly methods that produce improved results will certainly continue under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

Environmental scientists, engineers, and lawyers make up the vital core of the EPA workforce, for obvious reasons, but that has been changing. Information technology specialists are in very high demand now, as are economists, businesspeople, financial analysts, and talented managers for complex public-private partnerships.

• National Park Service

One of the nation's best-loved agencies, the National Park Service operates hundreds of national parks, from well-known treasures like Yosemite, Grand Canyon, and Yellowstone, to tiny properties that attract only a handful of visitors. Because many parks are simultaneously nature reserves, sites for scientific research, and outdoor recreation areas for millions of people, pressure is always on park professionals to balance public access with the need to protect the natural bounty that inspired us to protect these areas in the first place. Maintaining that balance has been made even more difficult in recent years by the need to deal with a serious backlog of needed improvements that will require millions of additional dollars beyond current budgets.

The core of the National Park Service workforce is its cadre of park rangers, a growing number of whom are unfortunately required to handle law enforcement issues along with environmental education and conservation...