Remake a Living: Consulting with the devil

Can you work as an environmental consultant without losing your soul?

Posted by Kevin Doyle (Guest Contributor) at 9:55 AM on 16 May 2006

Read more about: green jobs

As director of program development at The Environmental Careers Organization, Kevin Doyle knows a thing or two about job searching. In this recurring column for Grist, he explores the green job market and offers advice to eco-job-seekers looking to jumpstart their careers.

I have been working in the environmental consulting field for several years now. I must admit, I'm quite disillusioned due to clients who simply don't care about the environment. I turn away projects when I realize the goal is to use me to produce an assessment that removes their responsibility. When I explain that the data cannot be altered, many attempt to offer more money, but end up choosing to find another consultant. I want to return to why I entered this field in the beginning. I'm 40 years old now, and I need to make a change. Where does this idealist go from here? -- Jacqueline M.

Is there something in the water, Gristers? Recent calls and emails are bringing plaintive cries from 40-something environmental professionals all over the country.

It's not only people like Jacqueline in the so-called "environmental industry." I'm hearing from federal, state, and local government employees, environmental officers at corporations, academics, and even a few activist types. Just this week at a pollution-prevention conference in Atlanta, I listened to a state government environmental leader declare flatly that the permitting work her team spent "thousands of hours on" was producing little or no additional benefit for people or the natural world. No one seemed shocked and appalled. No one suggested she was being too negative. Most everyone nodded and shrugged as if to say "tell me something I don't already know."

The message I'm getting is that many of the people who have been toiling in the greener part of the vineyard for years have begun to suspect that they may be part of a game -- one that's better at keeping expensive professionals gainfully employed than it is at creating a sustainable world.

In Jacqueline's case, the story turned out to be much darker than simple worries about benefits versus costs. Our follow-up phone conversation was filled with depressing tales of political pressure; doctored and withheld data; bribery; "good old boy" networks between consultants, elected officials, and developers; gender discrimination; and previously respected mentors revealed to be corrupt liars when the spotlight was turned off.

Ouch. What am I supposed to say to the long line of students and career-changers queuing up for jobs at environmental agencies and companies? Don't bother? Sorry, we're not the good guys after all? It's all a big greenwashing scam?

Well, of course not. Let's be clear. There are thousands of highly ethical and productive professionals out there doing creative, productive work that results in improved ecological and human health. For every example of less-than-ethical behavior there are many, many more stories of green workers generating results we can be proud of.

(Can I add an aside? We environmentalists would do well to talk more loudly about the dozens of remarkable success stories our movement has produced. People like that sort of thing.)

Still, Jacqueline's experience should raise concerns for citizens and taxpayers, as well as career seekers. The pressure to stay afloat in a fiercely competitive environmental marketplace can tempt even honest professionals to bend the rules -- or worse.

Moreover, environmental business owners largely respond to the needs of their government and corporate clients. They are rarely asked to weigh in on the question of whether or not the proposed work makes any sense or will produce any real environmental results for the money and time invested. Securing contracts that result in billable hours for employees is the name of the game. If that means churning out reports to fulfill an increasingly meaningless regulatory permit requirement, then so be it.

This wouldn't be much of a problem if the role of business in environmental problem-solving was fairly small. But it's not small. Over the last 40 years, government agencies and regulated businesses have transferred more and more responsibilities to the private sector, creating a large industry that employs an ever-larger percentage of the professionals who actually do the on-the-ground work that most of us think of as "environmental."

And I do mean large. The Environmental Business Journal reports that the companies and quasi-governmental agencies that offer environmental goods, services, and equipment took in $245 billion in revenues in 2004. Water and wastewater entities accounted for the largest share, at $90 billion. Solid waste management and recycling related businesses were next in line, with over $54 billion. The remaining billions tracked by EBJ are spread out over hazardous waste management, air pollution control, site remediation, "clean energy" systems, and prevention technologies. Some $20 billion went to environmental consultants large and small, including Jacqueline's tiny company.

Here at ECO, we conservatively estimate that the environmental industry employs at least 750,000 people. And this doesn't include hundreds of additional environmentally related companies in fields like organics, green construction, energy conservation, efficient appliances, hybrid cars, and more.

So here we are, 36 years after the first Earth Day. An entire generation of environmentally concerned people has invested the better part of their lives in creating a massive infrastructure of institutions, including a sprawling private sector industry. Money is pumping through it. Talented people are showing up for work every day. Permits are being filed and approved. The system we've set up is churning along.

Jacqueline speaks for many people, however. She remembers why she got started in this field. She's concluded that at 40, she needs to make a change.

No, Jacqueline. I'm guessing that you're pretty much OK just as you are. Perhaps the rest of us can work on bringing the change to you.

Have a question for Remake a Living? Send an email to , or post a comment below.

Kevin Doyle is the national director of program development for the The Environmental Careers Organization in Boston. He is coauthor of The ECO Guide to Careers That Make a Difference: Environmental Work for a Sustainable World and The Complete Guide to Environmental Careers in the 21st Century.

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Narcissism is a natural part of consumer life

When the consumer society was gathering steam, sometime around the time Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, the idea of an "ecological crisis" was born. Earlier societies had experienced environmental disaster, most famously the coal-fired "London fogs" that choked the lungs out of 19th-century England, but they did not regard this disaster as "ecological crisis." It is the distinction of consumer society to have meditated upon ecological crisis.

Consumer society, nevertheless, is a form of society that channels efforts at happiness through the consumption of "goods and services" (to repeat an Econ 101 cliche). Consumers, then, are happiest when they're consuming. Ecological crisis is the flip side of this; it is the notion that human beings are consuming the world to death. And it's true; that's what consumers are doing.

Consequently, "companies in fields like organics, green construction, energy conservation, efficient appliances, hybrid cars, and more" exist to satisfy this consumer society. Green appliances aren't for "the environment," they're for consumers. "Remarkable success stories" are about pleasing environmentalist consumers. "Improved ecological and human health" exists against the background of an ecology and a humanity that is hardly getting healthier. "Talented people are showing up for work every day" to feel good about themselves.

Really, seriously, if we wish to defend the right of the next seven generations to a life, or if we wish to defend the right of the environment to its ecological integrity, we will have to revolutionize society so that it is no longer capitalist society or consumer society. We can start by thinking about how we humans are going to stop consuming 85 million barrels of oil each day.

But if those really are your goals, if that is really what you want to accomplish, then consumer environmentalism is not going to make it happen. For consumer environmentalism is the appliance the consumer environmentalists plug in to make themselves happy. It's not about the environment.

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

by LegumeSam at 10:43 AM on 16 May 2006

scant comfort for poor Jacqueline

Hey, if she says she doesn't feel as though she belongs there anymore, why encourage her to stay? I sympathize with her plight. I had a mixed great and horrible experience working as a environmental consultant for about nine years. I worked for a huge consulting firm and did the regulatory compliance write-ups and overall writing/editing on EAs and EISs. I was occasionally appalled at my bosses' and clients' circumvention of the National Environmental Policy Act (a statute I pretty much deify).

I assume it has only gotten worse, since corporate power grows stronger and resentment toward regulation sourer each day.

It was a combination of my frustration over these issues and the punitive billable-hours treadmill that got me in the end. My body forced me to quit the job through the sneaky tactic of taking away my mobility with a herniated disk.

The positive side of the job was that it gave me the background I needed for a short stint as a local govt planner. Even way better, the experience made it possible for me to found and run a small non-profit that works to save federal land from bad real estate deals and sell-offs to private entities. I have been so insanely lucky as to have been doing this for nine years. Without the indepth experience I had at The Firm with NEPA implementation by the federal land agencies and the sweatbox report-writing, this would have been much more difficult. It was only after I started the Western Lands Project that I finally understood why I'd had to spend so much time in utter depression.

I wouldn't condemn those people of conscience who are able to hang on to add their increments of good....on the other hand, if your soul tells you to go, perhaps it is time to find a more satisfying way to use your smarts.

by Blaeloch at 12:58 PM on 16 May 2006

Another consultant's perspective

I'm in my mid-40s and have been in the environmental consulting field for 10 years, mainly consulting for government agencies (although I've also worked for a few private sector clients). I honestly have never encountered the kind of attempts to doctor or distort data that Jacqueline describes. True, I have occasionally encountered high-level attempts to suppress findings of reports I worked on, but I can only think of a couple of cases of that over the past decade.

So I guess my advice to Jacqueline is "you're not in the wrong line of work, you just have the wrong clients." One way to find the right clients is to spend some time on the Web researching government or private sector programs that are getting results and accomplishing good things, programs that you would feel proud to support. Then call or e-mail some people who work for those programs, ask them who their contractors or consultants are, and see if you can get a job with one of those firms.

by bhurley at 2:27 PM on 16 May 2006

State Permitters Do No Good?

So the lead permitter for a state agency said his or her employees thousands of hours of work were achieving nothing on the ground?

Sounds to me like there are three possibilities:

(1) They are not doing their jobs by including meaningful permit conditions and/or denying inappropriate permits.
(2) The permit standards are so weak as to be meaningless.
(3) The standards are appropriate, the employees are doing their jobs, but someone (perhaps the agency director who was speaking?) is undercutting good staff work.

Hey, I'd rather by building park benches than writing comments on permit applications, too, but those permits matter, because sometimes the regulators say no, and often they put conditions on a project that hugely reduce its impact.

by Native Brookie at 3:00 PM on 16 May 2006

Be sincere, and starve - ?

This is a fascinating ethical situation. And I am very sorry to learn that people whom I greatly admire, our professional environmentalist friends, are made to play the anti-regulation game.

So let us say the environmental consultant makes it very clear to the prospective client: "I am definitely on your side, because I am assuming you agree that environmental regulations are good things, and I am assuming you want to do all you can to follow those regulations; and I am going to do all I can to tell you how to follow them." Has that consultant sealed his/her fate? Is it at once perceived that the consultant is not going to be a team player, and so is chucked out the window?

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

by caniscandida at 11:14 PM on 16 May 2006

Clients are funny

I have had many clients who apparently were using me to make something seem legitamite, don't worry about it though, these people almost always get what is coming to them in the end. There are many downsides of being a consultant, but I am sure you will all agree the upside way outways the downside.

I found another cool blog which has a lot of tips, for consultants, pretty good reading.

http://coaching-consulting-unlimited.blogspot.com/atom.xml

by Driveguy at 2:59 PM on 02 Jul 2006

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