What to do with an environmental science degree (or environmental engineering for that matter)

I don’t know about you, but these don’t look particularly promising

You would think that with all the talk we hear about in the news and media about the environment, climate, oceans, polar bears, suicidal walruses, wildfires, epidemics, Swedish girls, Koch Brothers, and bartenders turned politicians, there would be at least a bit of opportunity for being employed as an all-around holistic expert in all things environmental. The excitement around the environment has contributed to there being 373,404 graduates with a degree in it, a 4.5% increase from the year before, and steadily increasing. Typically, the public sector, whether the EPA or Department of Environmental Protection snap up these grads, but currently there are only 8 jobs listed for college students and new graduates. This may be irrelevant, as websites don’t reflect the entire picture, and anecdotally, I was told at a career fair they [EPA] had 60 open positions. Additionally, Trump has not affected the budget, so nothing has changed hiring wise.

That’s great, but 60 < 370, 000. Where are all these graduates going to go, especially saddled with student debt?

My personal suspicion is that contrary to what my fellow ecologists/environmental scientists may believe, the government’s involvement in policing environmental practices and regulating everything up down and sideways regarding the environment actually undervalues the environment, and thus, environmental scientists. I’m not claiming that the free market is better, but the government’s strictures make maneuvering and innovating and adapting and creating extremely difficult, and frankly those are all reforms that the environment and environmental improvement need.

Nevertheless, the average salary for an “environmental scientist” is about 60k, or above average for US salaries. Entry level jobs are scarce, and pay less. Typically, an “environmental scientist” position wants an environmental engineering degree, and with a mere environmental science degree, you may reach a pay ceiling. My father, who currently works for the DEP, started as an environmental consultant with a geology degree, and experienced a similar situation to the linked Reddit post. Environmental consulting is not in bucolic verdant places, it’s in brownfields, landfills, chemical factories, and lots of abandoned buildings. It’s sewage tank in bad neighborhoods. It’s Three Mile Island, but without the notoriety. It’s a lot of work which doesn’t draw on your degree.

In other words, it kind of sucks. Environmental compliance is a cost to companies, and is thus minimized. This means you do as much as possible for as little as possible.

However, this type of work will experience high turnover, so you’ll likely find yourself in it.

If you do indeed get hired doing grunt work in the field at contaminated sites for environmental regulatory compliance, make a list of your responsibilities. We live in an age of automation, and anything that can be standardized into an algorithm of practices should be.

Even if you’re not in this line of work, view this video and devise ways to either automate, or assist those who are responsible for performing these duties. How can we move on from Excel? How can we incorporate environmental sensing and spatial data? Can we utilize voice technologies like Siri, or AR technologies?

As the interviewee in the video describes, most work is auditing and permit writing.

And that’s environmental engineering! If even engineering requires endless schooling and certification, all for a boring job that is redlined and dictated at every step, why even major in environmental stuff in the first place?

I wouldn’t blame you for feeling this way. I have been a naturalist my whole life — in fourth grade, when other kids said what they wanted to be when they were older, I said what I was then: a naturalist — it’s like a sixth sense. I love fishing, I live and breathe it. But unless you’re a professional bass angler or Youtuber (and even then) you don’t make very much. I majored in environmental science anyway, at Cornell no less, and it honestly was tough to land a job.

Jobs won’t come to us environmental scientists. We will make our own opportunities, and they will be better.

If you go to a target school like myself, it is possible (if you perform well) to get hired on to Wall Street. The top 4 consulting firms all have divisions for sustainability and environmental compliance, but not entry-level, and frustratingly, very few in these positions come from environmental science backgrounds.

My gripe with an environmental science degree is that it only gives a cursory overview of a smattering of subjects; a little bit of biology, a bit of chemistry, a bit of earth physics, barely any math, and maybe a policy and economics course. Everyone assumes you’ll get a masters degree, and then you get thrust into the surprisingly quantitative fields of evolutionary biology, spatial ecology, and theoretical ecology, all of which require modeling, so learn to love your differential equations.

Meanwhile the innovations that will actually help human society live compatibly with the environment come from non-environmental science backgrounds.

If you haven’t gotten your degree yet, but you want to contribute to advancing mankind’s symbiosis, I would consider the following degrees in order of relevance (but don’t worry ES/EE majors, you’re not forgotten):

• Petroleum engineering: not all schools offer this major, but you have to know the problem to fix the problem. Hard degree to attain, and enrollment is down.
• Chemical engineering: similar to PE, this is probably the most versatile degree for environmentally minded people. It’s hard, but the root of all environmental problems come from chemicals. Whether you’re working with manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, construction, pulp and paper, petrochemicals, food processing, electronics, chemicals enter the picture. Obviously chemistry is a good second choice.
• Marine/Nautical Engineering: these are offered at specialized schools, but because shipping is one of the biggest climate change contributors, understanding this sector is crucial.
• Aerospace engineering: Satellites are a key part of the environment sensing puzzle.
• Computer Science/Engineering/Data science/Statistics: all around useful degrees for the 21st century, these are skills that can be picked up post hoc attaining an environmental science degree. GIS, drones, satellites, environmental sensors and even blockchain are integral to the future of environmental science, and interpreting the data collected and modeling thereof will be part and parcel of future environmental scientist’s repertoires. Might as well be ahead of the curve.
• Mechanical/Electrical engineering: From solar panels to wind turbines to drones and satellites, to sensors, understanding the environment requires mechanics, signals processing, and systems know-how.
• Molecular biology/Biological engineering: a plain biology degree ain’t gonna cut it, you need to understand the microscopic stuff. Whether it’s plastic-eating bacteria, algae power, bunny poop jet fuel, or dog poop lighting, this is an important piece in the symbiosis puzzle.
• Civil engineering: more than just wastewaster, civil engineering deals with dams, ports, highways, railways, and a term you’re likely very familiar with: pipelines.
• Applied Math/Physics: You can’t escape these subjects even within an environmental science degree, because you need them.

Now for the easy degrees:

• Systems engineering/supply chain analysis: this can be a worthwhile masters track, and there are some supply chain MBAs. Climate change is due almost entirely to supply chains. Learning about ecology hopefully taught you the concept of systems/networks, and I would advise learning about those concepts in more detail.
• Architecture may look attractive, but it’s a bad idea.
• Geology, which some of you may already have degrees in, could potentially land you a job in the energy sector.
• Government/political science/public policy: you may as well learn the language of 21st century environmentalism. It may set you up for lobbying or a career in politics.
• Economics/business/accounting/finance. You might end up doing these same jobs with an environmental science degree anyway, so be ahead of the curve. Real estate can fight climate change. Insurance can fund the fight against climate change, but aren’t.

So if you have an environmental science or engineering degree, and you don’t want to get stuck in the mire of dirty underpaid fieldwork, what should you do? What is your place in “saving the world” if all these other people with harder to attain degrees are better prepared than you?

First of all, with 370, 000 new graduates on the market, that’s a sizable company/union/super PAC if everyone teamed up. There is no point in going at this alone. If all of these graduates donated $100, we’d have nearly 40 million dollars. Think of what we could do…

As an aside, If these graduates undertook coding bootcamps, they’d be quickly swallowed by the million software developers demand.

Second, we need to move away from doom and gloom pessimism about the environment. If it’s all for nothing, why did you major in it? Let me introduce you to the Kuznets curve.

See? It’s gonna get better. But wait, there’s more. Let me introduce you to bright green environmentalism.

What does this mean? It means that you, as an environmental scientist, should shy away from the prevailing anti-corporation, ecosocialist mode of environmentalism, it doesn’t solve the problem. Economic innovation is responsible for improving peoples’ lives, and though at first the environment suffers as a result, but innovation will solve that problem too.

But solving the problem of the environment, a wicked problem, will require finding, defining, and outlining the problems that make up this larger problem, and imagination, creativity, and leadership for solving them.

As an environmental scientist/naturalist/ecologist/sustainability scientist/systems thinker, you are responsible for managing, organizing, assembling, and leading all of the other specialists. You are the generalist, the higher view thinker. You’re not buried in different specializations, so you have to be a polyglot in these different domains. You need to be able to pick up research papers in subspecialties of subdomains of subfields of various sciences, and translate them for people in other fields. If you don’t understand a particular research article, track down people who do, if not the authors themselves.

But my main advice for environmental scientists and engineers who know their stuff is this: you’re now data scientists, and more specifically: storytellers.

Since you’re going to be using Microsoft Suite heavily anyway, I would generally advise the average environmental scientist/engineer to learn programming and data science, especially with geospatial information systems. With your environmental background, you will be in charge of translating the greater problem for stakeholders, especially the costs of these problems. You will use GIS for collecting data, data science for interpreting the data, and machine learning for automating this process. You may use SQL or PostGIS instead of Excel. You may need to dabble in the domain of signals processing for taking input from sensors for noise, humidity, temperature, etc, which will feed datasets for interpretation. This may require utilization of natural language processing and computer vision libraries like NLTK and OpenCV. We are seeing a wave of satellite startups which will need sensors, and will collect data to interpret. This is almost rocket science, and this practice could do with the elimination of many barriers to non-programmers/non-aerospace engineers. There are open source satellites, but for those of you who are not poindexters this is pretty overwhelming, but you don’t need satellites necessarily, drones work too.

You look through this list or this one or this podcast or this paper and you see applications for machine learning and AI in helping reduce carbon footprints. You don’t necessarily need to know how to do programming, if you can be the boots on the ground in implementing these applications, interpreting the results, and communicating implications of those results to stakeholders. Where can money be saved?

One often overlooked part of sustainable consumerism is the use and employment and concomitant preservation of cultures in developing countries: the integration of villagers in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and various islands into the neoliberal global economic system, without the dilution of languages, customs, and traditions of said peoples. Companies like LXMI employ Nile villagers to make beauty products. Similar companies have limited distribution channels, are expensive, and exploit the poor people they claim to elevate. LXMI shows how sweatshops are not necessary to get the same results. Trade with poorer countries need not be exploitative. Creating economies for people in developing countries is integral to preserving those ecosystems, as frequently, exploitation of those ecosystems is the only way for those people to eke out a living, either via farming, mining, or selling timber, not to mention black markets.

Additionally, in ecology, you learn about the idea of pollinators. How can supply chains “pollinate” local economies? Maybe you have to discard preconceived notions? Maybe forests can be valued equivalently to the timber?

Sustainable fashion requires supply chain analyses, anthropological studies, and environmental impact reports, which you as an environmental scientist can produce easily.

Supply chain analysis is the first relevant field for an environmental scientist to enter. Aside from the fact that it’s the main contributor to climate change, supply chain management has potential to draw on several aspects of your environmental background: it requires graph theory or network analysis, it involves the extraction of natural resources from forests, seafloors, deserts, taiga; it uses modes of fossil fuel consuming fuels; through roads it fragments habitats, through shipping it spreads invasive species, through flying it spreads diseases; vehicles encounter animals crossing roads, planes encounter birds, boats encounter sea life; the global economy is built on exploitation of the earth, and the global supply chain is built on exploitation of human labor.

The average consumer or investor doesn’t see the implications of the entire supply chain behind any given product or company they invest in. Supply chain transparency will be a growing sector, and communicating the effects of consumer or investor choices will be your job.

Using GIS, you can interpret deforestation and the resulting land value. This is how externalities can be properly priced into products. Even when regulations exist, enforcement is difficult, but again, technology helps. Tracking ecosystem change will call on your knowledge of cutting edge technologies, but more necessary than the technologies themselves is creativity towards applying them. Pharmaceutical companies once tried to be conservators of rainforests, but it was expensive. These are opportunities for scientists like you to devise solutions.

This paper on creating sustainable timber industries in Latin America outline the following obstacles:

• Property rights: Without secure, long-term tenure of land and/or forests, small-scale forest enterprises (SSFEs) have little incentive to make long-term investments. Major advances have been made in Latin America regarding securing or strengthening the property rights of forest-based communities. Yet many cases of insecure or short-term tenure and partial devolution of rights remain.
• The regulatory framework: Arguably second only to tenure in terms of importance, another primary challenge for SSFEs is the costs imposed by inappropriate regulatory frameworks originally designed to minimize the environmental costs of industrial forestry operations. Attempts to adapt these frameworks have struggled to escape some of the original design elements. These costs undermine the economic viability of SSFEs (see also final lesson below).
• Institutional environment: SSFE development initiatives face a persistently limiting institutional and political environment in all Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) countries. This is the case with much of the legislation, policies and regulatory bodies affecting community forestry, but also those that affect forest product markets and access to and conditions of credit. Cumbersome regulatory frameworks tend to operate as institutional barriers and impose excessive transaction costs on local SSFEs.

• Business development and marketing capacity: Many SSFEs fail due to weak business organization. In Mexico and Central America, however, where most communities have a long history of market exposure, SSFEs have been able to develop market-oriented relationships and institutions. The “inclusive value chain” approach adopted by many SSFEs in Mexico, for example, has successfully built trusting relationships with timber companies.

• Access to capital and finance: Most financing mechanisms for SSFEs in Latin America contain significant subsidies. The “difficult economics” of community forest management make obtaining commercial loans unrealistic, particularly in the case of timber-based SSFEs. If subsidized finance is unavailable, SSFEs have little alternative but to accept funding from downstream value chain actors. Such relationships tend to be inequitable.

• The challenge of economic viability: Most of the challenges identified above are underlying factors that will determine the economic viability and sustainability of SSFEs. Those SSFEs that have demonstrated long-term economic viability have generally benefited from long-term, external financial and technical support. Viability is therefore conditional and rather precarious.

Any ideas for fixing these?

The second field is real estate and urban studies. Building homes is still an opportunity for sustainable practices to be implemented. Real estate has the power to put a price on climate change, and brownfields can be cleaned up and resold if nontraditional practices are used. Cities will be on the front line of implementing greener practices. You can use your GIS skills to value land, so that property owners don’t feel the need to develop it. Incentivize landowners to preserve their forests. This startup is like Airbnb for camping. We have seen many cities and communities in the US ruined by natural disaster, and frankly environmental scientists are going to be even more important in light of this, so consider this industry. “Smart city jobs” likely will need other skills, but you should enter this space anyway.

Agriculture/farming is the third sector we’re needed. A background in machine learning and sensors will help with this, for both horizontal and vertical farming. This discovery is pretty interesting too. Crop insurance companies might use you too.

Seafood and invasive species offer a massive industry. As you’ve undoubtedly learned, invasive species are damned expensive. Bringing invasives, from zebra mussels to carp to pig to lionfish, into the circular economy has opportunities too. Startups can help waterfront property owners with maintenance of lakes, robots can kill lionfish, monitoring, or zebra mussel prevention. The seafood industry needs tech, and aquaculture particularly.

Both agriculture and seafood are obviously looking into alternatives. This is where molecular biology is useful, but the founder of Wild Type comes from an international relations background.

Let’s put implementation of tech aside, tech itself offers a great industry to work in.

Computers use energy, and energy is expensive. Algorithmic analysis is all about finding efficient algorithms that are less energy consumptive. Memory space is finite, and storage of information requires more servers, and thus more footprint. Thus decentralized and more efficient servers are needed, as well as ways to cool them. Sustainability could come from the most surprising of places.

Blockchain is both an environmental boon and a bane, but for server reasons. It also offers a possible medium for carbon trading .

First and foremost, Fifth Wall Ventures is the prominent market-leading real estate venture capital firm, backed by the biggest housing companies. They have raised a fund for investing in decarbonisation; climate resilience, which will look at ways buildings can prepare for future changes in the climate, such as increased heat or higher sea levels; the circular economy, which allows materials used to build and fit out buildings to be reused; and general tracking and reporting to help the sector measure its impact on the climate, the first step to improving performance; essentially everything I’ve described. Therefore you want to be in the startup space, but to do that you’ll need skills you can bring to startups. Programming certainly is one, and if you get further schooling, you could get an MBA in either supply chain analysis, strategy, or management. The founder of a robotics startup has a geology degree. But don’t shy away from simply constantly learning a little of every subject, drawing cross-sector conclusions, and coming up with new innovations. Getting a law degree is an investment, but when I advised getting a government degree, it’s because you likely won’t be just an environmental lawyer, you’ll be just a plain lawyer. Legaltech has not touched environmental law yet, so there are opportunities there.

Get involved with accelerators that are tackling climate and environment issues. That list omits the best one. Wait, there’s another. I missed this one. This one deals with GIS. Look who just raised money. This looks interesting. Check this one out. You’ll love this one. And this one. And this one. Or this one. Check this out too. Another cool one. WWF has one too. Patagonia has this one. I keep finding them. Join this.

A caveat, these accelerators may not pay well, and neither would these startups necessarily, but they certainly are exciting, and breathe life back into the industry. Have you heard of the Ellen Macarthur Foundation? Or Closed Loop Partners?

It would be impossible to compile all the great startups that are helping the environment, but let’s focus on major ones.

This is the famous one.

Plastic replacement startups:

• Cuantec uses chitin for plastic
• Biocellection makes recycling easier
• This student made fish scale plastic
• Straw-nosed turtles are no more with Loliware

I give up listing all of these. There’s likely overlap in these lists. Here’s one more. Here are some more. And some more. Here is everywhere you can deploy your GIS skills. These look interesting. This is a brand new list.

Generally, you can find companies through the portfolios of the venture funds and accelerators I’ve listed.

Before summarizing, I would check out edx.org for courses from Chalmers, ETH, and Delft, among others, and Coursera for various GIS courses, natural capital sources, and the Technical University of Denmark has courses on solar and wind power, if not sampling, and Delft has a circular economy course.

To summarize, environmental consulting is drudgery according to people in the field, but it may offer a position at one of the the consultant’s clients eventually. If you pursue this, look for opportunities for automating the permit process, compliance, sensing — hell — the whole workflow.

Focusing in chemistry or molecular biology offers the best research opportunities for solving problems.

If you go into ecological research, I would look for opportunities for app development and automation technology to aid cataloguing and sampling.

Data collection and presentation of findings still requires Microsoft suite. Can this be replaced?

Given the necessity of data science and GIS data collection for studying climate change and even natural resource management, learning computer science and data science/machine learning in particular is the best bet for giving yourself a valuable skill, and a crucial skill for being an environmental scientist.

There are waste management startups, conservation startups, plastic startups, food and agriculture startups, invasive species startups, and so many opportunities to make real estate more valuable, technology less energy consumptive, and the economy more circular. Surely, you can find a niche, maybe even in marketing.

But most of all, collectively, we can bring about change. 40 million dollars. What would we do with it? $150 apiece brings us to 55 million. $200 apiece and we’re looking at 70 million. $300, and it’s 100 million. A donation of 300 bucks is not chump change for an environmental consulting salary, I confess. Being a software engineer warps my perspective, but it goes to show collectively what we are capable of. With just the relatively small number of environmental science majors (not even counting environmental engineers), most of whom could pick up programming from bootcamps, we could pool our money to the definition of ultra-high-net-worth with 100 bucks, the net worth of Ed Sheeran with 225 bucks, and even the net worth of Mohamed Hadid with 300 bucks. This would buy a considerable number of shares in Berkshire Hathaway, and I’m getting ahead of myself.

Currently there are no ways to securely pool money for starting superPACs, nonprofits, charities, or investing funds for activist investing. This holds opportunity for you entrepreneurs, maybe using the blockchain.

I can be found on Linkedin, let’s talk.