The Market and My Place – Assessment.

Call it a mid-life assessment.

I won’t call it a crisis but an assessment which may well lead to a crisis or a correction or a confirmation.  No worries – nothing to do with home and hearth.  I am totally infatuated with my husband and son, though I confess I don’t always understand them!

It’s a career review, perhaps.  And I think one that may resonate with many in the field of sustainability. You see, this passion for greening buildings has been around for a long long time, but has only made serious market inroads over the last 20 years.  This is in no small part due to  the work of the USGBC and the LEED rating system. The launch of LEED into the market 15 or so years ago gave us a metric to understand greenness in the built environment and it coincided with or perhaps even spurred attention to GHG tracking and emissions reductions, etc.

I’ve been in green building officially since 2004 as a LEED AP and very involved with the U. S. Green Building Council at national and local levels since then.  Not among the first, but certainly still catching that first big wave.  I was passionate and learning and committed to greening up well before that, and my design work and personal choices have been solidly informed by TBL thought my life.

In 2007 I was coerced into an excellent opportunity to be the first Director of Sustainability in a NY State government entity, which occurred under the Spitzer administration. It was a very hard decision as I love project management and design, and working with construction teams is fun and challenging as well as instructive and inspirational.  In working for state government, I would lose direct connection to projects, but have a much wider influence on buildings.  I choose to enter the confusing and large pond of state government, and have worked hard to set goals and to guide state work onto a more sustainable path.

Let’s not talk about how my role has changed over that last eight years, but let’s touch on how the world has changed around me.  I was the first: an innovator, working on concepts that people were just beginning to grasp. I had the exceptional pleasure of working with teams of thoughtful, respectful people struggling to understand GHG emissions and tracking, to define what goals could and should be set for buildings, to implement financial mechanisms to move the performance bar.  For 10 months I was part of a team of nearly 400 people working on a Climate Action Plan for NYS, and felt my skills as an architect were well referenced while my abilities as a collaborator were fully employed and even challenged. It was exhilarating and powerful. The plan has never been signed though most of the individuals have brought the knowledge from that endeavor back into their day-jobs resulting in clear betterment of state goals and efforts.  Even so, the work overall has since slowed in passion and breadth. It is still impactful even though the focus, at least in NY state government, has shifted.

New York draft Climate Action Plan

So I now look around and realize that nearly every business has someone tasked with sustainability.  Great changes in less than ten years! Lego recently released a plan to become more sustainable with better plastic content. Better plastic – in planning.    PepsiCo was one of the first to begin aggressive sustainability planning reports, and measurement. and even Shell Oil has been reporting for 18 years, now including disclosure of  conflict minerals and looking into plans for wind energy.

Companies have been created from the ground up with sustainability of people, planet and profit at their core. Companies such as Clif bar and Patagonia.  These companies would have remained niche without this growing, worldwide respect for TBL.  Basically everyone “gets it” or, at the very least, they profess to in their public outreach.

But have I, and others like me, been left behind? I am seeing more and more sustainability positions in state government and in business and this is wonderful and needed.  I applaud anyone who seeks sustainability inputs and knowledge or who comes to the table with these skills.  But now I also see Masters programs in sustainability at many levels such as policy, economy, management, and business, and I see nearly every job in the sustainability realm tied to a requirement for a Masters of some sort.  I find myself in an odd position that I am sure many people have experienced in many innovative professions – I’ve been so busy doing  the work at hand that I have no paper creds.  Of course, this is not a problem unless I have a reason to seek another job, but it is disconcerting in a general sense.  I see valuable people with real solid experience being unable to participate in research and development of goals because the minimum education requirement is a Masters degree, as in the work at Project Drawdown.  I see the USGBC looking for “new blood” and turning its back on old blood (even those of us in our 40’s).  I see job after job being posted for work vital to ongoing sustainability efforts, and many of them call for Masters at a minimum, with PHD preferred.

Pollution Prevention Institute, looking for a leader, with a Master’s degree.

Yes, we need the training and education.  Please don’t misunderstand me.  I believe it’s more about the education to collaborate, communicate and be ready to flex with new inputs, but must also include the knowledge to develop needed tracking and reflection on performance.  But I find myself in a situation where my street cred is not as useful as a classroom credential would be, and I wonder if this is wise.  We are making up so much of this as we go along that we need to maintain in prominence the people who have put in righteous efforts and…failed.  Or succeeded differently than they planned.  We need to keep the old blood in the mix, because it is hardy and understands there is no ready-to-go solution that will fix it all.  Our ego is present, but bolstered by the team, not subjugated to it.  We are innovators, yet our innovation comes with background inputs of reality and of imperative.  We need, above all, to be able to work and innovate across silos.  These things you don’t often get from masters programs. Sustainability and TBL need to be a mix of hands-to-work and visioning if we are to innovate and progress.

So, back to me.  Do I need to find a way to get the paper creds if I am to remain viable? I’ve always considered myself as someone who will always work.  I am not a counter of years until retirement and I am fairly certain I would shrivel up and die if I couldn’t continue to work with teams on valuable projects and ideas. But I need to re-assess my value and make sure it’s of use.  I need to then make sure my creds on paper illuminate that value so I can take part in the growing opportunities brought to us by climate change.  I then need to figure out how to parcel out the time and effort and money I need to get those creds on paper.

But first, I need to convince myself it is worthy of doing and that it is worthy of doing even if it stops me from doing the actual work that I see needs to be done today and every day on climate change and green buildings.

Caught between a rock and a hard place…

Jodi; trying to be greener.