NEW NATURE-SMART CAREERS: 11 for the Future and for Right Now
Want to make a decent living and a better life? Here’s one way. Get a job – a nature-smart job. Or better yet, be a nature-smart entrepreneur. By that, I don’t mean a career devoted only to energy efficiency. That’s important, but there’s a whole new category of green jobs coming. These careers and avocations will help children and adults become happier, healthier and smarter, by truly greening where people live, work, learn and play.
Here are some exciting careers that you – and your kids – may never have considered:
• Nature-smart workplace architect or designer. Studies of workplaces that have been created or retrofitted through biophilic (love of nature) design show improved product quality, customer satisfaction and innovation. Successful models include the Herman Miller headquarters building, designed for abundant natural light, indoor plants, and outdoor views, including views of a restored wetlands and prairie on company grounds. After moving into the building, 75 percent of day-shift office workers said they considered the building healthier and 38 percent said their job satisfaction had improved.
• Nature-smart residential builder. They’ll specialize in window-appeal (the view of nature from inside the home) — not just curb appeal. They’ll know how to place a new house in sync with the sun’s movements, use local materials to reflect the nature and history of the region, install a super-insulated green roof that can last 80 years, design for natural air-conditioning, and weave nature in homes and offices in even the most crowded urban neighborhoods.
• Nature-smart yard and garden specialist, who will help homeowners and businesses reduce traditional lawns, and replace them with bird-attracting native vegetation, butterfly gardens, chlorine-free natural swimming ponds, organic vegetable gardens, beehives, places to raise chickens and ducks and gather eggs. As local governments continue to loosen regulations on yard farming, and as nearby production of food becomes more important, this specialty will become more popular.
• Urban wildscaper. Urban designers, landscape architects, and other professionals who develop or redevelop neighborhoods that connect people to nature through the creation of biophilically-designed buildings and preservation of natural land will be increasingly in demand. They will design and establish biodiverse parks, urban forests and community gardens, wildlife corridors and other wild lands. Seattle recently announced plans for a massive urban forest that will produce free food. Wildscapers will also manage wildlife populations.
• Outside-In decorator, who will bring the outside in, creating or improving our homes to nurture health and well-being through nature: “living walls” of vegetation that purify air; indoor vertical vegetable gardens with automatic drip-irrigation systems; biophilic decorations such as twig furniture; fluorescent lights that adjust throughout the day via light sensors at the windows; bird-warning elements for windows; indoor water gardens and other living features. So will individual homeowners decorating their own homes. This goes way beyond Feng Shui.
• New Agrarian. Who’s that? Urban farmers who design and operate community gardens. Designers and operators of vertical farms in high-rise buildings. Organic farmers and innovative vanguard ranchers who use sophisticated organic practices to produce food. The focus is on local, family-scale sustainable food, fiber, and fuel production in, near, and beyond cities.
• Health care provider who prescribes nature. Ecopsychologists, wilderness therapy professionals, are going mainstream. Some pediatricians are now prescribing or recommending “green exercise” in parks and other natural settings to their young patients and their families. Hospitals, mental health centers, and nursing home are creating healing gardens. The Portland, Oregon parks department partners with physicians who send families to local parks, where park rangers serve as health para-profesionals. In the U.K., a growing “green care” movement encourages therapeutic horticulture, ecotherapy, and green care farming.
• Green exercise trainer. Exercising indoors and outdoors seems to produce different results. Even when the same number of calories are burned. Outside exercise appears to have better results, especially for psychological well-being. Green exercise trainers can help individuals and families individually or by organizing “green gyms” and family nature clubs. “People walkers” can help the elderly take a hike.
• Natural teacher. As parents and educators learn more about the brain-stimulating power of learning in natural settings, demand will increase for nature-based schools and nature-based experiential learning, providing new opportunities for natural teachers and natural playscape and school garden designers. Librarians can be natural teachers, too, creating bioregional “naturebraries.”
• Bioregional guide. We’ll see the emergence of the citizen naturalist who, as professionals or volunteers, help people get to know where they live. One organization, Exploring a Sense of Place in the San Francisco Bay Area, guides groups that want to have a deeper understanding of the life surrounding them. Think of these guides as nature-smart Welcome Wagons who help us develop a deeper sense of personal and local identity.
The list of possible careers can go on. Stream restorers, law-enforcement officials who use nature for crime prevention and improved prison recidivism, specialists in nature-based geriatric services. Once the entrepreneurial spirit kicks in, it’s easy to start thinking of products and services. And when people begin to consider the career possibilities of human restoration through nature, their eyes light up: here is a positive, hopeful view of the human relationship with the Earth, a way to make a living and a life.
Richard Louv is chairman emeritus of The Children and Nature Network and the author of “THE NATURE PRINCIPLE: Reconnecting with Life in a Virtual Age,” from which this piece is adapted, and “LAST CHILD IN THE WOODS: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder.” On April 16, he gave the keynote address at the first White House Summit on Environmental Education.
Related: It’s Time to Redefine Green Jobs
Outside-In decorator sounds fun!
Hi Richard — I appreciate all the various angles from which you’re coming at our challenge. This post reminds me that, even those of us who don’t call ourselves something green-sounding can make a difference by being teachers — academically, perhaps through our writing, or even informally, by introducing others to the wonder of Nature.
I started a native prairie plant garden coaching business! And always talk up the benefits to kids (and adults).
I became and remained until recently an ecological garden/landscape designer and I got into this line of work after I earned my master’s in ecological agriculture. I’m leaving the field because I am unable to survive economically, let alone thrive while swamped by the effort to simultaneously educate clients while serving them with the services they ostensibly came to me for. I can’t claim to be self-taught as a designer; my teacher was and continues to be nature, the best instructor I could have ever wanted. Before striking out on my own entrepreneurially, what I mostly learned by unintentional example from human designers I initially worked under (or worked after by addressing design mistakes after the fact) was how NOT to do things.
The core principle of sound garden and landscape design is to meet the needs of the plants first and foremost. All other desirable objectives fall into place with less time, money, effort, and ongoing long-term maintenance than people invest – often begrudgingly, if not resentfully – into their conventional gardens and landscapes. The frustration and struggle for desired results can for the most part be avoided. What can’t be avoided is the culturally conditioned human desire to impose our will and wants on the plants, by which we manage to get in our own way and work at cross purposes against ourselves unintentionally. Our ambivalence towards, disconnection from, and fear of nature manifest overtly as efforts to control aspects of nature and by extension, nature herself. The last laugh is on us however since all attempts to impose control will be trumped by the global warming wildcard, which is manifesting as weather pattern disruption and increased weather extremes on the micro scale observable on the ground. On a larger scale, we’re just starting to observe and track how plant and animal species respond en masse but what we lack is the ability to measure the subtle qualitative shifts in relationships between species within ecosystems. An informed systems perspective doesn’t focus on individuals or even individual species but the RELATIONSHIPS between individuals, between groups of individuals, between groups of groups, and so on.
The most difficult aspect to teach and demonstrate about high quality nature-smart garden/landscape design that simultaneously meets the needs of plants and people is that it’s largely invisible unless one makes a concerted and conscious effort to discern patterns and principles. Nature speaks in patterns, cycles, and rhythms and we have allowed ourselves to become deaf and dumb to her language. Subjectively, people who experience good garden/landscape design can say that it looks and feels good but are hard pressed to say why. Prospective and actual clients of nature-smart designers can’t and don’t value what they do not see, appreciate, or understand.
When I said that client frustration and struggle for desired garden and landscape results can be avoided, it’s predicated upon the sophistication of a client and his or her self-edification, otherwise it’s an uphill battle slogging knee deep through molasses to overcome the absence of literally decades of environmental literacy which American culture doesn’t inherently foster or cultivate. For the most part, clients care only about getting their garden problems solved or their irritations soothed as quickly as possible for as little money as possible. I have both observed and experienced that the “how” didn’t really matter to them although the HOW makes all the difference in the end results that clients narrowly focus upon. The HOW is the heart of the process of the manifestation of nature-smart design from concept to experiential reality and the practical application of nature-smart principles towards real world problem solving.
Until environmental literacy becomes an epidemic and more natural to us than the immersion into the technological bath that Millennials have become accustomed to, self-employed eco-entrepreneurs and nature-smart designers looking for companies to work for are going to have a hard time finding niches that sustain them professionally and financially.
Love this article, Richard. I was drawn to the topic of this blog because my son is entering college in September with concentration in Environmental Science/Conservation Biology. I do really hope that these avenues open up as you say. Because, as of right now, seems very tough to get jobs in this sector. But we are going in the right direction and I am hopeful that there will be lots of new emerging, green jobs in the near future.
And, of course, I am part of this sector myself. As a Feng Shui and Bau Biologie consultant, I am an “Outside/In Consultant”. My focus is to create indoor environments that help people connect more deeply to the natural world.
So thanks for this, Richard. I will re-post on all my social media sites!
This is a very interesting article, as I am about to retire from my flower shop, and will need another lower impact career. Growing organic flowers & veggies in my new backyard is an option, and teaching folks to be locavores is a hopeful wish for me. I will be happy not to be importing chemical laden boxes of blooms from all over the world as I am now, tho now I do use local flowers as often as possible, but long winters in Maine make it difficult. I am hopeful for the next stage.
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A sprinkle of nature oriented subjects is a must for every careers of tomorrow. I see nature smart teaching as a must if we are to survive the hardship of hotter summer and colder winters, harsher lives and diseased bodies. After all a time will come when we will cherish who we are and not be bothered by what is gonna happen and the happenings beyond one’s control.
I have youths asking me for such careers, where they will love to work, lost in their own world of happiness. After all, are we not at our best when we are happy, why should our productivity be compressed?
I have met Richard Louv at Foothill College when he was first starting out with the new notion that we should get back to Nature. I am very happy to see that he has more than survived and is developing more ways all the time to reach all ages and stages of people turning their interest to Nature and understanding the importance in our own lives and in our work.
I am working on the basic ways to teach Teachers and bringing the whole world together in understanding how deeply connected we are. We as human beings in the modern world, we have forced our square-thinking upon the Earth. Watch for my books on Natural Teaching Curriculum and you will find a whole new understanding of the Earth and how we can find ways to be much more understanding and supportive of Mother Nature.
Thank you, Richard for forging the pathway and bringing many to follow you.
[...] a huge, hopeful challenge for future urban planners, architects and policy makers — and other careers, for which we do not yet have names, that connect people to the natural [...]