Environment Careers

If you’re still undecided on a career path, you might be toying with the idea of going into medicine, or trying your hand at law, or following in your father’s footsteps and starting up a traveling, one-man performing art show (it’s possible he wasn’t the ideal role model).

There are a plethora of options available to you. However, none of those options will exist if...we don't. And if the health of our environment continues on its current downward spiral…we won’t.

You might still run into the occasional climate change denier, but chances are that guy also feels pretty strongly that two plus five is eight. Those fellas are not usually the biggest believers in things like “science,” “facts,” or “evidence.” So yeah…we’ve been pumping coal dust and other fun chemicals into the air for centuries now, and it’s taking its toll on Mother Earth. All she wanted to do was kick back her feet and relax for a spell, poor thing.

If you’ve got a cape, can fly, and have X-ray vision, you have a decent chance of saving the world (if you can pull yourself away from the women’s locker room, ya perv). If you have none of those things, however, your best shot at saving the world might be to have a hand in rescuing our environment, while there still is one.

The breadth of opportunities in this field is awfully…breadth-y. You’ve got your environmental engineers, who are coming up with ways to improve stuff like methods of waste disposal and air pollution control…meteorologists, who are studying atmospheric conditions—and our effect on them—to help us understand better how to…take care of the homestead…and a whole slew of biochemists, biophysicists, geoscientists, hydrologists—you name it. All of them have a common goal though: to protect and preserve the planet we all share. (Earth, in case you weren’t paying attention.)

Because the job of saving the world is such a big deal, and because these career paths require a bit of smarts, the pay for most positions is commensurate with their importance. The average environmental scientist gets around $65k in annual salary, but there’s certainly room to make much, much more than that. Figure out a way to make the polar icecaps start…unmalting…and you could be a very rich guy or gal.

Because…let’s be honest. If your whole life is about being green…you should be able to pocket a ton of it.

Now go hug a tree. Just make sure it’s “into it” first.

Careers In This Field