Most people working in environmental & renewable energy jobs probably haven’t given the term much thought, but now that the White House has ‘a green jobs czar’ , following on the Green Jobs Act of 2007, this got me wondering what qualifies as a green job. Based on a quick search through the archives of Google News it looks like discussions of ‘green jobs’ dates to at least the late 1980’s. It wasn’t until sometime around late 2006 – however, that the term really exploded into the mainstream. Now, three years later, people have been bombarded with proposals for ‘greening’ the economy, your job or pretty much anything you can think of. With all the proposals on the table for the expansion of green jobs I bet a lot of so-called green professionals have wondered if that includes them. The answer is: it depends.
From review of archived articles discussing the the promises of a green economy, in the early 1990’s ‘green job’ was a catch-all for any job in an environmental or sustainable development field – including conservation, renewable energy or the environmental sciences. Sometime in the late 1990s this definition seemed to narrow a bit. No longer was it enough just to work towards ensuring a clean environment, through such hum-drum activities as maintaining compliance with 1970s era legislation like the Clean Water Act or National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) & California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). This would likely exclude fields such as forestry, hydrology, land remediation & other environmental science-type fields that take place in government or through consultancies.Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/2645894
