Seniors, Spring Break has come and gone. For those of us who haven’t figured out where we’re going, our postgraduate futures are upon us jobs, grad school, freedom, uncertainty.

Part of the appeal of environment-related majors is they always have a foothold in very serious issues that must be addressed clean water, clean air, healthy ecosystems. Students choose these majors because they want to do good when they graduate.

The question is whether we have the tools at our disposal to make the biggest effect possible. For any project to be carried out successfully it needs to be financially sustainable. Let’s talk about making environmental work an economic engine.

Business savvy will come in handy regardless of whether graduates go on to work in the public, private, academic or nonprofit sectors. City governments need restoration projects to translate into tax revenue. Activism is marketing for a cause instead of a product. Research needs to be funded somehow. In all of these cases, money is a tool for getting what you want.

In many cases, environmentally minded efforts are good business. Industrial ecology discusses approaching manufacturing without waste streams. Everything is to be used and re-used for maximum efficiency. Phytoremediating soil is frequently less expensive than excavating and disposing of it. Using less energy intensive practices for industrial or commercial processes means lowering energy costs.

Although we’ve been told communication is important for scientists and engineers, that is only part of it. We need to explain technical matters not only to illustrate the concept at hand, but also in terms of economic effects. Projects don’t get completed unless there is a demand for it, and scientists and engineers don’t always understand market demands.

All of the career services help I’ve encountered is about how to get into graduate school or how to get someone else to hire you. I want to talk about products or services that serve the environment and how to build a business model around that.

My brain is working on how to make manufacturing tools appropriate for small-scale farming a viable business. Commercial equipment is built for farms that have thousands of acres, not dozens. They’re too big and too expensive small farmers spend a lot of time and energy making tools themselves when they would rather be farming. How do you make tools from available materials that have lower energy costs? How do you make that a business that can perpetuate itself?

Although there are business courses included in some curriculums at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, they are usually very specific to a major and not taken widely by students outside that department. Taking business classes at Syracuse University requires a lot of legwork for ESF students who may not get approved. Classes in entrepreneurship, marketing and grant-writing would certainly get the attention of students thinking about life after college.

There’s plenty of interdisciplinary collaboration at ESF, but I don’t know how often we collaborate with business majors. Projects would be more robust with an economics perspective added into the mix.

There is so much to learn about the world. You can’t learn it all in four years.

Leanna Mulvihill is a senior forest engineering major and environmental writing and rhetoric minor. Her column appears every Tuesday. She can be reached at lpmulvih@syr.edu or followed on Twitter at @LeannaMulvihill. 

Published on March 26, 2012 at 12:00 pm