"WHAT DON'T YOU LIKE about them?" Rachel Gutter, the U.S. Green Building Council's Schools Sector manager, asks a group of students at Alexandria's new T.C. Williams High School about one of the school's eco-friendly, water-saving features.

She's referring to the waterless urinals in the men's bathrooms, and the kids insist they're stinky. "I'll talk to the architects — they aren't supposed to smell," Gutter says.

Bathrooms are a big part of Gutter's job. She also just checked in with the kindergartners at Germantown's Great Seneca Creek Elementary to see how they like their dual-flush toilets. (They love them, especially the labels that explain, in detail, which button to push based on what's in the bowl.) She's collecting their thoughts to help the USGBC, the nonprofit that created the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) system, build a model of a green school that will tour the country.

Across town, Marty Kearns and his five co-workers at Green Media Toolshed are helping eco-friendly companies interact with journalists, providing consulting services and training for young organizations. These two companies couldn't be more different, but they have something in common. That fashionable, ubiquitous, let's-hope-it's-more-than-a-buzzword, green. Suddenly, having a green job doesn't have to mean donning hip waders and sampling stream beds for pesticides, though it can.

"Green jobs," the umbrella term encompassing solar-panel installers, environmental engineers, lobbyists and horticulturists, seem to be everywhere. Nonprofits and research groups estimate millions of jobs will be created by 2020. The industry was worth $265 billion in 2005 and is growing, says Kevin Doyle of eco-consulting firm Green Economy.

It's funny how these things start, how these seeds, if you will, get planted. A newspaper article about polar bears sparks outrage, or maybe pollution hits closer to home in the form of the Chesapeake. Or maybe the perfect job happens to combine two passions. Gutter, 26, has been with USGBC for almost a year. She started her career as a teacher, then worked for a year at a green architecture firm.

In 2006, she attended USGBC's Greenbuild conference and learned the organization would soon create a separate LEED certification for schools. (Previously, schools could be certified under the council's "New Construction" standards.) "I remember calling my mom, saying, ‘I figured out what I want to do,'" says Gutter. She learned she'd need experience working in a school that was already LEED-approved, "so, I called the Montgomery County school district and said, ‘How would you like a free intern?' [They said], ‘You can start in three days.'"

In green industries, much of the territory is still largely uncharted. While there's lots of work in traditional fields (like fundraising for the World Wildlife Fund or stuffing envelopes for the Arbor Day Foundation), someone with a yen for, say, wind-turbine manufacturing or eco-friendly dry cleaning may experience challenges.
Take Phil Ugel, 37, a fashion designer and owner of British Columbia's Blue Sky Design Company. He works with firms that produce his casual women's clothing line, which he sells wholesale. But "most manufacturers look at you like you've asked them to manufacture something on Mars" if you ask about organic fabric or non-toxic dyes, he says. He admits attitudes are changing, though, and he's in talks with organic cotton makers.

Other carbon-cutting industries that are gaining critical mass: green roofing, or planting living vegetation on rooftops to cool buildings and slow water runoff; sustainability coordination, a relatively new industry gaining traction in schools and universities; and solar panel installation. Vanessa Deutschmann of Chesapeake Solar says solar companies traditionally educated workers on the job. Only recently have programs sprouted to train potential solar workers. Still, "the market is always changing," she says, "There's job security and opportunity for growth, but somebody who just wants to come in, do A, B, C, D and leave at 5 p.m." would probably not thrive in a green career.

Green roofer/horticulturist Sarah Murphy, 24, agrees that market forces are shifting. Three years ago, when she worked at Baltimore green roofing company Emory Knoll Farms, "the owner was growing more plants than he could sell. ... We basically were overstocked most of the time."

Now Murphy owns a green roofing firm, Canopy, and works at D.C. Greenworks, a nonprofit that trains at-risk youth in horticulture. "It's growing tremendously," she says of her industry. "Developers are not thinking twice about getting green roofs."
Critics of the green jobs movement point out that the growth of these new industries may speed slowdowns in older areas; arguing that, for example, creating positions in wind energy will lead to pink slips for coal plant employees. But a 2004 University of California Berkeley study found that, even allowing for a loss of 150,000 jobs in coal, oil and natural gas, the economy will gain more than a million jobs in renewable energy industries by 2020. And Deutschmann says skilled workers in a dirty industry can often transfer into cleaner careers. "These are folks that are smart, that have really good skills," she says.

And if you don't have the skills to pay the bills, hit the books. Annaliesa Guilford, graduate enrollment specialist for environmental science at George Mason, says many students in the environmental program are engineers, but schoolteachers, political scientists and others lacking a degree in environmental science are signing up in droves, too. Or, for an even faster ticket to green, certificates in environmental science, public policy and even sustainable landscape design are available at local universities.

Back at T.C., Gutter is explaining that average green schools save 40,000 gallons of water per year through low-flow faucets and, yes, waterless urinals. Because T.C. is much bigger than the average school, its water conservation is closer to 500,000 gallons yearly. But when she asks, "What about the flush; do you miss it?" the students respond with a unanimous "yes."

Even in the brave new green world, some things never change.

Written by Rachel Kaufman
Photos by Chris Combs/Express and Abby Greenawalt for Express

Posted by Express at 12:00 AM on April 16, 2008
Tagged in Going Green , Lifestyles , Maryland , The District , Top Stories , Virginia