By Duncan Kinney | Portrait by Dale MacMillian
The event that pushed Mike Hudema down the path to being an environmental campaigner wasn’t reading Silent Spring or watching the Exxon Valdez oil spill on TV, it was visiting the state of Kerala in India.
“One of the first triggers for me was seeing people really fundamentally involved in building the society that they wanted and being involved in making those community decisions and I felt that here, in Canada, that people seem very divorced from that.”
We caught up with the Greenpeace activist as he gets set to tour around Alberta, touting the possibilities of green jobs.
It’s easy enough to yell “Stop the Tarsands” at the top of your lungs. It’s another thing entirely to give the people feeding and housing their families a viable alternative. Here’s the conversation we had on the subject.
Why the focus on green jobs? And what’s the connection between a green job and meaningful work?
You already see countries like Germany which employ 90,000 people in their solar industry. By 2020 it will employ over 250,000 people. And Germany is not a country that is very sunny compared to Alberta, the sunniest province in the entire country.
We need to get back to a place where our jobs mean something to us again. They’re more than just where we go to get a paycheque and we go into the office and watch the clock until we’re done. In moving to a green economy I think we are talking about returning a lot of the meaning to the workforce. By participating in a green job, you are contributing to making our planet safer, to making our communities healthier, making our environment more sustainable.”
Your organization did a study on green jobs. What did it find?
We found three main areas to focus on.
What we found was that just by addressing energy efficiency we could create anywhere from 10,000 to 22,000 jobs in Alberta. Immediately putting people to work retrofitting our homes and our buildings, reducing the amount of energy that we use quite considerably and putting money back in the hands of Albertans.
The other one we looked at was sustainable transportation. What we could do as far as improving mass transit services and potentially the construction of a high-speed rail link between Edmonton and Calgary. Again we found significant job growth could be created, anywhere between 50,000 to 86,000 direct jobs just in the sustainable transportation sector alone.
The third thing we looked at was accelerating renewable energy development in the province. What we found is that if we actually contributed and built a solar industry or built a wind industry within the province and set up a manufacturing base, the numbers were quite astounding. On the high end, as many as 200,000 jobs could potentially be created. There are tremendous job benefits in moving to a green economy, tremendous ecological benefits and it strengthens and diversifies our economy.
Why are you focusing on the issue of green jobs?
When you’re looking at what the jobs of the future are going to be, they are going to be green jobs and the people who are at the cutting edge of that are going to be the people who will benefit the most.
The future needs to be a green economy. We’re looking at a looming climate crisis, a looking water crisis, a looming food crisis and an economic crisis that we’re still trying to get out of and the answers to all of these is moving to a green economy because you’re addressing all of those categories
What green jobs are out there right now?
Many of the jobs we’re talking about are similar to the jobs we have now. Machinists, pipefitters, welders – all those jobs are green jobs if they’re put towards the right purpose. If you’re building a wind turbine instead of a pipeline, you’re putting the exact same skill set to use but building something that is more sustainable and healthier for our communities.
Beyond that there are solar engineers and technicians; there are people who need to do the installing, people to do the energy retrofits and the installation work. When we’re talking about sustainable transportation, we’re talking about engineers and drivers and train conductors and it really starts to become an endless thing.
Where are these green jobs coming from? Are they coming from entrepreneurs or established companies?
They’re coming from a variety of different sources. There are a lot of entrepreneurs that have blazed a path.
Now you’re seeing more mainstream businesses and industries pick it up and really see the energy and cost savings are a substantial way to increase their bottom line by going green.
Category: Work
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There’s another interview on the topic of sustainable enterprise creation in the context of Swords to Pllowshares which may be of interest. P-CED founder Terry Hallman goes on to describe his earlier work on inclusive capitalism.
http://www.iccrimea.org/scholarly/economicdev.html
This leads to his sessions at the Economics for Ecology conference in Sumy
http://www.p-ced.com/1/projects/ukraine/sumy/
[...] pages before this one, or click this link to read Unlimited Magazines interview with Mike Hudema: http://www.unlimitedmagazine.com/2010/05/swords-into-ploughshares-2-0/ . Okay, so green jobs, done! We know we will not be left jobless, we know that there will be less [...]