Young Women Who Are Doing Well with Changes Affecting Their Work: Helping and Hindering Factors

The world is on a path toward unsustainability which affects all living beings. As career development practitioners, we have a responsibility to be capable of helping clients consider and integrate a holistic concept of sustainability into their career decision-making when they call upon us for such assistance. The environment may be the highest priority concern but it is also time to go beyond just “green careers” to think about sustainability in the broad sense. This article analyzes the current state of green careers, proposes a model for clients to assess sustainability-enhancing career options, examines related growth opportunities, and calls on career development practitioners to be part of the sustainability solution in bringing these considerations to the forefront. “The world we have created is structurally and chronically, but not incurably, unsustainable.” Laszlo (2009) The concept of sustainability is on the minds of many people these days, and so it should be given the predicament of unsustainability the world is in. As career development practitioners, we are more likely than ever before to encounter clients who include sustainability in their set of work values so it is important we are equipped to offer them a means to evaluate the degree to which any given career option contributes to, or detracts from, a future that is sustainable. The recent focus on growth areas in “green” career options is a positive development but only one part of a larger solution. We should also help clients to realize there are many possible ways they can have a direct or indirect effect on sustainability through their work. To that end, this article will present a model for assessing the sustainability potential of any career option, how it applies to the existing slate of “green” careers, and how to broaden the notion of sustainability-enhancing career options to include but also go beyond those primarily focused on the environment. But first we need to understand what “sustainability”—perhaps the buzzword of this decade—means. The best context to understand sustainability is to appreciate the main ways in which the world has become unsustainable. When something is said to be unsustainable, it means it cannot continue without change. There is no single reason or root cause but rather a set of inter-related circumstances and events that have brought the world to its present unsustainable state. Laszlo (2009), Flannery (2006, 2009), and numerous other reports including a major IUCN paper (Adams, 2006) highlight many facts along our current path toward unsustainability, but a summary of the most salient points follows. The three types of unsustainability described below are reflected in the pillars of sustainability which form part of the career sustainability assessment model. Unsustainability in The Environment Our environment is currently unsustainable in so much as, according to Flannery (2009), we are already exceeding the earth’s capacity to support our species by 25%. Water, essential to all life, is polluted and misused, even as our reserves of fresh water are decreasing. The total amount of productive land, cropland, is being lost each year even while at the same time there is increasing exploitation of natural areas such as forests and wetlands. Air, like water, is increasingly polluted; its oxygen content decreasing, while other gases such as CO2 are increasing. In just 200 years of industrialization, the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen by 30% (Flannery, 2009). In addition, up to 30% of all animal species are under threat of extinction during this century (Flannery, 2006). The Canadian Journal of Career Development/Revue canadienne de développement de carrière Volume 13, Number 2, 2014 The Canadian Journal of Career Development/Revue canadienne de développement de carrière Volume 13 Number 2, 2014 Consider that all life is inter-related and this fact alone gives reason to pause. In terms of global warming and climate change, there remains ongoing debate as to why these environmental changes are occurring but according to the IPCC (2007), there is a 90% degree of certainty that there is human cause to climate change. Whatever the cause, that it is actually happening is almost indisputable. Unsustainability in The Economy As we saw in 2008, and continue to see today, the world has an inherently unstable financial system. Some countries may be more secure than others but in a world which is highly connected in every way, our global reality is that no economy exists in isolation. All finance is linked, whether it be that of individuals, corporations, banks or governments. So as debt of all types increases, bailouts and reorganizations continue in various forms but it seems like putting shims under a house that is not built on a firm foundation—the next big storm may wash it away. Consumption of all types continues to grow, as does the massive world population which requires them. This leads to overexploitation of resources. All resources cost money to acquire, process, distribute and sell but the uncertainty of those resources coupled with the rising demand creates a volatility which is yet another input into an unpredictable global economy. Unsustainability in Society The rich-poor gap continues to grow. In Canada, 1% of the population earn 10.6% of Canadians’ total income (Grant, 2013). Eighty percent of the world’s domestic product belongs to one billion people; the remaining 20% is shared by almost 6 billion (Laszlo, 2009). Particularly in the western world, there is a breakdown of social structures. Job security, and family security, are largely things of the past. In an unnatural twist on evolution, the twentieth century brought “survival of the fittest” and “greed is good” and individualism took rise over social responsibility in many parts of the world. Among both groups and individuals, we see various and increasing manifestations of aggression, competition and desperation in both rich and poor countries (Laszlo, 2009). Defining Sustainability Flannery (2009) suggests that we may be moving beyond the tipping point, sooner rather than later, when the emphasis will irrevocably cease from being about stopping or reversing and become about merely mitigating and extending life on earth: “There is now a better than even risk that, despite our best efforts, in the coming two or three decades Earth’s climate system will pass the point of no return. This is most emphatically not a counsel of despair; it is simply a statement of my assessment of probability.” If this state in which the world finds itself today, is unsustainability, then what does sustainability look like? We need some grasp of this if we are to assist clients who value sustainability with integrating it as a consideration in their career decision-making. Dictionaries define sustainability as variations of the capacity to endure, to continue, and to perpetuate. As it applies to the human element, Flannery (2009) sees sustainability as a derivation of the eighth commandment—do not steal. Sustainability, he says, comes down to not taking from future generations what we need for ourselves today. Bur perhaps the best known and most widely quoted definition of sustainability as it applies to our progress on this planet comes from the United Nations General Assembly (1987): “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” While no single definition of sustainability is universally accepted, there are clearly multiple elements to it and many would identify 3 critical supporting pillars: environmental (all living and not living things which occur naturally on earth), social (societies, cultures, communities, people, and the relationships among them), and economic (the production, distribution, and use of income, wealth, commodities and resources). These pillars can be envisioned as overlapping circles As depicted by Adams (2006), when there is balance among the three pillars, as in the very middle of the overlapping circles, sustainability is that point where the needs of all three are Beyond Green Jobs