Scattered Thoughts on the Corporatization of Environmental Education
Two lives after the Yale School of the Environment
I don’t go on LinkedIn much. It’s just not my vibe. But it is the vibe of a lot of graduates of the Yale School of the Environment (YSE), an institution that was founded by Gifford Pinchot alongside the US Forest Service in order to train young foresters in the skills needed to manage large tracts of land in the American West.
It’s no surprise then that many graduates of YSE today go on to work in the civil service, and thus it is no surprise that many have been laid off over the past month. Having not been on LinkedIn in a while, when I logged back on the other day, the site showed me a few of the top posts from friends over the past while. The first post I saw was from a good friend who graduated top of her class at Yale and earned a Presidential Management Fellowship:
On Feb. 13th, I was terminated from my position at the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), along with thousands of bright, passionate, and dedicated probationary employees in the federal government. My time in the federal civil service was cut short during a detail at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, where I had the honor of helping to carry out historic conservation policy actions that I will forever be proud of.
Like many of my friends and colleagues, I joined the federal government out of a desire and commitment to serve the American public and to help care for our lands, waters, and communities. At NRCS, I was a part of a team that helped better understand and improve the environmental benefits of healthy farming and ranching practices. This work helped agricultural producers feed a growing world, while supporting the environmental health, integrity, and sustainability of their lands. Simply, the mission of NRCS is to “help people help the land.”
NRCS was created following the environmental disaster of the Dust Bowl, where unsustainable farming practices resulted in dust storms that led to the death of 7,000 people and left 2 million homeless. It undertakes the quiet work of helping to keep our lands, waters, and communities healthy through assisting farmers and ranchers to tend their land in ways that allow for the long-term health and productivity of our nation’s agricultural lands (nearly 50% of the US!). Many Americans don’t think about the ways in which farming practices might impact their and their communities’ health, nor should they have to. This is why the government exists: to safeguard against the issues that might and will beleaguer us without intervention.
I am deeply saddened to watch this work be undercut and undervalued, but I am buoyed by the passion and resilience of my fellow civil servants. I am confident I will be able to continue the work of protecting our country’s natural resources, and helping the communities they touch, but I am unspeakably sad I won’t be able to continue to do so as a civil servant working for the American public. I loved my time with USDA and the White House, both filled with the most dedicated, intelligent, and committed colleagues I’ve had the privilege to work with.
I am looking for roles in conservation/environmental policy and landscape-scale land management. If you know of anyone hiring, or just want to chat about the future of conservation in uncertain times, please reach out!
As I scrolled through, I saw one, two, and five more posts of a similar genre—young, talented friends who’d gone through some Pinchot-inspired path toward a stable managerial career supporting the American public. One of these friends noted that “this [rapid firing] affected new mothers on maternity leave, veterans, dual-fed families, and people young and old across the country who were dedicated to serving the public. It impacted employees who relied on employee housing and had to deal with losing their homes on top of losing their jobs and insurance.”
A bit further down, I stumbled across another post from a friend and alumni of YSE who’d over the years become a punchline for many of us for his shameless pursuit of private sector impact after leaving school.
Today, I’m excited to announce that Cambium has closed our $18.5m oversubscribed Series A led by VoLo Earth Ventures—this is a dream and we have so much more work to do 🚀 🌳!
We are helping the $788B wood industry advance through better technology and better sourcing. We now deliver Carbon Smart Wood™, salvaged material that is processed locally, to huge clients like Amazon, Gensler, Equinox, Steelcase, Room & Board, and countless others. The round includes new investors like Ulu Ventures, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Alumni Ventures, Dangerous Ventures, Tunitas Ventures, Groundswell Ventures®.
Big next steps for us:
Continue to invest in our product to build the best forestry supply chain AI software on the market
Hire exceptional talent across all of our teams and functions (Come join us!).
Expand our ability to source Carbon Smart Wood™ across the country and scale into the Mass Timber market.
Dramatically grow our impact by scaling regenerative, resilient, and local wood economies.
I am so grateful for our customers, team, and investors.
Some guy named Chris Wedding responded in the comments by saying:
Kudos on your work to disrupt the $788B wood industry and turn waste wood into valuable assets. 👏 Can't wait to learn more. If you'd like to tell your story on my podcast at EFI (Entrepreneurs for Impact), let me know. You could be guest #217. 👍
I began at Yale in 2017, and over the course of my time at YSE, I’ve seen the school change its name, handle racial justice meltdowns, deal with COVID, and navigate the whiplash of multiple Trump presidencies. But all the while, the major trend that has never ceased is the growing corporateization of the school. The strategy was always clear: take more money as fast as possible from the rich corporate sector before the poor eat the rich, put enough of it towards hiring some famous faculty of color so the students stop complaining about white supremacy, and transition toward accepting more Masters applicants that are younger and excited about the private sector. Over the long haul, the school will be a diverse corporate utopia.
When I started in 2017, I’d say about 10% of students were sort of “business and the environment” types. Today, it sometimes feels like 100%. One would think that I have some moral stake in this game, but I have to admit, I don’t. I’ve spent too many years shitting on this place.
The current goal of YSE is to train students for professional life after school, not to “save the environment” or even anything close. This general form of the American professional school is structured to take individuals who have already, in the Protestant moral sense, “found their calling” and provide them with the tools—network, access, cultural capital, terminology, technical skills—to translate that calling into “impact.”
And today in the United States we’re living in a period of unprecidented inequality and oligarchy. Schools like Yale follow power, not enlightenment or any particular moral code. It’s power and money—that’s it. And so, of course, “even the environmental school” would be gutted out by corporate America, who will hire more economists who will push to translate every given environmental or humanistic inquiry into fungible forms of money or carbon, which, at this point, are indistinguishable currencies.
On the one hand, I do not blame the administrations at schools like YSE for just following the incentives. But on the other hand, the chickens will eventually come home to roost. The melting point of the ice on the Greenland ice sheet isn’t “socially constructed," and it doesn’t care about your little Protestant “calling” or whether you believe you “made an impact” in this little life.
The incentive structure of the private sector is fundamentally at odds with the sustainable management of natural resources. Period. We can pretend this is not true—or even more pernicious, convince ourselves positively that the opposite is true—but at the end of the day, the purpose of the private sector is for progress, not sustainability. We do not need more things; we need to chill the fuck out.
This is not to say that the private sector is not valuable. Indeed, this form of human organization has accomplished a lot over the past 500 years. But the fact is that a prosperous society and a sustainable one are not the same thing, even if the majority of YSE graduates these days want to believe they are. Hey, we all believe a lot of stupid and wrong things!