Green Jobs : Featured Stories

Working in a garden center, Audrey Matson noticed something: customers were bypassing the ornamental trees and shrubs and going for vegetable-garden, canning, and composting supplies. A combination of recession, environmental awareness, fears about food safety, and desire to learn hallowed hands-on homemaking skills was creating a generation of  neo-agriculturalists--most of whom were savvy young urbanites. So despite the economic downturn, the time was right for a farm store in the city--one that specializes in out-of-the-way and hard-to-find supplies.

Our Resident Tourist takes a tour of a boxcar-shaped building on the Minneapolis riverfront where, even in winter, scientists use inflowing water from the Mississippi to model all kinds of interactions between land and water. Scientific esoterica? Not really. The scientists at the Saint Anthony Falls Laboratory want to help Louisiana rebuild its delta. They want to understand the algae blooms that create fish-killing "dead zones" in the Gulf of Mexico. And with new federal support, they're turning their expertise toward the study of wind power, biofuels, and "hydrokinetics"--nothing less than the discovery of "new ways to power our civilization."

While many of us do our best to retrofit our houses to be more sustainable--adding insulation, putting in low-flow toilets, installing a solar panel on the roof--some Twin Cities architects and designers are going all-the-way green with rehabs and new house designs that are radically--and even experimentally--devoted to environmental responsibility. Two of the most prominent locally are the EcoDEEP Haus in Saint Paul, an environmentally concerned architect's refitting of his own house, and the University of Minnesota's ICON Solar House, the result of the input of some 150 design students. And these sensible, responsible houses also happen to be way cool to look at and live in.

There's a whole lot of clucking going on in the urban neighborhoods of Minneapolis and Saint Paul as heartland city-dwellers recover their rural roots by welcoming chickens into their lives. It's part of a growing national trend that's part nostalgia, part fascination with the birds themselves--they turn out to be oddly charming--and part hardy self-sufficiency. And you should taste the eggs.

If you live in one of the cities and towns Eureka Recycling serves, chances are you've seen its big green trucks lumbering along, picking up waste. But if you think Eureka is just another green-bottles here, brown-bottles there outfit, you're in for a surprise. It's one of only a handful of nonprofit recyclers in the country, and its vision goes way beyond recycling to a world that doesn't produce waste in the first place. To that end, it collaborates with artists and restaurateurs, encourages manufacturers to think zero-waste, and in many other ways acts as if the green future has already arrived.

The Twin Cities' newest bike cafe, Angry Catfish Bicycles and Coffee, joins two predecessors, One on One Bicycle Studio and Cars R Coffins Coffee Bar/Cykel Garage in catering to the caffeination needs, and gear lust, of serious bike riders. These coffee house/bike shop/art gallery hybrids are celebrations of two-wheel culture in a town that's getting prouder and prouder of it.

Sure, bikes are big in the Twin Cities--but the people who ride one-wheelers here may be even more intense, if that's possible. In fact, our towns are a world center of unicycling; all twelve of the unicyclists rated highest for riding skills--the black belts of the sport--have belonged at one time or another to the Twin Cities Unicycling Club. And just in case you think it's all about trick riding in parades or at the circus, meet the folks who ride fat-wheeled 36-inch unicycles to work--in winter.

Can you really ditch your ride and live carless in the Cities? A youth worker and a cartoonist who have been without everyday internal combustion for years say yes--as long as you're willing to do a little planning and take advantage of all the transit options in town. Pluses include: closeness to nature, awareness of others, improved relationships--and a body that tells people you don't spend half your life in a driver's seat.

There's a lot of excitement about "green jobs" and their potential to put America back to work. But defining what a green job actually is can be difficult, say some clued-in researchers in the state Department of Employment and Economic Development whose efforts have helped put Minnesota is in the forefront of the infant science of green-labor-market studies. A few real-world trends: there are many shades of green in the job market, the total number of certifiably green jobs in the state isn't large yet, and yet the potential for green-job growth is real.

There's a pair of European-born marketers who, from a table in a literary coffee shop in Minneapolis, turn the earth itself into an ad platform. Dutchman Maikel van de Mortel and Icelander Bjorgvin Saevarsson stamp logos into snowbanks, draw slogans in dirt and dust, and plant flower gardens that spell out client identities. The Internet loves it, and so do the duo's mostly European and coastal-US clients. Is this the earthy new face of advertising?

David Byrne has seen a lot of the world as a touring mega-rocker--much of it from from the seat of a bicycle. Last Thursday he joined three notable Twin Cities bike advocates--Mayor R. T. Rybak, author and journalist Jay Walljasper, and walkability/bikeability expert Steve Clark--at the Uptown Theater for a celebration/exploration that looked at the future of urban pedal culture in the Twin Cities and the world. Hint: it's about a lot more than bike lanes.

Our techno-skeptical writer (and master gardener) Meleah Maynard showed up at a gathering of Twitter- and Facebook-friendly farmers and garden folk--last month's Social Media Breakfast at the State Fairgrounds. The scene was a little strange (half the audience was tweeting or texting during the presentations) but Meleah found herself warming up to the new ways Minnesotans are using the social web to get the word out about healthy food.

Dan Noyes was a veteran teacher of architecture and design who wanted to create something new: a small, hyper-hands-on school of "ecological architecture" where the goal wouldn't be simply to turn out well-trained designers, but to nurture visionary poets of space-making whose work would foster a connection with the earth. When Noyes discovered that a century-old telephone exchange building in Northeast Minneapolis needed a basement tenant, one of the nation's smallest--and most innovative--graduate schools was born.