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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.