A new generation makes a career out of saving the planet

When Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina in September 2024, Maggie Paradis, a North Carolina, native now living in New York City, followed the news with dismay.

“That was a disaster that really didn’t need to happen if it weren't for climate change,” says Paradis, a student majoring in environmental science with a concentration in sustainable urban agriculture at LaGuardia Community College. “Those sorts of places aren’t built with infrastructures to handle those sorts of storms. I have friends whose houses were swept down a river, and they lost everything.”

Paradis, who is 28 and married with a 2-year-old daughter, says she has been seeing these kinds of extreme weather events “pretty much my whole life.”

She’s not alone. Paradis is part of a generation that has grown up witnessing extreme weather events attributed to climate change, and many want to know what they can do about it. Colleges and universities are responding to their interest. From community colleges to Ivy League universities, higher education institutions are offering green degrees — associates, bachelor and graduate degrees in environmental and sustainability studies and related fields — and the number is expected to continue to increase as demand grows.

Julian Dautremont, program director of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE), has been tracking the growth and says there are more than 1,900 academic programs in environmental and sustainability studies across the U.S. Last fall the University of California San Diego implemented a first of its kind program — a required course to teach students how to understand climate change and to prepare them for its challenges in their lifetime.

”This generation understands that this (climate change) is going to be a problem that stretches through their lifetime, largely worsening over their entire lifetime, until and unless we manage collectively to reduce our emissions in line with the best available science and try to avoid those worst-case scenarios,” says Kim Cobb, director of the decade-old Institute at Brown for Environment and Society (IBES) and a professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. “They have everything at stake.”

Last winter, Brown University hosted its first Climate Careers Exploration Fair, where students met with job recruiters from the nonprofit, government and private sectors as well as with alumni working in sustainability and environmental industries. Jim Amspacher, assistant dean and director of Professional Pathways at the Brown Center for Career Exploration, says more than 300 students participated in the fair.

“Twenty years ago, we’d think of climate solutions as solar panels and EVs and federal policies,” Cobb says. “Now we think about it as law, as education, as communication and journalism. Yes technology, yes policies, but behavioral psychology and social sciences, economics, you name it, there is very critical work going on all across the world in each of these spaces and our job in higher education is to help our students map their paths, their interests and their purpose on these professional pathways.”

Ann Garth, graduated in 2020 from Brown University with a degree in Systems Change and Environmental Policy. She is a senior geothermal associate at the Clean Air Task Force, a nonprofit that supports the technology and policy changes needed to achieve affordable zero-emissions, high-energy practices development of superhot rock geothermal technology to advance the renewable energy transition.

Garth, who met a steady stream of students at the fair says, “There’s a lot of smart, motivated, extremely bright young people who are coming up and asking me, ‘How do I get this job?’ There is a huge interest in these sorts of careers from students because frankly, the climate crisis is still happening. There’s lots of continued examples of extreme weather that bring home to people that this is pretty important, we really want to be trying to fix this.”

Last year, a group of LaGuardia Community College environmental science students in New York City, including Paradis, put their academic interest into social action and launched Finca La Florecita (Little Flower Farm), featuring 21 raised garden beds.

Spearheaded by Dr. Preethi Radhakrishnan, professor and director of LaGuardia’s Environmental Science Program, the farm offers the students hands-on experience in sustainable agriculture. It also serves the community as the crops grown there – okra, cilantro, bok choy and hot peppers – reflect the students’ cultures, support the LaGuardia CARES food pantry, providing fresh produce and addressing food insecurity among students and the local community.

Paradis, a former chef, plans to graduate in 2026 and get a job with a nonprofit organization working in urban farming and composting and making to make the world a better, healthier place for her daughter.

“I would like to do my part and do my best to improve the world that she’s going to grow up in,” Paradis she says.