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A Sustainable CareerYes, there are green careers out there —

here are some of themBY RACHEL KAUFMAN

Want to make a difference and help save the planet? How about get-ting paid to do it? For some, it’s only a dream. But for some college graduates, it’s a dream come true. We talked to six who are help-ing to keep our air and water clean, protect animals and preserve

our open spaces — and learned how they got their jobs. Want to follow in their footsteps? Study up and you, too, could become an eco-hero.

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Burson, 55, spends his days recording animal and human sounds in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks in Wyoming. “Soundscapes are a resource, just like wildlife, or plants, or air quality,” he says. His work started when the National Park Service wanted to measure the noise impact of the 80,000 snowmobiles that zipped through Yellowstone each winter.

“When I first collected data in the winter of 2002-03, you could hear snowmobiles 90 percent of the time,” he says. “But since the park service in 2013 released new rules governing snowmobile use, you hear snowmobiles less than half of the time in the busiest corridor. I’m happy that some of the data I collected went toward that.”

With that success under his belt, Burson can turn to other projects: monitoring bats with ultrasonic micro-phones, discovering some “ear-ringing” quiet places in the parks and creating a soundscape guide for both parks so that visitors who want to have the best chance of hearing a wolf howling or an elk bugling will be guided to the best place.

“I think a lot of people don’t come to national parks for the natural sounds, but ... it has an importance to people that they don’t realize,” he says.

JESSICA MOHLMANResearch and collections assistant, The Field Museum

SHAN BURSONAcoustic ecologist, National Park Service

B.A. in human ecology, College of the Atlantic,

1983

M.S. in ecology and behavioral biology, University of Minnesota,

1989

Mohlman, 23, still remembers childhood trips from her home in McHenry, Ill., to The Field Museum in Chicago, specifically an exhibit called “Evolving Planet,” about the evolution of life on Earth. “The thing that resonated with me was at the end of the exhibit they talk about the mass extinction we’re in cur-rently, and it had a clock counting how many species have gone. ... Little me was like, ‘I need to save the planet.’ ”

After three college internships in various departments in the museum, she returned full-time in 2015 to assist the museum’s curator of mammals with a project mapping and identifying many species of bats in Kenya, a first step toward protect-ing the vulnerable mammals.

“I knew nothing about bats prior to getting this job, so I’m learning a lot,” she says. “That’s the great thing about working in a museum. ... I always leave here every day learning something I didn’t know beforehand.”

B.S. in both biology and natural resources

(emphasis in wildlife and fisheries ecology), Northland College,

2015