Picking a livelihood that helps to reduce suffering while creating a community that has access to such livelihoods are big and necessary challenges for everyone. The centrality of these goals is often overlooked. Here, I illustrate some hiccups with this process for those pursuing careers related to biology.

Biology Jobs

Bright-eyed young people gravitate towards out-of-doors careers, working with critters or plants, hoping that somehow they can help save the world by becoming experts at biology. They work hard to get biology degrees up against others who are pursuing more lucrative careers as doctors or genetic engineers. They compete for volunteer positions and internships to get hands-on experience. They go into debt to attend a Master’s degree program so that they are competitive in the marketplace of biology jobs. 

A very few of these well-educated students will obtain PhDs to become research biologists or even professors. There are fewer and fewer of these jobs however, and most realize that this is hopeless unless they compete to be affiliated with the very best University faculty and labs as doctoral candidates.

Most budding biologists discover that the most available and well-paying jobs are as biological consultants. Most have loans to pay and families to raise, and that is the easiest way forward. But some can’t stomach being biological consultants (more on that later) or just never seem to be competitive in the application pool. These folks settle for jobs with government agencies such as public parks (BLM, State, City, or County Parks), regulatory and planning agencies (state or federal wildlife agencies, water districts), or advisory agencies (US Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service, Resource Conservation Districts).

Teaching and Research

How well does teaching and research mesh with ‘right livelihood?’ I will paraphrase Thich Nhat Hahn with this example. I teach biology and conservation to many students, but some of those students will get jobs in biology just to make money which will enable them to raise children who likewise have no ethical appreciation for conservation of life on earth. I already benefit from those students’ contribution to the economy, and their unethical children will likely pay for my social security. 

Does that mean I shouldn’t teach and research about conservation? No. What it means is that I need to consider these outcomes of my work and seek to improve my approaches to conservation. I also realize the need to improve my community, so that the biological careers that are available to the students I teach are more ethical, so even those who enter those fields ‘for the money’ can do less harm.

Agency Biologists

It is nearly impossible for biologists working for public agencies to practice excellent biology for conservation. At best, they might incrementally reduce harm to nature, but more likely they are enabling harm to nature by helping to ‘cover’ for the other, more politically supported mandates of the agencies. For instance, the tidal wave of outside influence on parks by well-funded groups such as the Outdoor Industry Association has created a situation where parks agency biologists’ opinions are marginalized, and they are not allowed to insert any meaningful biological protective language into parks planning which is mostly about expanding extractive recreational uses for public lands (for instance, for BLM see this and for State Parks this). Instead, as you will see when following those previous links, they are asked to rationalize imbalanced planning approaches that will cause environmental degradation. When such approaches from agencies are challenged in court, there is a long legal history of courts siding on behalf of the agencies. I need to do another column on the bad news that happens when courts are asked to decide on biological matters: the quote that comes to mind is ‘if a scientist testifies to affirm it in the courtroom, a pig can fly.’

Consulting Biologists

Another career choice that biologists might make – and the most profitable by far – is biological consulting. Biological consulting is an area of the economy that has mostly been made feasible through regulations designed to protect the environment. Some consultants make a living helping public agencies that don’t have in-house biologists, often falling into the same pitfalls as outlined in the prior section. These and other for-hire biological consultants have a variety of approaches to helping their clients navigate environmental protection regulations. There is a spectrum of such approaches, and at the far end of the spectrum there are what a mentor of mine called ‘biostitutes’ – biologists who are in the business of ruining the earth for personal gain. 

Biostitutes

During my 35 years of watching environmental discourses play out across the Central Coast, I have seen quite a few biostitutes profiting from environmental destruction, but their numbers are diminishing for a variety of reasons. One tactic I’ve witnessed is when otherwise well educated biostitutes claim over and over again not to understand clearly written, required monitoring guidelines: instead they create very poorly executed reports using poorly collected monitoring data in order to reduce costs for their clients. And, I’ve witnessed biostitutes misrepresent the extent of endangered, legally protected habitats by inventing their own, biased methodology of vegetation classification. In many of my experiences it has been a commonplace practice for biostitutes to, without any evidence whatsoever, claim that it is feasible to restore new areas of habitat or rare species to demonstrate to environmental regulators that there is ‘no impact’ of their clients’ proposals to destroy habitat or rare species populations. It is amazing to me that these people keep getting employed, but they do…why?

The Politics of Biology

It is my contention that biostitutes and other less blatantly unethical career biologists keep earning their livings because of their expertise in navigating interpersonal political bond formation. Subtly or not so subtly, a biologist can signal their willingness to be helpful to clients with what they would call ‘biology problems.’ Be it a subdivision developer, a parks manager, or a public works director, there will inevitably be environmental protections to integrate as part of getting projects done. The biologist is faced with the dilemma of either telling their clients (or their bosses) that there is ‘serious work’ that needs to be done to avoid biological impacts or, on the other hand, that such impacts are normal, inevitable and relatively easy to justify or repair. In the case of the biostitutes I’ve seen, there’s also often the formation of chummy comradery via framing a polar world of ‘us’ (the world-improvers) vs ‘them’ (the regulators). This situation is particularly weird as the regulators easily recognize this framing, and so clients of such biostitutes end up paying a lot more money than if they had been advised by biologists with collegial working relationships with regulators.

The easiest way to identify a potential biostitute is to ask them to provide evidence of where they have succeeded with environmental protection measures. Go to those places with an expert, and you’ll either not be able to find anything or be led to something less than success.

Learning and Growing

Those with the more collegial approaches to ‘biology problems’ are seeking the path of right livelihood. They serve as educators to both the regulators as well as those who are navigating the regulations. This approach helps the regulators learn and improve environmental protection while also helping push practitioners to be more environmentally sound. These ‘learning and growing’ biologists keep up on the science, are great communicators of science, and have a track record of succeeding with well-informed environmental protection outcomes. They will be proud to show you where they have succeeded, where they are learning, and where they look for evidence of moving in the right direction for environmental protection.

Aren’t these examples with right livelihood in biology interesting to apply across the spectrum of other jobs? I hope that you will now more easily identify the right livelihoods around you and work to make it possible to have more of these options in our community.

-this article is slightly modified from the one originally posted by Bruce Bratton at his BrattonOnline.com blog