Luis Estrada ’90 is a renewable energy engineer at Southwest Technology Development Institute, which is part of the Institute for Energy and the Environment at NMSU. Here he stands in front of one of the photovoltaic arrays at STDI.

Courtesy Photo

Jeremy Fisher ’01 ’06, below, along with a colleague, conducts some field tests for an Albuquerque company called Daniel B. Stephens & Associates Inc., a water resources and environmental consulting firm where Fisher works.

Courtesy Photo

Quita Ortiz ’07 plants some seeds so they can germinate in small pods. Ortiz works for the nonprofit organization New Mexico Acequia Association, which educates farmers about various sustainability issues.

Courtesy Photo

Most of them are engineers, but there’s an accountant and another studied geography. They attended New Mexico State University without much thought about what their future would hold. So they went for the green – not the mighty dollar; even though some of them are making the big bucks – no, they went into green jobs, sustainability or alternative energy fields.

They’re the type of jobs that are now in high demand. And universities throughout the world can’t train the future green force fast enough. As the price of a gallon of gasoline exceeded $4 in the summer of 2008 and as the polar icecaps and the world’s glaciers slowly dissolve, governments and corporations have all of a sudden decided it is time to act. You can hardly pick up a newspaper, magazine or see a TV commercial that does not mention alternative energy or green “something.”

“I just kind of fell into it,” says Luis Estrada ’90, renewable energy engineer at Southwest Technology Development Institute, which is part of the Institute for Energy and the Environment at NMSU, a place that is researching and doing consulting work on alternative energy sources such as solar and wind power. Ironically, Estrada worked as a field engineer for the petroleum industry after graduating from NMSU. Work with that company took him from the jungles of Brazil to the deserts of Algeria in Africa, and he’s a Las Cruces homeboy who says he’s 45 but really looks 29.

Adolpho Telles ’70 graduated “a long time ago” as he answered the question – “probably before you were born,” he said, not knowing he was talking to another old codger. But in 1970 green had a different meaning for Telles. He graduated with a degree in accounting, which he later turned into a CPA and became a partner in an accounting firm that brought him to a successful retirement. Now that the alternative energy fever has been rising, Telles is in the process of using his investing skills to build a 200-megawatt wind farm at his ranch near Bakersfield, Texas. Texas leads the nation in the production of electricity through the use of wind turbines. And why not? “There’s not much out there,” Telles says.

In northern New Mexico, the term acequia is well known. Historically, they are communal irrigation ditches that have supported many communities in New Mexico. But throughout the history of these communities, the people of the villages and towns themselves have regarded the acequia as a vital component of the community’s core.

Quita Ortiz ’07, who graduated with a master’s in applied geography, has been using her skills to help revitalize a system of agriculture that has maintained sustainable practices for centuries. The workshops she conducts with her co-workers for the nonprofit organization New Mexico Acequia Association educate farmers about various issues like protection of acequia water rights, acequia easements and land conservation tools. These sustainability issues help conserve water and culture, practice sustainable agriculture and strengthen the local food economy.

“The term sustainable is relatively new, at least in the mainstream sense,” the 28-year-old Quita says. “But acequia agriculture has existed in a sustainable way for centuries, long before sustainability became something of a trendy sort.”

Trendy sort indeed – but ask anyone what sustainability means and you’ll get different definitions or approaches to its meaning.

“It’s like going to people and asking them to explain gray,” says Abbas Ghassemi, executive director of the Institute for Energy and the Environment at NMSU. “The gray to you is different than the gray to me.”

It depends on the horizon you envision, Ghassemi explains. It is a classical argument because if you make a 70-year projection of sustaining your environment, you have to deal with what is available now without knowing the factors in the future that may affect or help your sustainability efforts. So, the argument ensues to ask what are the things that can be done now to help sustain the water, energy, agriculture, food, soil and air, etc., etc., for future generations. And depending on how far into the future you are planning will determine the efforts needed to reach that goal, he says.

Considering the future is where NMSU has taken steps to offer the academic programs to prepare the next generation of students to be able to solve sustainability issues or work in green jobs. In a sense, the university is working on a sustainable future.

Jerome Fisher ’01 ’06 graduated with a bachelor’s in philosophy, but returned to NMSU to pursue a bachelor’s in environmental science. The 37-year-old is now working with Daniel B. Stephens and Associates Inc., a water resources and environmental consulting firm in Albuquerque. Fisher’s employer helps government and private sector clients develop and preserve their groundwater resources and clean up contaminated groundwater supplies.

His take on what sustainability means is “employing practices that can be supported by available resources over a long-term period.” For something to be sustainable, it cannot deplete resources, he says.

In January, NMSU declared 2009 the year of sustainability and has encouraged all colleges and departments to take steps to conserve energy and create awareness programs to help the university community support sustainability programs.

In the conversations about going green, these alumni and Ghassemi agreed that the sustainability trend has been more at the forefront now than in previous years. Part of that enthusiasm is that governments and corporations are taking bigger steps and investing money to move toward a more sustainable future. Naturally, this puts more dollars into sustainability research.

A report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) titled “Green Jobs: Toward Decent Work in a Sustainable Low-Carbon World” released in September 2008 shows that at a global level green jobs are being generated in some sectors and economies. The report cites the reason in “large part as a result of climate change and the need to meet emission reduction targets under the UN climate convention.”

According to the UNEP report, “the Deutsche Bank pronounced government efforts to address climate change as a ‘megatrend’ investment opportunity. U.S. bank Morgan Stanley believes that global sales from clean energy sources like wind, solar, geothermal, and biofuels could grow to $505 billion by the year 2020, and to as much as $1 trillion by 2030. Under this scenario, Morgan Stanley thinks that solar PV (photovoltaic) could account for 11.2 percent of global electricity production in 2030 and wind for 9.6 percent, and that biofuels could account for 21 percent of transportation energy use (assuming, however, that overall demand levels are tempered via boosted fuel efficiency).” In essence, it’s putting green into green.