by Lisa Pearce

Created on: January 26, 2009

I am an environmentalist. These days it's almost a career-limiting statement to make, especially in the company of engineers or business owners, but I make it with conviction anyway. Don't get me wrong: I am no greenie. Instead, I am a realist and although my training is in botany, geography, environmental law and conservation biology, I find increasingly that my work makes the biggest difference in policy, politics and finance. If you as an environmentalist can't relate to the real world in real world terms, you don't accomplish much.

I believe strongly in doing things right. Not purely or exclusively (or in fact at all) for the sake of the environment, but because doing things right translates into respecting people and place and nine times out of ten means making better business decisions. "Environmental management is everything management", in my view.

As with any group of people, there are always different shades of grey within the collective. Some environmentalists I've met are very good at propaganda and fighting a cause merely for the sake of having a cause to fight for. Much like so many politicians. Then there are individuals for who I have a tremendous amount of respect: those who actually know what they're talking about and are able to not only understand the implications of what they're lobbying for in terms of political, social or economic terms, but are able to bring that message across in a sane, non-emotional way. I take my hat off to those people.

Once I had the opportunity to motivate a significant financial investment purely on safety and environmental terms: an industrial installation belonging to the company I worked for was polluting a local dam because it was located in a wetland area too close to the dam. The flooding was getting so bad that it endangered the safety of employees working there. In days gone by, engineers viewed wetland areas as non-valuable' and it made short- to medium- term financial sense to drain such areas and construct these industrial installations there. However, nature has a way of returning to its original state and the wetlands started healing themselves over a period of about two and a half decades. By that time workers were refusing to enter the installation because their lives were threatened, and we were called in to find a solution. The engineers had tried in vain by then to find a way to divert the water away from the installation.

After assessing the situation, we found that pollution from the installation

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