Meet Three People Working to Make the Planet a Lasting Home
Sometimes, your career chooses you.
“I had never met a scientist. None of my parents' friends or my friends' parents were scientists, so I didn't see it as a job opportunity. I thought of it as something that Einstein did,” said Steve Jacobsen. As we sat in the Earth and planetary sciences wing of Northwestern’s Technological Institute, Jacobsen taught us how to examine a large piece of quartz with a hand lens.
Today, Jacobsen is a professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Northwestern University. His research centers around mineral chemistry, but he didn’t start out his academic journey pursuing science.
“I went to college to study business or music, because that’s what I knew,” Jacobsen said. “Everyone I talked to did business of some kind, and I figured that’s what you had to do to get a job.”
Jacobsen playing the violin while camping with friends in Wisconsin. Courtesy of Kristen Kaufman.
Though he wasn’t exposed to science as a career growing up in Denver, Jacobsen was immersed in nature from a young age. After playing outside, he would often bring home rocks, curious about how they might have formed.
After taking an introductory course in geology at the University of Colorado, Jacobsen began to realize that his interest in rocks and the natural world could become a career.
“I took Geology 101 and just fell for it. I just couldn't believe how cool it was, how nature could be taken apart and studied in a way that its purpose was to understand the climate,” Jacobsen said.
Today, Jacobsen seeks to share his excitement for minerals with his students. He tells his mineralogy class that his only hope is that they never look at minerals the same way after the course.
Tommy Vaughan, the business operations advisor at WasteNot Compost, also came upon his career in an unexpected way. When he was a student at Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy, Vaughan did not think he would pursue an environmental career in business.
Graduating college with a degree in social policy, Vaughan worked on a few political campaigns in 2020 before eventually working for Cook County Commissioner Bridget Degnen, who held sustainability as a main priority.
“I was her outreach coordinator and she was like, ‘Hey, I want to get involved with businesses that are doing cool sustainability work in my district,’” Vaughan said. “So just through Googling and research, I found the company WasteNot.”
Vaughan, representing WasteNot at the 2023 Fall Nature Fest. Courtesy of Abigail Caldwell.
Vaughan subsequently met WasteNot’s CEO, Liam Donnelly, and the two became friends. Eventually, Vaughan joined the WasteNot team.
“Ironically, one of my favorite stories is—growing up, I was in charge of taking out the trash, but I refused to take out our compost bin because I thought it was too gross,” he said.
One of WasteNot’s goals is to make composting clean and convenient for families and businesses alike.
Coming from a sustainably minded community in Oakland, Calif., Vaughan was surprised by the disregard for recycling and composting in the greater Chicago area. He recalls seeing recycling bins being treated like trash cans in campus buildings.
“I came out to school at Northwestern and I have this vivid memory of going to my dorm room trash room on move-in day and just seeing so many boxes and so much garbage,” he said.
A company that began with a teenager’s personal drive to compost the waste he saw accumulating at his job, WasteNot’s mission is to “reduce the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by landfills.” With the nation’s largest fully electric vehicle fleet, WasteNot is setting an example.
Vaughan’s vision for the future of sustainability is a holistic one—ideally, he wants Chicago’s food waste to be composted and be returned to local gardens, farms and public lands. The interconnectedness and cyclical nature of the environment is something that is often reflected in our lives, too, he said.
For the retired Libby Hill, the natural world touches every aspect of her life. Over her decades-long working life, she’s occupied many roles: librarian at Evanston’s Roycemore School, author of “The Chicago River: a Natural and Unnatural History,” professor of geography and environmental sciences at Northeastern Illinois University and steward at the Clark Street Beach Bird Sanctuary, to name a few. But throughout it all, her love for the outdoors remains the common thread.
Hill in front of the Chicago River. Courtesy of Jan Wolf.
Hill said that the way she grew up helped inform the direction of her life. She was raised on more than five acres of land outside Baltimore, spending her days in nature and her summers at camp.
“I grew up outside. When you grow up outside, it’s going to affect your life,” Hill said. “We played with the cones, we played with the seeds—we made toys out of natural things.”
People with a passion for environmental protection can spark change in almost any profession, whether it’s in the hard sciences, humanities, business or law. Jacobsen recounted that, while he was interested in sustainability in college, he did not see himself following his peers. He instead decided to forge his own path.
“I was motivated to work on problems that related to the environment. But I wasn't really motivated to protest,” he said. “And so I thought maybe learning science was an alternative way to make a positive impact on making the Earth a safer place to live for everybody.”
He cited the global effort to actualize reforms to halt acid rain and the prevention of the growth of the ozone hole as tangible governmental initiatives that stemmed from scientific research. In doing so, he thinks scientific understanding can influence environmental policy.
In his work, which generally focuses on minerals, he collaborates with engineers—whom he calls “doers”—to manufacture solutions to environmental problems. For example, in his previous work, he and Alessandro Rotta Loria, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University, created a method to restore shorelines by using carbonates from seawater.
A look into Jacobsen’s lab at Northwestern, where he works with minerals under high pressure, x-ray diffraction and more. (Ruby Grisin/ION)
For Vaughan, the impact his chosen line of work has on the world is something he sees on a regular basis, adding to the fulfillment he feels in his career.
“I'm so happy in this job and really love the fact that I can walk down the street and see a bunch of [WasteNot’s] buckets and [think], ‘I was a small part of getting those there,’” he said.
Avenues for Change
Given all these options to make a difference, it can feel impossible to choose. For Jacobsen, Vaughan and Hill, the path to finding their careers was anything but straightforward.
As a first step, Jacobsen encourages first-year undergraduate students to get to know their professors and graduate TAs to survey the multitude of possibilities for specialization in the fields they are interested in.
“Who really knows what they want to do, going into college,” Jacobsen remarked. “When you begin to get a sense for what all the graduate students are working on, you’ll have a pretty good picture for the scope of applications in your field.”
Jacobsen also recommended that students explore their department’s seminar schedules to learn more about recent developments in their fields. Several departments at Northwestern offer seminars each quarter—for example, the departments of economics, computer science and Earth and planetary sciences offer talks on a variety of topics.
This will help students narrow their choices, discovering what makes them tick.
Climate change is an interdisciplinary problem, with its impact reaching all corners of society. Hill said that the key to working effectively in any environmental field is to remain flexible and open to new ideas and career paths.
“It’s really important not to silo yourself, because to the best of your ability, you’ve got to know everything,” Hill said. “If you’re going to be making environmental policy, you have got to know everything.”
“Knowing everything” seems like an impossible task—an impossible task aimed at solving an even more impossible-sounding problem: climate change.
As such, going into the environmental field can feel daunting. As President Donald Trump began his second term, he initiated a series of executive orders that, among other things, pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement, declared a national energy emergency and temporarily paused wind energy projects. The rationale behind many of these policies is an economic one.
For Hill, these cuts in government spending are akin to what she saw under Reagan in the 1980s.
“When I look back, Reagan cut a whole lot of money for the environment—he was no environmentalist,” Hill said. “And yet, we did come back, so I have to be hopeful.”
According to the Pew Research Center, 56% of Americans feel anxious about the future when thinking about news and information they’ve come across on climate change. Jacobsen has seen this happen among his students, too.
“It’s hard for me to see because I feel optimistic, but I am kind of a futurist in the sense that I tend to believe that technology will get us out of problems—and I know technology causes problems—but we have been able to engineer and design our way out of a lot of really tough problems,” he said.
Vaughan has seen this happen firsthand at WasteNot. According to Vaughan, WasteNot’s customers are generally first-time composters who recently learned about the role composting can play in fighting climate change.
“They want to do the right thing,” Vaughan said. “People just don’t always know how to.”