I KNEW I WASN'T the only one experiencing a nagging anxiety about being left out of the big green party. And I'd burned enough hours wandering in the wilderness of government help lines and Web sites to see that the bureaucratic jungle is tangled and dark.

The person who finally turned my worry to possibility was Kevin Doyle, founder of the Boston-based consulting firm Green Economy. "How did green jobs come to mean renewable-energy jobs?" he asked. What about conservation biologists? Park rangers? "Once you stop defining your green opportunities around six or seven job titles in clean energy, then you're back where you were and, frankly, where you always are, which is: Who are you? What do you want to do?"

That's all very nice, I said, but when you're in free fall, the last thing on your mind is the color of your parachute.

Au contraire, said Doyle: Following your bliss is precisely your smartest move. Take, for example, a Wall Street casualty. "OK," he posited, "you're 55 years old. You're out of work; you don't see any opportunities in your previous training; you're competing against younger, hungrier people. So what's your first step?" It is, he said, to identify people who do what you'd like to do, go talk to them, and measure the gap between their experience and yours. "You might fail," Doyle allowed. "It's risky, and the older you get and the more you want to make a change from who you've been to who you want to be, the riskier it gets. But the riskiest strategy of all is to just get in a line with a whole bunch of other people."

So maybe there's a green future in (recycled) pencil pushing after all. And maybe there's one in landscaping and green finance and, yes, wind. I've been thinking a lot about Rascoe's students, fanning out into the wind farms of America. They'll be out there in their hardhats, climbing the towers, checking the circuits, and watching the big blades fill their wallets—ching, ching, ching!