People have to work on this side of the world too

Midtown, Anchorage

My new job is shaping up well. I am really enjoying the private sector, with people striving to get work done and move projects forward, with deadlines, and a foreseeable end to projects, and goals achieved. These important things were so intangible in my government job last year. Everyone here appears to really enjoy working for HDR, which is really important too (and I thought impossible). People work hard at the office, but on the whole are pretty outdorsy healthy people who are playing hard outside the office too, which suits me. HDR works on some really interesting and controversial projects in Alaska - for big oil companies that are taking oil resources from the far North of the country, for mining companies that pose enormous threats to wilderness areas and the wild salmon fishing industry, for a big bridge out of Anchorage that will mean widescale development of a whole new urban area that is now wild. HDR does a lot of environmental impact assessment with scientists and biologists, as well as engineers. At this stage I am retaining a belief that an impact assessment will determine a true level for what environmental damage is posed by a developer, and that the public will then be able to have a say, and the project will be veto-ed if there's too much at stake. Much of the Alaskan community is passionate about the wild places here, and that is why they chose to live here, so people are interested in protecting it. I am interested to see how the most controversial projects that are currently in public debate will go, and to see how I feel about working for a company that is involved in this way. I don't work in the environmental section, but the water section. I'm happy about this because at this point I'm interested in staying in the water field, and coming back to Australia in this field. The projects I am working on at the moment are about poo - this makes me happy enough. I feel like I've got much more support and resources to work with than I did at Power and Water. I have direct audience with a number of more senior engineers here in Anchorage, as well as on the email in *** offices all over the USA if I needed them. So at this stage it looks good, and I will certainly learn a lot here.

Being in this field of work in Alaska is very interesting. I went an saw Al Gore's doco 'An Inconvenient Truth' yesterday. Global warming is so visible here in this cold climate where a few things are going awry - the spruce trees dying from the spruce beetle that no longer gets killed off sufficiently in the winter, and of course the receeding glaciers.