(Barbara Wiseman, Co-Founder and President at The Earth Organization)
America’s skilled trades shortage is becoming an increasingly important challenge for the infrastructure demands of the coming decade. As the country prepares for continued investment in construction, energy, manufacturing, and environmental infrastructure, the availability of qualified workers could become a significant factor in how quickly these projects move forward.
The Lowe’s Foundation announced this week that more than 75 organizations are joining an initiative aimed at preparing one million people for careers in the skilled trades by 2035. The effort comes as the foundation points to an estimated 2.1 million skilled trade positions that could remain unfilled by 2030, potentially contributing to as much as $1 trillion in annual economic losses.
The challenge extends beyond traditional construction and manufacturing. Skilled workers are increasingly needed across industries responsible for maintaining infrastructure, improving energy efficiency, supporting environmental initiatives, and building the systems required for a changing economy.
As demand grows, expanding access to technical education, apprenticeships, mentorship, and career development could become an important part of addressing the workforce gap.
The announcement lands at a moment when the American economy is demanding more people who can work with their hands, even as technological investment accelerates.
Environmental restoration faces a version of the same problem, although it is rarely framed as a workforce crisis. Restoring degraded land may require people who can work with soil. Rebuilding water infrastructure needs people who understand what happens beneath the surface. Recovering damaged habitat can require practical field expertise. Funding, policy, and technology may streamline its reach, yet none of those things can substitute for trained people actually doing it.
The urgency becomes sharper as infrastructure built around artificial intelligence places new pressure on natural resources. According to Brookings, data centers require substantial quantities of water for cooling, with a typical facility estimated to use around 300,000 gallons a day and the largest facilities potentially reaching 5 million gallons daily. Reuters has already documented rising water consumption among data-center operators as AI-related capacity expands.
Amidst this change, the environmental question is slowly shifting into an infrastructure question: who has the skills to find, manage, conserve, and restore the resources that a rapidly expanding digital economy requires?
Barbara Wiseman has spent years approaching environmental problems from that practical end of the equation. The model she advocates starts with a premise that environmental restoration cannot remain primarily a funding exercise. “We can continue doing two, three, four projects at a time, but that’s not going to get us very far,” she explains. “As far as the kind of impact my environmental solutions non-profit wants to scale up to, we realized that what we must create is an environmentally themed trade school.” Her answer is the World Restoration Trade School, an initiative of The Earth Organization designed primarily to prepare U.S. military veterans for environmental restoration careers.
Wiseman co-founded The Earth Organization in 2003 with the late South African conservationist Dr. Lawrence Anthony, whose career, she notes, gave the organization an unusually field-driven foundation. Anthony became internationally known after rescuing a herd of wild elephants considered too dangerous to manage, later leading a months-long effort to protect and rebuild the Baghdad Zoo during the Iraq War. He also worked with the United Nations around the conflict involving the Lord’s Resistance Army in Central Africa. His approach to conservation was grounded in solution discovery and implementation, a mindset that Wiseman carried into the organization’s subsequent work.
Her own framework for environmental problem-solving is purposely operational. Before taking on a major issue, Wiseman explains that The Earth Organization researches whether the problem actually exists and establishes its significance. The next stage is finding its genuine source. Solutions are then developed to benefit the interests of people, businesses, communities, economies, and ecosystems before being implemented or transferred to capable groups. Educational material follows from the lessons learned in the field.
This system, she notes, has taken the organization into projects involving wildlife, toxic conditions, oil-spill response, habitat restoration, disadvantaged community empowerment, and water scarcity. According to Wiseman, the organization also carries out field implementation, root-cause solutions, and conservation approaches that account for human and economic realities.
Water has become one of the clearest examples. The organization has worked with what it calls Deep Seated Water Technology ™, a system intended to locate freshwater resources at greater depths than conventional shallow groundwater sources. Wiseman explains that the technology is designed to identify underground fractures and determine precisely where and how deeply to drill, reducing much of the uncertainty associated with water exploration.
According to her, this technology has begun to reach into the expanding data-center economy, particularly in water-stressed regions. Wiseman argues that identifying alternative freshwater resources should become part of the answer as demand from large computing facilities competes with existing agricultural, municipal, residential, and industrial needs.
The proposition is significant because it could shift environmental restoration into the same conversation now surrounding America’s infrastructure workforce. She says, “Resources are only useful if there are trained people capable of applying the knowledge and technology required to manage them intelligently.”
Veterans provide a particularly consequential workforce opportunity within that equation. Wiseman realized that people leaving military service already possess experience with discipline, structured training, responsibility, and mission-oriented work, yet civilian life can remove the framework around which those capabilities were developed.
“If you go into the military when you’re young, for the next several years you’re told what you’re supposed to do, exactly what your focus and your mission is,” she explains. “After years of that, they get out and are really set adrift.” The World Restoration Trade School is intended to make the transition smoother and more substantive. “We want to be able to instill a new mission – world restoration.”
Veterans, Wiseman explains, would receive training in trades such as plumbing, electrical work, and welding alongside environmental technologies, with assistance finding aligned employment after graduation. The proposed model is residential, giving participants an extended period to acquire practical civilian, social, and financial management skills while establishing a new professional direction.
The timing is significant. America is investing heavily in rebuilding its skilled workforce, while environmental restoration increasingly requires precisely the hands-on expertise that traditional environmental discourse can overlook. Wiseman’s proposition applies that workforce logic to an environmental challenge: restoration itself can become a career sector rather than an activity dependent primarily on charitable funding.
The larger question is whether enough people are being trained to carry out that restoration at the scale the environmental crisis demands. The environmental workforce, viewed through that lens, is part of the infrastructure required to repair the planet.
