"Dirty Jobs"-- happy and green

From Liz Wolgemuth in USN&WR...

Throughout the course of the show, Rowe, 47, has parachuted into incredibly dirty jobs, including coal miner, shrimper, and even skull cleaner, paying tribute to the value and integrity of manual laborers as he sloshes around in knee-high nastiness right beside them. U.S. News recently chatted with Rowe about dirty jobs and MikeRoweWorks.com, his website dedicated to promoting blue-collar work and drawing attention to impending worker shortages in the skilled trades....

The thing that makes Dirty Jobs different is that it's one of the few shows that portrays work in a way that doesn't highlight the drudgery. Instead, it highlights the humor. If you're flicking around with no volume, the odds are good that you'll see people doing something that appears to be really challenging and really adverse, but they also appear to be laughing and having a good time in the process. That's really about the simplest message that I can hope the show will impart—that in our haste to build up what a good job is and to reward our own decisions, we need to marginalize all of the other choices that people make....

So when the president talks almost romantically about putting people to work building wind turbines and installing solar panels, is that music to your ears?

Well, it's music, all right. Like Philip Glass....I basically took the position a year ago that Dirty Jobs was the greenest show on television, by far. I theorized, on camera, that it didn't get any love in that regard because unlike every other green show, we made no claim to be green at all. What if the greenest people on the planet were the people with dirty jobs? And what if so much of the tension in the environmental movement was coming from the fact that a huge percentage of the country was being asked to accept role models that didn't resonate with their core beliefs?...

I figured, maybe we've got some great role models on Dirty Jobs. You don't see it because they're too busy making a living doing what they do. There are other things that are more important to them than saving the planet—namely making a living and taking care of their family. The more I looked back at shows, everywhere I looked, I saw examples of brown before green....