Mike Rowe: Why Dirty Jobs are Green

The "experts" on your show are the guys with the dirty jobs. Wouldn't you say this is one of the only shows where these guys have the upper hand?

I wouldn't say they're experts. I would just say they know what they're doing. I'm never looking to put anybody on the show in any position other than being themselves, of being competent at what they do and having the ability to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly. It can't all be apologetics. You start wrapping people in the flag and singing "Look for the Union Label," and, you know what? That sucks. Because sometimes work really is hard, and it really is a drag.

[See 5 key issues surrounding the Employee Free Choice Act.]

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. That's just how we build ourselves up, in every way, but it's a really stupid thing to do professionally. Because when the investment bankers come home and flick on the lights, they want to see light. And when they flush the toilet, they want to see the poo go away. And when those two things don't happen ... all of these things that we've built for ourselves and all of these conveniences we've come to associate with success are kind of worthless.

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. Politically, there's no smart response for me. I'll plead my record. 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? What if, for instance, millions of people in the heartland didn't cotton to Leonardo [DiCaprio], or maybe weren't comfortable with Vice President Gore, or just looked askance at any idea that came out of Hollywood or the beltway?

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. Matt Freund, who makes flowerpots out of cow s—t in northwest Connecticut. He started doing it because nobody was buying his milk. Now, he's buying more cows because he needs more crap. How much browner could you get? It's a completely environmental play, and yet this guy is covered in crap 24-7 and making a fair amount of green as a result. But it all happened because of his personal economy, not because he was looking to leave a lighter footprint.

What's a career lesson you've learned?

Completion is a big one. Most "good jobs" don't have a lot of visual cues in the course of your day or your week or your month to let you know how you're doing. We learn how we're doing by performance reviews and a whole lot of things more complicated than looking down and seeing a ditch where there wasn't one. I just think it's in our DNA to know when we're done. ... I think all the D's are bad—drudgery, drone, dismay, depression. We do ourselves such a disservice in this country when we portray work in that way, and yet we're helpless to not do that. It's what we do. We've waged war on work. We have collectively agreed, stupidly, that work is the enemy.