Mud on the Boots

There is something missing in the environmental profession today.

Not intelligence.
Not energy.
Certainly not vocabulary.

Young professionals entering sustainability today are articulate, globally aware, digitally connected, and deeply concerned about the future. Many can speak confidently about circular economy, ESG, net zero, biodiversity credits, climate finance, and Scope 3 emissions within months of entering the profession.

And yet, increasingly, I find myself uneasy.

Not because these ideas are wrong. Most are important. Some are in fact transformative.

But because the language of sustainability is increasingly separated from the long journey of experience that produced it.

Circular economy, for instance, did not arrive suddenly. It emerged through decades of evolution in environmental thinking, from waste minimization and pollution prevention to cleaner production, eco-efficiency, industrial ecology, life-cycle thinking, and eventually systems thinking around materials, energy, and value chains.

These ideas did not emerge in abstraction. They emerged from practice. From factories. From polluted rivers. From regulatory failures. From financing constraints. From engineers trying to make environmental improvements work within real operational systems.

The profession evolved one difficult lesson at a time.

Today, however, sustainability language often arrives pre-packaged or paradropped.

Concepts are consumed faster than they are experienced.

Young professionals inherit frameworks without always inheriting the institutional memory behind them. And that memory matters.

Because environmental management is rarely linear.

• Projects that look elegant in presentations become messy on the ground.
• Policies with strong intent weaken during implementation.
• Technologies celebrated in conferences struggle under local realities.
• Stakeholder consultations do not always produce consensus.
  Institutions overlap.
• Communities disagree internally.
• And sometimes, despite everyone’s sincerity, outcomes fall short.

One learns this only after spending time in the field.

Academia does not fully capture this world. Nor should it be expected to. Universities are meant to build foundations, methods, and analytical discipline. But professional judgment is shaped differently. It emerges through exposure to uncertainty, contradiction, negotiation, compromise, and consequence.

The other difficulty is that practitioners rarely document experience.

• Partly because they are too busy moving from one assignment to another.
• Partly because writing honestly about practice is difficult.
• And partly because consulting culture itself rewards delivery more than reflection.

Over time, an enormous amount of institutional learning quietly disappears.

This began to trouble me while working on EMC’s coffee table book over the past several months.

Founded in 1996, Environmental Management Centre Pvt Ltd has now completed nearly three decades of work across policy formulation, environmental planning, ESG systems, financing frameworks, implementation support, compliance systems, industrial sustainability, and monitoring assignments across India and several other geographies.

From more than a thousand projects, I selected around 150 case studies.

As we revisited them, I realized that the real value of these projects was not merely in the outputs delivered. It was in the lessons hidden inside them.

• A well-designed intervention sometimes succeeded because one committed local officer quietly carried it forward long after the consultants had left.
• A project delay occasionally revealed more about institutional realities than the original planning exercise.
• And a modest innovation at district level sometimes carried insights far more practical than highly polished global frameworks.

Those stories deserved to be told.

Not as corporate success narratives.
Not as polished sustainability marketing.
But as field notes from practice.

That is how Mud on the Boots was born.

The title felt appropriate because environmental work is rarely clean.

It involves field visits, uncomfortable conversations, conflicting priorities, skeptical stakeholders, incomplete information, political sensitivities, and long stretches where progress appears invisible.

And yet, this is where the profession is actually shaped.

So the newsletter attempts something quite simple:
to take one project, one dilemma, one turning point, or one hard-earned lesson from practice and make it available to younger professionals entering the field.

Not as instruction manuals.
Not as universal models.
But as narratives that may help bridge the growing distance between framework and field reality.

Perhaps the next generation deserves not only frameworks, but context.
Not only tools, but memory.
Not only ambition, but perspective.

I discussed about starting Mud on the Boots with my Professor Friend. He smiled and said:

“Environmental management has now become very PowerPoint-friendly.”

I asked him what he meant.

He replied:

“Too many people now understand sustainability without ever smelling an effluent treatment plant, sitting through a hostile public hearing, arguing with a production manager, or standing on a landfill at 6 in the morning.”

Then after a pause, he added:

“I am not blaming the younger generation. Every generation creates its own language. That is natural. But professions become fragile when they do not know or forget how their ideas evolved.”

He then leaned forward and said quietly:

“Real environmental practice is not built only through frameworks. It is built through exposure – to uncertainty, conflict, compromise, implementation failures, and consequences.”

Then came the line that stayed with me:

“A profession weakens when it loses its lineage — when it remembers the terminology but forgets the journey through which that terminology was shaped.”

Perhaps that is what Mud on the Boots is trying to recover in a small way.

Not the past itself, but the continuity of learning that allows a profession to mature across generations.

Over the coming months, every Thursday, I will share one story from practice as a LinkedIn newsletter – one project, one dilemma, one lesson, one turning point drawn from EMC’s long journey across policy, planning, implementation, finance, institutions, and field realities.

My hope is simple.

• That young professionals may find something useful in these narratives.
• That experienced practitioners may reconnect with memories of their own journeys.
• And that these stories may trigger conversations the profession perhaps needs more often.

If these weekly reflections gradually create debate, disagreement, exchange of experiences, and eventually even a small community of practice, I would consider that deeply worthwhile.

If the idea resonates with you, I would be glad to have you along.

Please do subscribe to Mud on the Boots https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/mud-on-the-boots-7458122293387481088/ and, if you find value in it, share it with your colleagues, students, younger professionals, and networks working across environment, sustainability, ESG, climate, and development.

Because buried within old reports, field notes, and lived experiences are lessons that still deserve to travel across generations.

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