When Eco Canada was founded in 1992, the very idea of an environmental career was still finding its feet. The United Nations had just created its Framework Convention on Climate Change, and it became clear that there weren't a sufficient number of qualified practitioners entering the field. A field, that is, that still wasn't well defined.

For Grant Trump, Eco Canada's founding CEO, that problem of definition cut to the centre of the work he began to perform as an environmental professional himself.

"I'm a chemist by background and became an environmental chemist in the 80s," he explains. "And it was easy to do because nobody knew what that was."

"When we began, environmental employment was in its infancy," he continues. "We didn't have a common definition, therefore we had no common language or logic with respect to what the environment was and what environmental employment was. People thought it was environmental activism, didn't recognize it was a scientific area in which people could prosper and make a good living dealing with air, water and land quality."

Like the Electricity Sector Council, Eco Canada is one of Canada's 34 sector councils —organizations created to analyze employment trends in an industry and meet its demands for workers. The data that these councils collect becomes essential reading for employers, postsecondary institutions and anyone else with any involvement in the environmental sector.

But just what is an environmental employee? Given the importance of defining a once-nascent industry, it's no surprise that Eco Canada offers an answer in three criteria:

"As an analytical chemist I'm a firm believer that if it's not documented it's not reviewable," says Trump. "We want people to be able to say: 'Here's the common language we're using. If you agree, tell us, if you don't, tell us where.'"

But even these definitions are not necessarily hard and firm: the council has modified its own definition of environmental employment four times since 1992. With the advent of new areas of environmental focus including greenhouse gases and climate change, and the broader creation of the so-called "green economy," which the council outlines in its Defining the Green Economy (2.3 MB PDF), the industry continues to evolve.

At the centre of the council's work, then, are the annual reports that allow it to define the field. Its most recent, the Profile of Canadian Environmental Employment 2010 Summary Report (5.9 MB PPT), provides a snapshot of Canada's environmental industry that reveals 682,000 Canadian environmental practitioners, defined as those who spend more than 50 per cent of their time on environment-related work activities. By expanding the definition to include any time spend on environmental work, the number grows to over two million workers.