William Mahoney earned his BA from SES in 1969 and is now a self-employed and semi-retired Senior Environmental Scientist at his company, Environmental Services International in Denver, CO.
Contact: wbmahoney@gmail.com
"Take a variety of courses to expose you to a variety of academic subjects and approaches to learning."
Where has your degree taken you?
After graduation, I decided not to attend Arizona State University which had accepted me to do a masters in paleontology. Instead, I took a dead end office equipment sales job in Columbus which I soon hated. Also, I was in the Ohio National Guard and after my unit (based in Springfield) was sent twice to the Ohio State riots in the spring of 1970, I desperately wanted to get out of Ohio and move out West.
After acing a couple geography courses in summer school at Ball State University in Indiana, I was admitted to a graduate program in geography at the University of Montana. The department had a heavy emphasis on environmental studies which was timely for me as I started my program a year after passage of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). I was given a research assistantship on a team that was developing a prototype environmental site permit system for the State of Montana. I “escaped” the Ohio National Guard by joining an Army Reserve unit in Montana where I became a Water Supply Specialist.
Prior to finishing my M.A. thesis on winter recreation conflicts in National Forests, I had a one-year teaching position in geography at Valley City State College in North Dakota. After receiving my M.A., my new spouse and I moved to Boston where I landed a one-year position as a Water Resource Planner with the New England River Basins Commission’s Southeastern New England Water and Related Lands Resources Study.
In the fall of 1974, I was hired by an environmental consulting firm as a staff scientist responsible for geology, soils, and water resources on the environmental impact statement for completion of Interstate Highway 93 through Franconia Notch, New Hampshire. I hired and worked with two MIT geotechnical engineers to determine the geologic hazards and associated environmental impacts of completing an interstate highway through the narrowest part of the notch. We determined that successful construction was problematic because it would either cut into unstable landslide deposits on the east side of the highway or impact the picturesque Profile Lake to the west. As a result of our efforts, a short segment of the highway through the notch was constructed as a two-lane parkway rather than a 4-lane interstate highway.
With the project in New Hampshire winding down, my company (VTN Consolidated) transferred me to their Denver office in the fall of 1975. Here I became involved with water sampling and water resources impacts associated with proposals for large coal, uranium, and oil shale mines in the western U.S. My most memorable work with VTN involved surface and groundwater sampling for the White River Shale Project on Federal Oil Shale Tracts near Vernal, Utah. The water samples we pulled from deep monitoring wells in the oil shale zones showed that mine dewatering would release water with unacceptable levels of heavy metals and shale particles. Mine tailings would have filled up a number of side canyons adjacent to the scenic White River, a tributary of the Green and Colorado Rivers. It was an environmental disaster in waiting and I was very glad to see the project die!
I left VTN at the end of 1977 to take a job with a Nevada-based hydrogeology consulting firm’s Denver office. It was a big mistake due to both personality conflicts with my two office colleagues and my lack of technical expertise in hydrogeology. After a few months, I left the firm and worked for two years as an independent contractor calculating coal reserves for a mining company, preparing soil and surficial geology cross-sections, and supervising installation of groundwater monitoring wells. Eventually, I drifted into editorial work with a non-profit organization and a magazine publishing company both based in Denver.
By 1985, I was in the middle of a mid-life crisis: about to turn 40, getting a divorce, and laid off by the magazine publishing company. I decided to do something really adventurous. Through some connections, I was able to get a South African visa as a travel writer during the waning days of Apartheid. I travelled throughout South Africa mostly by train while also visiting Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Lesotho. I eventually published articles in alternative papers in the US about the diversity of white South Africans I met (they ranged from hard-core racists to activists working to end Apartheid). While traveling through Botswana in June 1986, I stumbled on to an opening for a one-year position as a lecturer in Environmental Science at the University of Botswana. My degrees in geology and geography met the required qualifications. I was eventually hired and spent the academic year of 1986-87 working with department colleagues from Great Britain, Zimbabwe, Canada, the Netherlands, Malawi, and Botswana. I taught statistics for first year environmental science majors and Geography of North America to seniors. It was probably the most rewarding job I’ve had.
I returned to the US in the summer of 1987 and was hired for a one-year position in the Geography Department at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania. The pay was poor, my students were unmotivated, the town was depressing, and I realized I wanted to get back to Africa. Thus, at the end of my contract, I immediately headed north to Quebec where I enrolled in two six-week French language immersion programs at the University of Quebec and Laval University. I then took my French language skills, earth science degrees, experiences in southern Africa, and experience as an environmental scientist and writer to Washington, DC where I hoped to find a job in international development which would take me to one of the 20+ French-speaking countries in Africa.
After six months of no luck finding a job in Washington, DC, I decided that if none of the NGOs (non-governmental organizations) wanted me, maybe the Peace Corps would. They did! I was invited to join Peace Corps as a natural resources volunteer in Niger, a poor French-speaking country in the West African Sahel region. However, it was six months before I would start Peace Corps training. I used the time to first take a GIS course at the University of Maryland and then spent two months in Peshawar, Pakistan. There, a friend from Botswana helped me find a temporary job with a UN-sponsored mapping service which was producing village maps of Afghanistan for a French vaccination organization.
After three months of in-country Peace Corps training, I was sent to my post with a forestry project in a town 40 miles south of Niamey, Niger’s capital. I was involved with forest surveys, erosion control, community gardening projects, and heavy doses of government bureaucracy while surviving blistering heat and avoiding malaria. However, on August 15, 1990, my crazy native driver lost control of our truck and I would have probably been killed or confined to a wheelchair for the rest of my life had I not been wearing my seat belt. As it was, my injuries required fusion of my C-3, 4, and 5 vertebrae in a Washington, DC hospital and a year of physical therapy. I was discharged from Peace Corps and wound up back in Denver.
I decided I’d had enough adventure for the time being and returned to environmental consulting. In the meantime, I quickly earned an Associate of Science in Environmental Technology from Front Range Community College. Prior to graduating, I was hired in May 1991 as a Project Scientist by Greystone Environmental Consultants where I worked for the next 11 years. While at Greystone, I wrote the geology, soils, water resources, climate, and land use sections of numerous environmental assessments and environmental impact statements for mines, power transmission lines, power plants, pipelines, highways, and water resource projects. I also prepared numerous environmental site assessments for property transfers of industrial, commercial, agricultural, and residential properties (mostly in Colorado), a skill I learned as part of my associate degree program. I was in charge river morphology descriptions for fisheries surveys in Idaho, and my topo map-reading skills helped me guide a botanist to sites of rare moss communities in the remote, narrow canyons of the Dry Fork Basin in Wyoming’s Big Horn Mountains. Our finds of these mosses helped kill a proposed hydroelectric dam. During my time at Greystone, I also went through the process to become a Registered Professional Geologist in Wyoming.
Probably my most interesting work with Greystone was in 1998-99 when I traveled to nine states for environmental inspections of natural gas pipeline construction projects under a contract with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). During this time, I learned a great deal about erosion and sediment control on construction projects. I spent seven months in 2001-02 as lead environmental inspector on construction of an 11-mile natural gas pipeline through the western suburbs of Chicago with numerous local, state, and federal agencies looking over our shoulders.
At the end of the Chicago project, Walsh Environmental Consulting in Boulder, Colorado offered me a contract position as environmental manager with the BTC Oil Pipeline Construction Project in Turkey. I spent several months in Ankara for the project planning phase, then several more months based in the city of Kars in northeastern Turkey while supervising a team of a dozen young Turkish environmental engineers, biologists, soil scientists, and archaeologists. I was caught in the middle of a struggle between the Dutch/Turkish construction consortium that cared nothing about environmental protection and the environmental staff of BOTAŞ (the Turkish state pipeline company) who nit-picked us to death. I finally left the project in frustration and disgust in December 2003 (the construction company was fired a few months later by BOTAŞ).
After working several environmental contract jobs back in Colorado (including a stint in Alaska), I was hired in September 2004 by O&G Environmental Consulting as a Senior Environmental Scientist. O&G was a smaller company than VTN or Greystone and we tended to work on smaller projects, mostly environmental assessments for oil and gas field development or construction of petroleum pipelines which crossed Federal lands. During this time I studied and passed the test to become a Certified Professional in Storm Water Quality, an EPA-sanctioned certification. In the summer of 2007, I spent two amazing weeks as a volunteer with a team studying the effects of climate change on permafrost in the Mackenzie Mountains of Canada’s Northwest Territories. In 2008, I took two very enjoyable graduate courses in glacial geology and remote sensing at the University of Colorado at Denver while working part time. I received high marks for my paper on the use of remote sensing to study the retreat of glaciers in Iceland based in part on my visits to, and photography of, Icelandic glaciers in 2003.
Unfortunately, O&G went out of business during the 2009 economic downturn. I soon started picking up contract work doing stormwater permits, plans, and inspections for small oil and gas exploration and production companies in Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico. I also conducted spill control compliance inspections and environmental audits for some of these clients. Working part-time gave me a wealth of opportunities to do professional volunteer work and studies. In 2010, I spent a month as a volunteer in the Atlantic Forest (rainforest in Brazil) preparing a topographic survey of a sustainable farming community. In 2011, I was sponsored to do a survey of soil erosion problems in a community high in the Ecuadorian Andes. Engineers Without Borders used my survey results to help the community subsequently carry out a sustainable erosion control program. In 2012, I took a three-month around-the-world trip, presenting results of the Ecuador studies at conferences in New Zealand, China, Serbia, and Spain. I also visited and traveled with colleagues involved with erosion control in Australia, Thailand, India, Montenegro, Hungary, and France. In 2019, a colleague and I conducted a survey of erosion problems for the Southern Plains Land Trust. Also, my girlfriend of 25 years (a geology minor at Vassar College) and I have been making regular trips to hike southeastern Utah’s canyon country since 1994. I’ve threatened to charge Judy extra for gasoline because of all the rocks she has us haul back to Denver.
I have been studying Spanish since the late 1990s. In 1998, I spent a month as a visiting scientist with the Mexican Institute of Water Technology. In 2000, I had a one-month sabbatical in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala at a Spanish school while helping a local NGO collect soil samples from the slopes of an active volcano. In 2018, I worked as a volunteer in Nicaragua with a professor who is studying topographic changes on the active Masaya Volcano. I’ve also given presentations in Spanish on erosion control issues at a conference in Guatemala and a symposium in Costa Rica.
How do you feel your experience, specifically as an SES/geology student at OSU, prepared you for your career or life in general?
I started as political science major at Ohio State in 1964 hoping to become a US Foreign Service Officer. However, by my junior year I realized that I really didn’t like political science or the idea of having to defend the US President’s foreign policy no matter what my opinion was (remember, this was during the Vietnam War). I also really liked the two geology and one botany courses I’d taken for my science requirement. So, I switched my major to geology and the results are detailed in the long description of my career and personal life above. I’d have to say that it’s turned out quite well and my geology program at OSU was very useful.
What is your favorite memory as a student?
It isn’t exactly a favorite memory but it surely was memorable! After our first week in Ephraim, Utah, three other 1969 field camp students and I borrowed one of the OSU 2-wheel-drive Chevy Suburbans to explore the top of the Wasatch Plateau. As it was late June, quite a bit of snow remained on top of the plateau. The student who was driving couldn’t get the vehicle back up a muddy hill after we’d gone off Skyline Drive to avoid a snow drift. After numerous unsuccessful attempts to take different routes, we were stranded. The four of us had to walk all night for 19 miles to get back to Snow College. After an hour of sleep, Dr. Collinson was banging on our doors telling us that the plane tabling exercise that day was mandatory and we had to get up. The four of us also had to pay for the tow truck which pulled the vehicle back to Skyline Drive. A painful experience but a useful lesson for young geologists!
What advice do you have for current and future students?
Don’t drive off-road on top of the Wasatch Plateau! More importantly, take a variety of courses to expose you to a variety of academic subjects and approaches to learning. Consider holding off on marriage and parenthood for a few years so you can have an opportunity for some rewarding experiences. Travel abroad, learn a language, join an expedition, work in a remote location, and be open to the opportunities that come your way. Life is an adventure!