Yale Students’ New Vision: See the Forest <i> and </i> the Trees : Environment: Armed with forestry degrees, graduates plan to bridge the gap between business and ecology.

Carroll C. Yandell was a successful Wall Street investment banker about to become a vice president when she began to ask herself what she really wanted to do with the rest of her life.

“I was making good money,” she said. “But it didn’t grab me. It didn’t excite me. I didn’t want to stay up all night any more working on financial numbers on mergers. I thought, ‘What is it that makes me want to stay up all night?’ ”

Her answer: “The environment.”

So on a recent day, Yandell, 33, was back in class. She was the woman in the fourth seat in the second row of a pine-paneled classroom at Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

In a room otherwise tending to rumpled book packs and sweat shirts, Yandell was the woman in the skirt and sweater, listening attentively to the lecture on the ecology of estuaries or, more precisely, how the bureaucracy presumes to protect them.

But Yandell is not planning on a career on the front lines of the environmental movement, or in forestry, or science. She is one of a handful of Yale forestry students with a new vision; she plans to take her Ivy League environmental education and head right back to the corporate world.

She has no intention of confronting management and denouncing the polluting ways of industry when she gets there.

“There is a great opportunity and need on the part of the corporations to incorporate an environmental ethic into the business that they do,” Yandell says.

“I believe in corporations. I believe the corporations will be the ones who can help us out of the environmental problems.”

The latest student trend at Yale Forestry is a variation on one that began two decades ago, one that continues to shape what many believe is the finest such school in the country.

The forestry school began in 1900, the vision of Gifford Pinchot, first chief of the U.S. Forest Service, who wanted a school producing a supply of well-educated foresters. For years, the school attracted liberal arts graduates, many from Ivy League colleges.

At the time of the school’s founding, there was growing public concern over the disappearance of American wilderness and woodlands.

“It was like going into the Peace Corps today,” said Joseph A. Miller, the school’s librarian.

For decades it was the tradition for Yale Forestry graduates to go right into the U.S. Forest Service or to conservation groups or timber companies.

But by the 1970s, a new student began to fill the classrooms of Sage Hall, the old Gothic centerpiece of the school, fittingly rich in woodwork. In those days, students sought out Yale for the kind of sound natural-resource education they could use as ammunition in the battle against America’s intransigent polluters.

John C. Gordon, dean of the school, remembers the attitude heard in the early 1970s: “We’re going to find evil and expose it and lecture them about how they are supposed to get better.”

Today, that mind-set “is fading real fast,” Gordon says. “The notion now is you have to do things, positive things, if you are going to get anywhere. Lecturing, and its legal counterpart, regulation, are not going to do it all.”

The school’s students have always been motivated, goal-oriented types. But today’s students, from ever more varied professions, academic disciplines and backgrounds--Edward M. Kennedy Jr., from a family of lawyer-politicians, is a student--seem driven by a specific desire to solve environmental problems, Gordon said.

An example of the new attitude, Gordon says, is that “students are increasingly looking at careers in for-profit industry.”

Yandell is among a few students helping to fashion a new course of study within the school, one intended to prepare students for environmental careers in business.

The career track does not lead to the environmental jobs most often associated with industry--the engineers needed to design and oversee the pollution-control systems governments insisted upon.

Instead, the idea is to produce someone schooled in both financial and environmental matters who can speak to company officers authoritatively about the environmental virtues or drawbacks of a product or process.

Anthony J. Gordon, a graduate of Amherst College and the London School of Economics, also left a Wall Street investment house to come to Yale Forestry. He said he wants an environmental studies degree because he believes there is a great need for financial decision-makers who understand environmental sciences.

“The gap between science, policy and application is a big problem,” he said.

The explosion in interest in environmental issues in the corporate world as well as in other areas of American life has led to a soaring number of applications to Yale and to the other leading graduate schools, including Duke University and the University of Michigan.

At Yale, where the forestry student body totals 190, faculty and students travel the world doing research, with projects under way on every continent.

“We determinedly try to be international, on the theory that if you are going to learn about the environment and resources and how to manage them, you have to know they are always in an international context,” Gordon says.

But at the same time, the school wants to be more local. It is encouraging communication with the outside world, and it is focusing increasing energy on American cities, where environmental degradation is severe and public understanding of environmental problems can be poor.

Yale has begun a new “urban resources initiative” that so far involves Baltimore and New Haven.

Christopher B. Rodstrom, 26, a New York City native, started his career in Idaho with the U.S. Forest Service; today he is among the students working on urban environmental issues.

“If we can reach people in the cities . . . I think we’ve got a much better chance of getting them to shift, of getting society to shift, to a better way of living, so we are not damaging the larger environment,” he said.

Yale has also begun a new program in which it offers short courses on environmental matters for corporate managers. In recent months, Yale was host to a series of seminars focusing on business and the environment.

For decades, Yale’s graduates have dominated top federal forestry jobs. Its graduates are well-placed throughout the bigger-name environmental and conservation groups. And it has always provided managers for the big forest product companies.

Gordon sees another route for graduates in coming years. He predicts that within 15 years a Yale Forestry graduate will be running a major U.S. corporation.