Dirty Jobs‘ Mike Rowe was recently interviewed by US News and World Report and we have a snippet of the interview, wherein Mike discusses his family, work ethic, the economy, and one of our favorite shows, Dirty Jobs.

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.

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