 He served as the chair of the Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation, a foundation that provides grants and fellowships to promote environmental leadership.Since 1995 he has served as an ecological consultant for the Rainforest Alliance SmartWood Program in the Northeastern United States.In his 2006 book "The Myth of Progress", Wessels asserts that the aspiration to sustain indefinite exponential economic growth is an impossibility on the grounds that it violates three scientific principles