Greg Barnette/The Record Searchlight via AP
Members of the California Conservation Corps Region 1 get ready for flood training, November 19, 2015, at the Red Bluff Recreation Center in Red Bluff, California.
During the Great Depression, President Roosevelt established an “alphabet soup” of programs to hire Americans and lift families out of poverty. One of the most popular was the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which ran from 1933 to 1942. Over its lifetime, the corps employed three million men, planted three billion trees, built 125,000 miles of roads, erected much of our national park infrastructure, and fought forest fires. The program married improving the environment with putting Americans to work.
In Pennsylvania, there were more CCC camps than in any other state, save California. Nearly a hundred years later, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, President Biden announced his infrastructure legislation, highlighting plans to fight and prepare for climate change. “The American Jobs Plan will lead to a transformational progress in our effort to tackle climate change with American jobs and American ingenuity,” Biden said on March 31. And it built on a prior executive order by devoting $10 billion to establish a new Civilian Climate Corps, again putting people to work on needed conservation and environmental-justice projects.
The announcement came as the push for investing in a new climate corps was gaining momentum. Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) introduced a 21st Century Civilian Conservation Corps plan in 2019, saying she was inspired by the impact the 1930s program had on her father, who served in Ohio’s CCC. Seven CCC bills, representing members of Congress from at least eight states, were introduced just last year. According to a May 2020 Data for Progress poll, more than 70 percent of voters support the idea.
For Rep. Joe Neguse (D-CO), the need for a climate corps became stark last year, when two of the three largest wildfires in Colorado’s history burned in his district. “Given that my district has been the epicenter for this wildfire activity and given that … we know that these fires will become all the more pervasive in the future as a result of climate change,” he said, “it became clear that there’s a lot of work to do in these forests.” Neguse pointed to wildfire mitigation efforts and wildlife habitat building as potential tasks for the CCC. At the time Neguse introduced his version with Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), unemployment was in the double digits.
But the corps in the 1930s and its 21st-century equivalent can do more than just wildfire mitigation. The Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Neguse’s district was built by 1930s CCC members. “Here was this idea that worked so well 90 years ago, and addressing a real challenge with respect to economic disruption … and the real need to address this crisis of climate change,” Neguse said.
In his vision, the new CCC will have temporary, part-time, and full-time positions, and they can also transition to permanent positions in the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and other federal agencies. The new corps will likely build on existing infrastructure across the country, such as the Colorado Youth Corps Association (CYCA), which especially focuses on hiring in forestry. The organization, established in 1997, is modeled after New Deal programs.
If Biden’s American Jobs Plan passes and new funding juices conservation corps across the country, proponents warn that it must not just fill a gap year for upper-middle-class white kids, but become an inclusive program focused on job training.
“We want participants to come in, serve a term or two or three and then launch into their next career,” said Scott Segerstrom, executive director of CYCA. “We are about workforce development, career readiness, for youth, young adults, and military veterans to get training, get professional certification, get all the benefits of serving in a corps and be well prepared to make the step into a permanent career.”
CYCA is one of eight accredited conservation corps in Colorado, which Segerstrom said in a normal year creates about 1,800 jobs for young adults and military veterans. The Corps Network is a loose federation of more than 130 corps across the country, where young adults and veterans work on conservation service projects, disaster responses, and more. Terms range in length, but the modern corps is largely a public-private partnership funded through various nonprofits, unlike the federal program of the 1930s.
It’s also likely that the new Climate Corps will build on the Clinton-era AmeriCorps program, which already places people in various locals of the Corps Network. The American Rescue Plan boosted AmeriCorps funding to the tune of $1 billion. President Trump’s 2020 budget proposed to eliminate the agency that administers the AmeriCorps program. The agency normally operates on a budget of about $1 billion. Biden’s $10 billion will be funneled not just through AmeriCorps, but will infuse other service-oriented organizations with resources, too.
The modern corps is largely a public-private partnership funded through various nonprofits, unlike the federal program of the 1930s.
The corps’s proponents want it to do more than just tackle rural environmental issues. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) has collaborated with Openlands in Chicago to do urban environmental work such as brownfield remediation, repairing urban bike and walk trails, as well as planting urban gardens. Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) has pushed something similar in his state to address the loss of tree canopy in cities.
All of these proposals echo a more comprehensive plan progressives have pushed: The Green New Deal. But the union of job creation and climate work may end up taking different forms in Biden’s presidency. Given the corps’s mission of both green-energy-focused work and forest fire prevention, it reflects the stark reality: Government measures addressing climate change must include remediation to slow or reverse climate change. But they also must prepare for the inevitable natural disasters of an already-changed climate. Biden’s touting of the Climate Corps—a program that will do both—reflects this understanding.
But the modest scope of the program has some climate activists concerned. “We absolutely don’t think $10 billion is enough,” said Sunrise Movement press secretary Ellen Sciales in a statement. “The plan Biden rolled out would create about 10,000-20,000 jobs in a Civilian Climate Corps … When FDR rolled out a similar Civilian Conservation Corps, it employed around 300,000 people per year, and that was back when the U.S. population was ~40% of its current size.” Mark Paul, an environmental economist with the New College of Florida, told Wired that, scaled to today’s population, the CCC should have “roughly 1.5 million workers at its largest size, and perhaps upwards of 9 million workers over the duration of the program.”
“Our communities have long been left behind when it comes to resource distribution,” said Chas Robles, ancestral lands director for Conservation Legacy. “$10 billion is a great investment towards addressing the needs of our environment, economic development, and priorities of Indigenous communities, but most of this will fund projects that are not on tribal lands.”
Segerstrom says that while more would be better, $10 billion is a meaningful investment. The bill would have a “decipherable, identifiable, meaningful impact on conservation stewardship,” he said. “This bill represents a landscape-level investment.”
“You know, we’d like to do more, but $10 billion is a lot,” said Neguse. “When you think about the massive investment that $10 billion represents, you’re literally talking about hundreds of thousands of people working on these projects back here in Colorado and across the country.”
Proponents of the plan also see the Climate Corps as a chance to make amends for the racism and sexism that permeated the New Deal program. Although the CCC had a quota of 10 percent African Americans, proportionate to the population in the 1930s, the quota was often not met, despite African American unemployment at the time being higher than white unemployment. Camps for CCC men were segregated by race, and women were ineligible for the program.
Biden’s plan also sets aside funding for tribal and Native communities, including $500 million for tribal drinking water infrastructure repairs. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the nation’s first Native American Cabinet secretary, said in her confirmation hearings that Biden’s Civilian Climate Corps plan “demonstrates that America’s public lands can and should be engines for clean energy production,” adding that a 21st-century corps “has the potential to spur job creation.”
Robles emphasized a need for water and electricity infrastructure on tribal lands, but also pointed out a need for funding to preserve important cultural sites. “Many of these projects are not able to [be] completed in a year, but rather take multiple years, decades, or generations to complete,” said Robles. “We will need to take a long-term approach to ensure that these are successful for generations to come.”
To Neguse, the Climate Corps can represent a paradigm shift in how Americans may think about government. “I imagine that this could be sort of a new construct for the future, as we talk about large-scale projects we’d like to bring federal resources to bear.”
