The Civilian Climate Corps wants you.
Joe Biden wants to revive one of FDR's New Deal greatest hits. Will the Republicans get behind it?
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My paternal grandfather—John “Poppy” Bowles was a subsistence farmer, carpenter, and moonshiner, not necessarily in that order. In the 1920s and 30s when he grew up on a remote mountain called the “Hump” in Summers County, West Virginia there weren’t many steady jobs to be had. The coal mines were in surrounding counties to the west and south—too far to commute, even if he had owned a vehicle, which he didn’t.
The few dozen souls who lived on the mountain grew and canned their own food, milked their own cows, kept chickens for eggs and Sunday “dinner” (which was what we called lunch), raised and slaughtered their own pigs for meat (heavily salted and kept in a wooden meathouse through the winter), supplemented by the occasional unlucky deer or squirrel, a delicacy that most of my city friends are happy to say they never tried.
The Depression didn’t mean much to these folks; they didn’t have much before and they continued to live in a mostly self-sustaining way throughout the 1930s right up until Adoph Hitler and the Japanese provided an opportunity for many of the young men to see the world a bit and envision a life somewhere off the mountain if they survived.
Poppy was my best friend from the time I was old enough to go hunting and ginsenging or walk with him to the grocery store in Sandstone, which was the only grocery store within ten miles. Sometimes we would walk by the school I attended and he would never fail to point out to me a beautiful rock fence made of slabs of sandstone that had been quarried nearby, (hence the name of the village). I’ve been told that some of the stone dug there is in the Washington Monument.
“Looky here, boy,” he would say, pointing to an area of the fence. “I put them stones in there myself.” It was his masterpiece, a little bit of immortality, a permanent achievement for a hardscrabble life, a task that transcended simple survival.
The fence was built in the mid-1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of FDR’s earliest New Deal programs, established in 1933 to relieve unemployment during the Great Depression by providing national conservation work primarily for young unmarried men. Over its 9-year history, the CCC employed about 3 million men nationwide. A lot of men of my grandfather’s generation received valuable training and a small paycheck from the program.
Joe Biden’s Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad issued on January 27 revives the program by calling for a Civilian Climate Corps, an obvious nod to FDR’s CCC. It ordered the Secretary of Interior to…
…mobilize the next generation of conservation and resilience workers and maximize the creation of accessible training opportunities and good jobs. The initiative shall aim to conserve and restore public lands and waters, bolster community resilience, increase reforestation, increase carbon sequestration in the agricultural sector, protect biodiversity, improve access to recreation, and address the changing climate.
Like Poppy’s fence, there are still reminders of the CCC all across the country. If you visit a state park or national park anywhere, you’ll likely see buildings, trails, and shelters built by CCC workers. It was a government program that actually worked and did good things.
The modest Biden plan will be financed out of existing funds and focus first on developing an administrative structure, similar to AmeriCorps, a Clinton-era national-service program. Putting serious money behind the program depends on Congress’s coöperation which is pretty hard to come by these days.
A number of Congresspeople have taken an interest in the bill which, in a reasonable political environment, would have enthusiastic bipartisan support, given that we now have 20 million unemployed Americans. There is no guarantee of that in today’s poisonous political environment. Bills have been introduced by Ohio’s Marcy Kaptur, Colorado’s Joe Neguse and Illinois’s Bobby Rush, in the House, and by Delaware’s Chris Coons, Illinois’s Dick Durbin, and Oregon’s Ron Wyden, in the Senate.
Bob Casey, a Democrat of Pennsylvania has his own CCC proposal in the Senate, that would build and improve parks in inner-city neighborhoods and reverse the loss of tree cover that has made cities especially vulnerable to global warming.
Casey has also allied himself with the coalition of more than a hundred organizations behind an economic-policy package called “Reimagining Appalachia,” which proposes a C.C.C. that would restore wetlands and areas scarred by coal-mining while welcoming people who are unlikely to be hired by private employers such as ex-prisoners and reformed opioid addicts. In a nod to the environmental justice movement, Casey says the program could have the salutary effect of reminding rural and urban Americans that “they have very similar and overlapping problems,”
The CCC idea has been around for a while and enjoyed some success. California created what is now the largest state conservation corps in the country in 1976. Speaking on TV former governor Jerry Brown discussed how the conservation corps provides important work and inspires a shared civic engagement that could strengthen our democracy in perilous times. The CCC “builds an ethos,” he said.
It builds on the best part of human beings working together for a greater cause. That's very important in America today with all the separation and the ideologies that are dividing us. This is a unifying experience … for young men and women today."
The prospects for some version of a revived CCC are favorable although Republicans tend to run away anything with the word “climate” in it. To turn the new CCC into a worthy reincarnation of its immensely popular FDR predecessor, the Biden Administration will have to push hard and lend a sense of urgency to the effort.
My biggest fear is that Republicans will gaslight the initiative by deliberately conflating it with the Green New Deal proposed a couple of years ago by progressives like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Octavia. It is not the same but that won’t stop Fox News entertainer and 2024 presidential candidate Tucker Carlson from bashing it into the ground and possibly whittling the Biden program down to nothing. Just a reminder of why we can no longer achieve good things in this country.
Like, for example, the dignity that comes from building a good stone fence with pride and a purpose that nourishes the soul as well the body.
Dig Deeper
Politics & Global Warming, December 2020
Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad
What is Environmental Justice?
Tom Vilsack wants to save Rural America. Seriously.
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