“Roosevelt’s Tree Army”, as the corps was called, may be getting a 21st-century makeover
There is no shortage of work to be done. In 2020 nearly $12bn in maintenance was needed in America’s national parks. Western states want to increase controlled burns and forest thinning so blazes do not turn into megafires. The infrastructure bill Mr Biden signed doubles as a climate to-do list, allocating money to clean up abandoned mines, help communities prepare for and recover from natural disasters and set up charging stations for electric cars.
Mr Biden’s Civilian Climate Corps would be funded by the $1.7trn “Build Back Better” bill that lawmakers are haggling over. As it stands, about $15bn of the roughly $500bn devoted to climate measures would create 300,000 jobs through AmeriCorps, a national-service agency. Sceptics say the corps’ mission lacks focus.
Climate work conjures up images of physical labour in the backcountry. In Colorado, some new corps members will train as wildland firefighters or rip out invasive plants that suck up more water than the parched West can afford. But the Mile High Youth Corps, which serves 23 counties on Colorado’s Front Range, also offers an example of the work a federal climate corps could perform in cities and suburbs.
All this sounds good in theory. But there are roadblocks to implementing a programme like Colorado’s in every state. When Roosevelt started thein 1933, some 13m Americans were out of work. The Depression had squashed livelihoods and farmers had abandoned their fields as dust storms suffocated the Plains. The corps was meant to lift its workers and their families out of poverty.
In the early months of the pandemic, when at least 20m Americans were unemployed, the circumstances seemed comparable. But now firms across industries are scrambling to find workers. Even proponents of Mr Biden’s corps admit that recruiting enough young people to toil in labour-intensive jobs for little pay will be difficult.
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