Early on in The Biden Administration, we were ( it appeared ) gearing up to establish a Climate Conservation Corps. We were facing multiple crises. The pandemic, of course, but also mass unemployment along with environment itself. Wildfires, hurricanes, vanishing wildlife. The fires in the west woke people up. The sudden reemergence of Nature as the pandemic caused the world to grind to a halt was provocative. What would it be like to have clear skies? We recognized then that a massive concerted effort had to be taken to repair the damage man had wrought upon the earth.
There was also a fourth crisis well brewing then — a civic one. The country had been divided along political lines. Absent a common purpose, the nation fragmented along its familiar fault lines. Collectively, we lost the narrative. In calling for a Climate Conservation Corps at that time, we were self-consciously reaching back to The New Deal. Then as now, we needed a communal effort to galvanize us as a people. A whole generation was at risk. Leave them with no future, and you create nihilists. Bring them together, people of different backgrounds and ethnicities, and have them work to rebuild their community environmentally. FDR’s New Deal was very much an effort to head off fascism domestically by giving a generation new purpose.
Well as we all know, political realities weighed in, and in the end the funding for a large scale locally based program such as John Kerry and former EPA Chief Gina McCarthy advocated for wasn’t there. The environmental problems, along with the civic ones, that such a program would have sought to address have only gotten worse though. Isn’t it time we revisit this initiative? Let’s make the argument, one driven by our current understanding of the importance of native habitat to the overall welfare of a given community.
Let’s start with the premise that an investment in natural infrastructure is the only infrastructure investment that appreciates over time. Build a road or a bridge, and it’s value begins depreciating from Day One. Annual maintenance costs come in. Plant a native forest, revive a river, and year by year Nature returns. Some tending will be required given the growing threat of invasive plants, but we’d be planting something otherwise self-sustaining.
Let’s also stipulate that habitat restoration would happen at a local level. People would be “drafted” to restore habitat in their community, it’s parks, woods, lakes and streams. Here we’d have everyone invested, working in common effort. We are all tribal by nature. That is what we are trying to address. Beyond the politics, what we share is a common bond with our home towns.
In my work, I have seen this again and again. Begin with the local. Get people’s hands dirty. Reach out to the local civic groups. Keep the focus on the mission of restoring Nature locally. Have the community start to think about it’s own sustainability. If this park is overrun with invasive plants and there is no longer much native wildlife, what will it mean for the town? If this pond is now covered in toxic algae, why would people want to live near it?
To kick start a Climate Conservation Corps, I would propose that local civic organizations — the scouts, Kiwanis, The Lions, The Rotary, The PTA, The Chamber of Commerce, church groups, etc — implement local habitat and restoration work and receive grants and training for such work. Our local civic groups need to be strengthened. Here too is a local purpose that they could all congregate around.
The fact of the matter is this: We need to go big now or go home. We are in the beginnings of the Sixth Great Extinction, a manmade one. Over a million species are at stake. If we DON”T have something at the scale of a Climate Conservation Corps, one operating in every state and town, over the next decade or two, we and our local wildlife will feel the full brunt of this mass wave of extinction and climate change itself.
We will have surrendered our yards, parks, forests, and lakes to all the invasive plants and animals now destroying our native habitats and with that our wealth — kudzu, bamboo, Japanese knotweed, wisteria, oriental bittersweet, The Chinese Lantern Fly and the Emerald Ash Borer. The list is a long and growing one, and we are losing badly in a war we mostly don’t now we are fighting.
What was proposed two years ago — A Climate Conservation Corps — is even a better idea now. For one, things have gotten worse. Secondly, there is indeed a hunger to find common purpose, a yearning to reconnect. It would happen most organically in one’s community, and best done in Nature, in planting, say. As we heal Nature, it heals us. As we find empathy with it, we find empathy towards each other. You are also working together for the community’s common wealth.
Establishing such a program to reward local stewardship would be in my view the single best infrastructure investment we could make as a nation, at the same time that it would make us more of a nation by rebuilding everywhere locally.