Environmental civil service is returning to the United States. Ninety years after the Civilian Conservation Corps created by Franklin D. Roosevelt to overcome the Great Depression, the Biden administration has launched the American Climate Corps. But if in the 1930s the young Americans who joined the CCCs helped build hundreds of natural parks, this time the focus is on climate.

In its first year, reads the official White House website, the initiative in fact counts on placing “more than 20,000 young people on career paths in the growing fields of clean energy, ecosystem conservation, and climate resilience.”

Climate Civil Service

The idea of civil service for environmental purposes dates back nearly a century, when the Great Depression of 1929 had reduced many American families to poverty. With the goal of combating youth unemployment, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created a government assistance program in 1933, as part of the New Deal, to employ (paid) young workers to conserve the natural heritage of the United States. The Civilian Conservation Corps, in just under 10 years, helped create hundreds of parks, including the Great Smoky Mountains, fight forest fires and plant millions of trees.

The return of the initiative today, at the behest of the Biden administration, is part of a backdrop of climate resilience policies that the country has recently been investing heavily in.  Indeed, the Inflation Reduction Act, in its more than $300 billion in environmental investments, was supposed to include funds to replenish the CCC: money that was eventually cut, however.

Now Joe Biden is relaunching the initiative, but with a new name, much more in tune with the times: American Climate Corps. The idea is to link the initiative to the AmeriCorps national civil service program and build synergies with local climate resilience programs already active in some states, for example in California, Colorado, Maine, Michigan and Washington.

A youth call for ecological transition (and for America)

Unlike in the 1930s, the purpose of the new Corps is not to create immediate income opportunities for young people otherwise destined for unemployment and poverty. From what the official statement says, the American Climate Corps will be primarily a giant training program for a new generation of professionals in renewable energy, sustainable technologies, climate resilience and ecosystem restoration. In short, a rallying of the younger generation to be prepared, professionally as well, for the ecological and energy transition.

But if the issue of expertise and (re)skilling is one of the main knots of the green transition (which Europe is probably delaying in addressing), in the United States the matter cannot avoid being tinged with a certain nationalism. The American Climate Corps Wants You, the magazine Scientific American sarcastically titled last week, pointing out how the Corps' name change (no longer Civilian but American) is a reminder of the States' inherent patriotism.

“President Biden and other Democrats are trying to label climate action not just good for the environment, but good for America,” Rutgers University professor Mark Paul explains in the pages of the journal.

Finally, it should be remembered that we are on the verge of presidential elections and Joe Biden needs to regain support among the youth electorate, the segment of the population most sensitive to the climate issue. As demonstrated by the big New York City march on September 17, young Americans are not convinced that the Democratic government is doing enough for the climate, or at least not as much as was promised. And several controversial decisions, such as the recent approval of the Willow Oil Project in Alaska (oil drilling on a large area of public land), seem to prove them right.

This article is also available in Italian / Questo articolo è disponibile anche in italiano

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