The American Climate Corps Puts a Fresh Spin on the New Deal

Katie Vartenigian spends her days in the forest. The 25-year-old rises early to lead her crew of Vermont Youth Conservation Corps members, sometimes building stone stairs to improve nature trails, other times clearing trees to manage bird habitat. “Rocks and dirt—that’s what we’re doing,” Vartenigian says.

In some ways, the crew’s work looks like a scene from a history book. Nearly a century ago, the Civilian Conservation Corps put 3 million young men to work to build trails and cabins and plant more than 2 billion trees. The sweeping effort transformed landscapes and offered families an economic lifeline during the Great Depression. Now, the Vermont group is part of a new government initiative trying to recapture that power: the American Climate Corps, which in June swore in its first cohort of young people for short-term jobs fighting climate change. 

The New Deal program provided the inspiration for today’s enterprise, but it offers an imperfect model: “The original CCC had very serious flaws,” says Trevor Dolan, who helped develop the Climate Corps concept as a policy lead for the advocacy group Evergreen Action. Exclusionary rules allowed only male enrollees and segregated the program by race, while a lack of ecological knowledge sometimes led to habitat-damaging missteps. As the Climate Corps puts boots on the ground, its supporters hope it can build on the CCC’s legacy while adapting to an environment, both natural and political, that’s changed dramatically since the 1930s.  

Supporters tout the new corps as a way to train a workforce in skills that are in short supply compared to what climate change demands, such as installing solar panels, managing wildfires, and developing sustainable farms. It’s also meant to help young people channel their climate anxiety into action—and get paid for it. “With my generation, this is one of the most pressing issues that we’re going to have to deal with,” says 18-year-old Jordyn Tomlinson, who spent the summer with the Mile High Youth Corps in Colorado.

Yet the American Climate Corps is starting smaller than the CCC, with an initial goal of signing on 20,000 members for terms up to a year. The Biden administration called for $10 billion in funding as part of a precursor to the Inflation Reduction Act, but that investment was abandoned during negotiations. Instead, the program has been left to cobble together a smaller pool of money from various sources. The EPA, for example, is contributing environmental justice funds, and the service agency AmeriCorps is supporting hiring.

The initiative is also joining forces with other corps organizations that have cropped up at state and local levels since the 1950s. Through these programs, enrollees like Vartenigian and Tomlinson often take on CCC-style trail building and conservation and, increasingly, work to address local climate-related needs. In its early hiring, the American Climate Corps is largely placing people within such groups, including the Vermont Youth Conservation Corps and Mile High Youth Corps. 

The localized approach means the new Climate Corps will tackle urban and rural projects, with a focus on supporting disadvantaged communities that face more severe climate impacts. Corps members may be found planting trees to cool urban heat islands, running compost programs, or making homes energy-efficient to reduce bills and emissions. That’s a major departure from the CCC, which intentionally sent its members far from home to work on rugged public lands, says Neil Maher, an environmental historian and author of Nature’s New Deal, a book about the original program.

Back in the 1930s, ecology was a brand-new science, Maher says, and some of the CCC’s work—like spreading poison to control pests or draining swamps to get rid of mosquitoes—actually damaged habitats and outraged the budding environmental movement. (“Why, then, should the CCC boys be made available for use on projects destructive of wild life and its habitat?” questioned a 1937 issue of Bird-Lore, the precursor to Audubon magazine.)

Today’s corps projects reflect a much better understanding of the natural world—and awareness that it’s in trouble. But how far the program can go in mobilizing a new climate workforce depends on how long it sticks around. “The climate crisis is a generational challenge,” Dolan says, and meeting it requires sustained investment. Yet Republican lawmakers have resisted the White House proposal to spend $8 billion over the next decade to hire 50,000 workers a year. With the 2024 election approaching, the corps has no long-term funding secured, even as record-breaking heat and extreme weather drive home the urgency of building climate resilience.

Imperfections aside, Maher says the original corps showed the value of investing in human resources while conserving natural ones. Though many CCC members signed up for a job, the corps taught them to be part of something bigger. “People nowadays can’t realize the extent of the CCC program,” one former corps member told Audubon in 1983. “Why, it was just like dropping a rock in the pond. The ripples spread out and out.”

For Vartenigian, that sense of purpose has been as important as the technical skills she’s gained in Vermont’s forests. As Climate Corps workers strengthen communities and ecosystems, she hopes they may be transformed, too—building up a personal resilience. “Living in a little crew, camping in the woods, removed from everything, is hard,” she says. “But if you can do that, you’re prepared for whatever else.”

This piece originally ran in the Fall 2024 issue as “Corps Values.” To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.