Waiting for a New Deal job program? These US parks are already hiring

Danielle Johnson spends up to six hours a day working in a wooded section of Table Rock state park in South Carolina, navigating rough terrain in the hot sun to clear brush, tamp down dirt and make way for the park’s first new trail in 80 years.

This is not her usual gig. Until the pandemic hit, she was a rock-climbing and whitewater rafting instructor. There are others working alongside her who are also newly unemployed: a realtor, bartender and a sales representative for an outdoor outfitter.

They are all part of a new kind of work program spun up for the pandemic era, and which takes inspiration from a 1930s project that provided work in environmental conservation to relieve unemployment during the Great Depression.

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During the nine-year civilian conservation corps program, 3 million men (the only gender to which it was open) were dispatched to state parks, national parks and national forests in every state, occupied in planting trees, building trails, constructing fire roads and other duties. Significant infrastructure from this era is still in use, for example at Grand Canyon and Acadia national parks.

The new iterations aim to create outdoorsy jobs on public lands, supporting at least a handful of the 17.8 million Americans out of work during the pandemic. The cities of Juneau, Alaska, and Austin, Texas, have launched similar programs.

Unlike the original New Deal program, which President Franklin D Roosevelt launched to demonstrate the federal government’s commitment to getting Americans back to work, local governments and non-profits are spearheading the current efforts.

Johnson is employed by the Carolina Climbing Conservation Corps, or C4. The Carolina Climbers Coalition established C4 after the coronavirus pandemic led to widespread job losses in Asheville, North Carolina. The non-profit launched a fundraiser to create the program, generating $34,000 to hire eight part-time local workers displaced by Covid-19 for trail construction and maintenance projects in state parks. Crew members set their own schedules and work up to 40 hours a week, though owing to the heat and backbreaking labor, most do less.

“At the end of the day, I can look back and see how much of a difference I’ve made,” Johnson says. “We are adding to the legacy of the conservation corps.”

The crew have already completed projects at state parks in North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee since mid-May, and the project has enough funding to continue through October.

Yet the reliance on fundraising “affects the scope of impact we can have and the promises we can make to workers”, said Mike Reardon, the executive director of the CCC. “We can only keep their jobs going as long as people are donating.”

In Alaska, meanwhile, state lawmakers allocated $1m to the city of Juneau from the federal coronavirus relief package to create its own Covid-19 Conservation Corps, helping to address the city’s 11.6% unemployment rate. A 35-member crew has been hired to build and maintain trails at several municipal properties.

At Eaglecrest Ski Resort, for example, general manager Dave Scanlan had 45 applicants for 13 positions available through the city’s conservation corps. The crew, who are paid a starting wage of $19.72 an hour, started working on 1 July; their positions are funded through mid-October.

“Most of the work is outdoors, you’re naturally socially distanced and once these trails are built, the infrastructure stands the test of time,” says Scanlan. “We’re in a great position to build recreational infrastructure that will attract tourists when the lockdown is over.”

In the decades since the original civilian conservation corps ceased, the model has inspired similar national service programs aimed at addressing national crises. The AmeriCorps program, for instance, was created in 1994 to help students defray rising college costs. They receive a $6,195 educational award in exchange for working at community organizations.

“National service often gets attached to the big issue of the day,” said Melissa Bass, an associate professor of public policy at the University of Mississippi who has studied national service. Yet Donald Trump “has never been supportive of national service”, she added, and has advocated shutting down the agency that runs AmeriCorps and similar programs. For this reason it is hard to imagine they will receive support in subsequent stimulus packages.

Although the federal government has not introduced a widespread, Covid-related work relief program, in June a bipartisan group of senators did move a bill that would double the number of AmeriCorps positions and increase wages to bolster the response to the pandemic.

The largest of the new schemes is in Texas. In May, the Austin city council passed a resolution to invest $2m in the creation of the Austin civilian conservation corps (ACCC). Workers will be paid $15 an hour to maintain trails, plant trees and remove brush to reduce wildfire risk on public lands. ACCC is expected to hire up to 200 workers by the fall, said Alison Alter, a council member.

“We have an opportunity amidst among the current [pandemic] to be creative,” Alter says – to “get people working and give people hope”.

Yet as a whole, the current breed of conservation corps programs are on a far smaller scale than their New Deal antecedent. The combined efforts of the corps in North Carolina, Texas and Alaska will provide jobs for fewer than 250 workers.

Although the Texas project has funding from the federal coronavirus stimulus package, without a much larger federal response it will be exceedingly difficult for such schemes to reach 1930s levels.

In South Carolina, Johnson is grateful the Carolina Climbers Coalition stepped in to fill a local need.

It just so happens that she is working on first new trail in Table Rock state park, called the Pumpkintown trail, since members of the original civilian conservation corps were dispatched to the site in 1938.

“It was a needle-in-the-haystack opportunity,” she says. “Some of my former co-workers are still searching for work and friends have recounted the difficulty of finding something … I feel very grateful for this work.”