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The Rightful Heritage of All

The Environmental Lessons of the Great Depression and the New Deal Response

SHEILA D. COLLINS

I see an America whose rivers and valleys and lakes—hills and streams and plains—the mountains over our land and nature’s wealth deep under the earth—are protected as the rightful heritage of all the people.

—Franklin D. Roosevelt, Cleveland, Ohio, November 2, 1940

Those who have sought to mine the history of the Great Depression for its economic lessons have tended to forget that the Great Depression was not only an economic disaster, but an environmental one as well. Most environmental historians have been equally ignorant of the meaning of the Great Depression, either treating the environmental conditions of the time as a “blank space” in the country’s environmental narrative, or interpreting the New Deal’s administrative state as antithetical to environmental protection.¹ Even scholars of the New Deal have neglected its environmental aspects. Nor have they seen how central conservation was to the New Deal agenda and to Roosevelt himself;² and fewer still have understood that financial crises and environmental crises are interlinked. In fact, they represent twin peaks of a systemic civilizational crisis of unprecedented but entirely foreseeable and preventable proportions. Clearly, the climate crisis we currently face is unprecedented, yet there are parallels between the two periods that extend beyond the purely economic. Understanding both periods as times of unprecedented, intertwined economic and environmental crises may help us see lessons for current citizens and policymakers. This chapter will survey the environmental crisis of the Great Depression era, examine both the philosophy and practice of the New Deal’s approach to environmental conservation, including both its accomplishments and limitations, and look at the lessons for environmental policy making today that can be drawn from the specific programs enacted by the New Deal.

The Environmental Crisis of the 1930s

The financial collapse of the 1930s, as Joseph Stiglitz has argued, was a consequence of deeper problems in the real (i.e., productive) economy that had been building for decades before the official Depression started. Stiglitz attributes the problem to declining prices and increasing productivity in agriculture that resulted in unemployment and a credit crunch in a sector that employed a fifth of the nation’s workers.³ Stiglitz’s explanation, however, confuses the symptoms with the causes. A deeper explanation requires that we look at the relationship between the land and its human ecosystem, something Roosevelt and his Brain Trust understood far better than most of today’s economists. As Miller and Rees recently observed, “Rather late in the play, we are beginning to recognize that a necessary prerequisite for both economic security and social justice is ecological stability.”⁴

By the 1920s, something had gone terribly wrong with our relationship with the ecosystem, and that most fundamental of activities—the growing of food—was the first to exhibit the symptoms of the disease. In the 1920s, rural poverty was rampant. Farmers in the Deep South, the Appalachian region, the Tennessee Valley, the Midwest, and the Great Plains were facing bankruptcy, and would soon experience what would turn out to be the greatest environmental disaster in American history. By the start of the Great Depression, commodity prices had fallen by 50 percent below their prewar levels, and per capita farm income was one-third the national average. Only 16 percent of farm households earned incomes above the national median. Ninety percent of farms relied on gas engines, horses, mules, and hand labor for power and kerosene lamps for light. Seventy-five percent had no indoor plumbing. Illiteracy was twice as common in rural areas as in cities. The causes of rural poverty differed slightly for each region, but both economic and environmental devastation were linked by a common thread: capitalism’s rampant disregard for the integrity of the ecosystem, the ruthless, competitive greed that it engendered, and the social divisions that it exploited in the human ecosystem.

The rural southeastern part of the United States was the poorest. Nearly one million children between the ages of seven and thirteen had no schooling. Health care was largely nonexistent. More than 1,300 rural counties containing 17 million people had no general hospital and lacked even a public health nurse. Unattended childbirths were frequent; malnutrition, pellagra, malaria, hookworm, and other parasites were rampant. Lorena Hickock, an Associated Press reporter who traveled through the region in 1933, reported to Harry Hopkins, a key member of the Roosevelt Administration:

I just can’t describe to you some of the things I’ve seen and heard down here.… I shall never forget them—never as long as I live. Southern farm workers, half starved whites and blacks struggle in competition for less than my dog gets at home, for the privilege of living in huts that are infinitely less comfortable than his kennel.⁵

The causes of Southern poverty were twofold: the legacy of the slave system and the sharecropping system that succeeded it. Both systems treated human beings, not as ecological entities themselves, whose well-being was intimately tied to the functional integrity of the non-human ecosystem, but as tools for extracting products from the land that would then be appropriated by others. To get the most bang for the buck, they relied on a monocropping system that had robbed the soil of its nutrients, destroyed natural biodiversity, and deprived the exploited human “capital” of the knowledge needed for its own survival. An economic system based on extreme social exploitation was exacerbated by the overproduction (made possible by new technology) required by World War I, so that when postwar demand slackened, crop prices fell by as much as one-third to two-thirds. Rising prices for farm machinery and fertilizer, coupled with ignorance about soil conservation methods, were also at fault.

The Appalachian region, stretching from the southern tier of New York State through the northern regions of Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia, amounted to America’s own Third World. Like many sub-Saharan African countries today, it had been repeatedly robbed of its natural resources—lumber, coal, oil, gas—by exploitative corporations, leaving behind a devastated land that, well before the stock market crash of 1929, failed to sustain even subsistence mountain agriculture. Here, in the heart of the coal industry, electricity was nonexistent. Families lit their shacks with kerosene, cooked on wood-burning stoves, dumped their garbage into the mountain “hollers,” and eked out a bare subsistence. In some counties, unemployment was as high as 80 percent. In the Tennessee Valley (covering Tennessee, parts of Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia) an estimated one-third of the population suffered from malaria. Overproduction had also driven Midwestern family farmers into bankruptcy. By the early 1930s, produce was selling at 50 percent or less of the cost of its production. In response to slashed prices, farmers dumped millions of gallons of milk, plowed under their surplus, and slaughtered their hogs and cattle in a futile effort to boost prices, even at a time when people across the country were facing malnutrition and starvation. But farm foreclosures multiplied, and many farmers organized to try to prevent eviction. So radicalized were farmers becoming that Edward O’Neal, president of the Farm Bureau Federation, warned Congress that “unless something is done for the American farmer we will have revolution in the country within less than twelve months.”⁶ Altogether, 750,000 family farms would be lost during the Great Depression.

Deforestation also added to the inability of the land to sustain its human occupants. Despite warnings as early as the 1870s that deforestation would result in streams overflowing their banks, causing floods, by the 1930s fully seven-eighths of the nation’s original forests had been destroyed.⁷ Farmers who had tried to earn money by lumbering had stripped the forests throughout the South, resulting in deep, rain-washed gullies that left land unsuitable for growing other crops like grains and vegetables. In other parts of the country, timber barons had stripped the land clean and lobbied to prevent Congress from legislating sound forest-management practices. Moreover, by 1933, every major white pine region in the country had been severely affected by blister rust, an alien tree disease that threatened to eradicate white pine completely from the nation’s forests.

One result of deforestation was the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, the most destructive river flood in the history of the United States up to that time. Rains of biblical proportions began in the winter of 1926, and by the spring of 1927, the Mississippi River broke its levee system in 145 places, flooding 27,000 square miles in ten states. One levee breech in Mississippi unleashed a violent cascade of water with the force of Niagara Falls, containing more water than the falls itself and the river behind it. An area up to eighty miles wide was inundated to a depth of thirty feet. The flood caused over $400 million in damages (about $5.3 billion in 2013), killed 246 people in seven states, and displaced over a million people.⁸ In the words of historian Stephen Ambrose, the Great Mississippi Flood created “more water, more damage, more fear, more panic, more misery, more death by drowning than any American had seen before, or would again.”⁹ Ironically, these words were written in 2001, just four years before Hurricane Katrina, which killed 2,000 people and destroyed over 100,000 homes.¹⁰ Then, as now, the Army Corps of Engineers had assured the affected populations that the levees would hold, that technology would outwit nature.

On the Great Plains, a region that stretches from Canada to Texas and from the Rocky Mountains east, crossing seven states, farmers in the late 1920s were beginning to face what has been called the greatest sustained environmental disaster of the twentieth century.¹¹ The full meaning of what came to be known as the Dust Bowl, its causes and the remedies that were eventually devised in an effort to recover from it, have been forgotten by an American public that is likely to face a similar environmental disaster within the next decades.

The Dust Bowl was a man-made disaster. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the great American heartland that had supported Native American populations for thousands of years but from which they had been ruthlessly dispossessed was opened up to exploitation through the Homestead Acts, despite a warning by Major John Wesley Powell to the Interior Department in 1878 that the prevailing methods of land distribution and agriculture would not work in the arid West.¹² The Homestead Acts relieved overcrowded Eastern cities by offering “public” land to any adult for little more than an $18 filing fee, provided the claimant moved onto the land and developed it for personal use. After five years, applicants could file for a deed to the land after demonstrating that improvements had been made. From 1862 to 1938, some 287.5 million acres, or 20 percent of the so-called public domain, was granted or sold to homesteaders.¹³ The Homestead Acts unleashed a frenzy of greed and speculation, fueled by unscrupulous developers who promised those who had lost out in earlier land grabs overnight riches in wheat production and cattle ranching. “Railroads, banks, politicians, and newspaper editors all played a variation of the theme.”¹⁴ Soon, millions of acres of prairie grass were being plowed up or overgrazed. With rainfall more abundant in the first few decades, the hyperbole of the developers seemed to bear fruit. In less than ten years, homesteaders went from virtual poverty to being masters of wheat estates, directing harvests with wondrous new machines, at profit margins that in some cases were ten times the cost of production.¹⁵ World War I more than doubled the price of wheat, and production increased by fifty percent with government-guaranteed prices. But in the postwar decade, even though the need for wheat was now reduced, the expansion continued, as did the ripping up of the product of thousands of years of evolution.

Much of the Great Plains should never have been settled. A region unique in its flatness and lack of forest cover, it constituted 21 percent of the entire land area of the United States and Canada, making it the largest single ecosystem on the continent outside the boreal forest. The Great Plains amounted to a gigantic inland sea of perennial grasses that had evolved over 20,000 years or more. A dense root system had allowed these grasses to hold moisture a foot or more below ground level, a perfect fit for the sandy loam of the region and the fierce winds and periodic droughts that swept through it.¹⁶ Before whites had driven the indigenous people off the land, the region had been home to millions of buffalo, nearly all of which would subsequently be slaughtered, in addition to other creatures that had evolved to fit the land.

Given the nature of this ecosystem, the bonanza promised by the developers could not last. Starting in the late 1920s, the region suffered the onset of a long drought that was to last for much of the decade and in some places into the 1940s. Temperatures rose above 100 degrees Fahrenheit for weeks on end. Lakes, ponds, and reservoirs shrank. Fish, frogs, toads, and salamanders died by the millions.¹⁷ With no grass to hold the calcified soil and no water to irrigate crops, nothing would grow. On the Plains, the fierce winds whipped across the fields raising billowing clouds of dust into the sky as high as 10,000 feet or more, rolling like moving mountains.¹⁸ The Dust Bowl was also a health crisis. Physicians across the Midwest reported thousands of cases of what came to be known as “dust pneumonia,” which sometimes resulted in death.¹⁹ On the northern Plains, the heat and drought hatched a plague of grasshoppers that darkened the sky and ate everything from corn on the stalk to garments hung on clotheslines.²⁰ To those who lived through it, the Dust Bowl had the character of a biblical apocalypse. Periodically, the “dusters,” as the storms were called, would darken skies from Canada south to Texas and east to Washington, D.C., and New York. One particularly bad storm blanketed ships in dust as far as 300 miles off the Eastern Seaboard and dropped 12 million tons on Chicago.²¹ The worst duster of all, which occurred on April 14, 1935, carried in one day twice as much dirt as was dug out of the earth to create the Panama Canal, which had taken seven years to build.²² By 1934, an estimated one-sixth of the nation’s topsoil had blown away or was going.²³

The Dust Bowl created the first great migration of environmental refugees in the modern age. An estimated 2.5 million people between 1932 and 1940 left their homes on the Great Plains and headed West to seek work. But a country suffering from a depression was ill equipped to deal with this great dislocation. Some found poorly paid work in the fruit and vegetable fields as migrant laborers, but many were turned away at state borders, and many often endured squalor in roadside ditch encampments or as hoboes who rode the rails. In the context of the times, the environmental disasters of the 1920s and 1930s were monumental ecological and human disasters, comparable in relation to this country to the predicted world-wide devastation wrought by global warming.

The Environmental Knowledge of the Great Depression Era

While the concept of conservation had been implanted as an American value during the Progressive era and enshrined in legislation, it was still a limited and somewhat utilitarian view that prevailed in public policy.²⁴ A portion of the public domain was to be set aside in perpetuity as wilderness, and public forests were to be managed wisely so that they would continue to be economically productive. Teddy Roosevelt and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, along with the naturalist John Muir, are justly credited with the establishment of the National Parks system and with conceiving of conservation as a democratic virtue. It was in this period that the National Forest Service was established, along with the nation’s system of wildlife refuges and the first commission to investigate the condition of the country’s navigable waterways. Also a product of the Progressive Era was protection of human health as a legitimate goal of conservation, resulting in the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. The concept of sustainability of the nation’s natural resources for future generations was also a result of Progressive-era thinking. But in 1933, the year Franklin Roosevelt took office, Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, with its more holistic understanding of ecosystems, was still sixteen years into the future, and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which demonstrated that the destruction of nature and human health were part of the same misuse of technology in the service of so-called “progress,” was eighteen years away.

Roosevelt would build on the legacy left by his predecessors but give the environment a new meaning and significance. His approach to the environment was more complex, more a product of scientific interrogation of natural systems and thus closer to that of Leopold and Carson than to that of his cousin Theodore, and it would take into account the need to develop some kind of balance between human well-being and environmental conservation. Franklin Roosevelt was a more modern environmentalist than his predecessors and is still ahead of any of his presidential successors.

The New Deal’s Economic and Environmental Vision

Though Franklin D. Roosevelt was no radical, the American people were fortunate to have elected as their president in 1932 a man who was suited to the exigencies of the times. From his experience with polio, Roosevelt knew about human suffering. He had, as the focus of his policies, the “forgotten man [sic]”—the common worker, the unemployed, the homeless and the destitute.²⁵ But beyond that, he had an uncommon understanding of ecological principles and a visceral empathy for the natural world. As Schlesinger wrote, “he felt the scars and exhaustion of the earth almost as personal injuries.”²⁶ Another historian wrote:

By innate character and formative experience he was a country gentleman, invincibly, personally rural in his outlook upon a gigantically mechanized and urbanized America. Stronger in him than in most men was a profound instinctive feeling for living nature. Something deep in his spirit vibrated in rare sympathy with the rhythms of seasonal change and weather change, of river flow and sea tide, and the growth of green-growing things, trees, and grass, food plants and flowers.… thrusting their way out of the living soil into sunlight and air, ripening there in open air, then dying back into the soil whence they came.²⁷

Roosevelt’s love of nature was formed during his boyhood on the family estate at Hyde Park, New York, where he developed an interest in the site from both an historical and ecological perspective. Here he collected species of all the birds on the estate, noted the effects of soil erosion and deforestation, and became committed to the need for reforestation and land conservation. Roosevelt’s approach to environmental protection was based on an organic feeling for and knowledge of the land’s specific ecology. His Farm Journal on the land at Hyde Park, which he kept from 1911 to 1917, reveals “a level of attention rivaling the chronicle of an agronomist’s forest science log.”²⁸ His interest in the land was less romantic than that of a Henry Thoreau or a John Muir; and in contrast to TR, for whom “wild” nature was something against which to test one’s masculinity, FDR’s nature was more domesticated, the nature of field and farm and productive forest. The land was a set of relationships—between humans and between humans and the natural world—that had evolved over time. The result of that relationship had often been destructive. Thus, the land had to be carefully husbanded if it was to be able to regenerate itself and therefore to support its human inhabitants. Sustainable land management was, for Roosevelt, the foundation of a democratic society.²⁹

From the time he first entered public life, Roosevelt had sought to make conservation a key focus of public policy. His sensitivity to the integrity of the natural world had been publicly defined as early as 1912 when, as chair of the Agriculture Committee of the New York State Senate, he spelled out in a speech the rudiments of what we now call ecological ethics, among whose principles could be discerned the ideas of generational and intergenerational equity. The speech could just as well have been written about the United States today as of the country in 1912. In it he laments both the loss of forests to clear cutting and the reckless use of land resulting from private ownership, connecting the health of the land to the health of the human community. In so doing he created a definition of “liberty” that pertained not only to the individual, but to the community, thus imbuing time-honored values with new meaning.

There are many persons left to-day that can see no reason why if a man owns land he should not be permitted to do as he likes with it.… They care not what happens after they are gone and I will go even further and say that they care not what happens even to their neighbors, to the community as a whole, during their own lifetime. The opponents of Conservation who, after all, are merely opponents of the liberty of the community, will argue that even though they do exhaust all the natural resources, the inventiveness of man and the progress of civilization will supply a substitute when the crisis comes.… I have taken the conservation of our natural resources as the first lesson that points to the necessity for seeking community freedom, because I believe it to be the most important of all our lessons.³⁰

For Roosevelt, the health of the human community required not only that the piece of land on which a particular community lived be handled sustainably, but that Americans had a national—long distance—responsibility to each other to care for the land, whether that be in Hyde Park or North Dakota. In a speech to the rather prosperous members of the Home Club of Hyde Park, he said:

if a farm family is on the verge of starvation in North Dakota, we people in the town of Hyde Park are helping to pay to keep that family from actual starvation; if we have made mistakes in the settling of the country in the past, we in the town of Hyde Park have got to pay to correct those mistakes. In other words, that we have a definite stake, not merely the spiritual side of it, or the social side of it, or the patriotic side, but the actual financial side of it.³¹

As chairman of the New York State Senate’s Forest, Fish and Game Committee, Roosevelt publicized threats to the state’s natural resources and introduced eight bills aimed at conserving them; and as the governor of New York State, he designed a rural program that enlisted the support of the state’s farmers and foresters as well as national forestry leaders to expand the state’s forests, defying upstate power companies that sought to acquire leases on forest preserves in order to create reservoirs for generating hydroelectric power. He also successfully sponsored an amendment to the state constitution which gave the state government authority to purchase and reforest abandoned and sub-marginal land. It was the nation’s largest reforestation program to date.

When he assumed the presidency of the United States in the midst of the greatest economic and environmental catastrophes the country had ever seen, Roosevelt immediately set to work on three programs that uniquely spoke to the combined concerns of unemployment, underdevelopment, and environmental crisis: the Civilian Conservation Core, the Soil Conservation Service, and the Tennessee Valley Authority. All three programs were FDR’s brainchildren,³² all were introduced and initiated within the first 100 days of his presidency, and all benefitted from his eagerness to push them through in the face of opposition and ridicule from some special-interest groups.

In the conception and carrying out of these programs, we can see a progression in Roosevelt’s ecological understanding—an understanding that immeasurably benefited the people and without which the United States might not have emerged as the economic power it did after the Second World War. Central to the New Deal environmental programs was the idea of careful land management and planning based on scientific research that attempted to reconcile ecological and human patterns of evolution. For New Deal planners, the landscape was a middle ground between the needs of civilization and the needs of wild nature. Thus, prevention, recovery, and restoration of destroyed landscapes, as well as conservation, were placed on the public agenda. This represented a significant—indeed a watershed—shift from a public ethos in which decentralization, atomistic thinking, and short-term decision making had led to tremendous waste, inefficiency, and environmental destruction. It also differed from the Progressive-era ethos in which “wild” nature was to be preserved as much as possible in its pristine state so that human beings, leaving the realm of “civilization” behind, could partake of its wonders. Education of the public about these changing ideas of nature and humanity’s role were also part of the New Deal approach to the environment.³³ The third characteristic of the New Deal approach, which demonstrates its very modern character, was the idea of holistic planning. Problems such as soil erosion, flooding, deforestation, disappearing wildlife, unemployment, and poor health were not seen as isolated issues but as interrelated, thus requiring that they be treated together.

The Civilian Conservation Corps

The most popular of the New Deal work programs was the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a semi-militarized voluntary work program for impoverished young people. From its inception in 1933 as the Emergency Conservation Work program (its name was changed in 1937) to its termination in 1942, the CCC employed an estimated 3 million youths, 85,000 Native Americans, and 225,000 World War I veterans, making it the largest peacetime manpower mobilization in history.³⁴ The program was conceived as fulfilling a double mission—serving as a work program for unemployed youth and as a way of halting the erosion of the nation’s neglected natural resource base—thus bringing together two wasted resources in an attempt to save both. But in its implementation, it also served four other functions: it provided extra financial assistance for urban families on relief; it infused local communities with much needed financial and technical aid; it improved the health of its impoverished and malnourished recruits; and it provided education and training for them. In urging passage of the program, Roosevelt said:

This enterprise is an established part of our national policy. It will conserve our precious natural resources. It will pay dividends to the present and future generations. It will make improvements in national and state domains which have been largely forgotten in the past few years of industrial development.… We can take a vast army of these unemployed out into healthful surroundings. We can eliminate, to some extent at least, the threat that enforced idleness brings to spiritual and moral stability. It is not a panacea for all the unemployment but it is an essential step in this emergency.³⁵

At the same time the program was also a politically clever move, as it served as a hedge against widespread social turbulence that was then imminent.³⁶

Membership in the CCC was for young people whose parents were on relief, with the exception of the separate programs for veterans and Native Americans. In 1937, Congress dropped the relief requirement. CCC workers were to be put to work to carry out a broad natural resource conservation program on national, state, and municipal lands. Passage of the legislation setting up the CCC met with expected criticism from Republicans and business interests that the wages were not to compete with the private sector, and from labor leaders that the low wages proposed—$1 per day—would drive wages down for all workers. Some objected to what at first appeared to be an overly militaristic program reminiscent of the Nazi and Soviet youth programs, as the Army was to be put in charge of logistics. To this Roosevelt replied that the corps was a civilian corps, explaining that since most of the young men lived in the East and most of the work projects were to be in the West, the Army was the only agency capable of handling the logistics of such an ambitious program in such short order.

There had never before been an organization like the CCC. Prior to the New Deal, the federal government hardly touched the lives of ordinary Americans. With the exception of Civil War veterans’ pensions, most Americans’ experience of government had been with their local and state governments. Yet this was an experiment in top-level management designed to prevent red tape and political wrangling from strangling the newborn effort. In order to get the legislation passed, details that would be likely to generate political backlash if embedded in the legislation were largely left to the president.

The program required the cooperation of four different federal departments. The Labor Department was charged with hiring; the War Department with physical training, transportation to specially constructed work camps, clothing, housing, and day-to-day running of the camps; and the departments of Agriculture and Interior with finding the work projects, in conjunction with state and local governments. In order to appease labor, the entire operation was directed by Robert Fechner, a vice-president of the Machinists’ Union and of the AFL. Unemployed local woodsmen were hired to supervise the work, and within a few months a voluntary education program was developed providing academic subjects, vocational classes, and job training. Ninety percent of enrollees participated in some aspect of the educational program, which was run by the military camp commanders with the help of civilian educational personnel.

As noted earlier, Roosevelt was personally and viscerally concerned about forest conservation. In response to a rather ignorant question from a reporter as to what the CCC men would do in the forests, Roosevelt replied with a lecture on forestry that displayed his knowledge of the forest as a living ecosystem and his concern for the proper management of the country’s forests. The passage below is typical of the kind of “teaching” that Roosevelt conducted during his presidency.

We have to have another class here on it. The easiest way to explain it is this: Taking it all through the East where, of course, the unemployment is relatively the worst with far more people, nearly all of the so-called forest land owned by the Government is second, third or fourth growth land—what we call scrub growth which has grown up on it. What does that consist of? Probably an average of four or five thousand trees to the acre little bits of trees, saplings, and so forth. Proper forestation is not possible; in other words, you will never get a marketable timber growth on that kind of land—plenty of cordwood and that is about all. But the timber supply, the lumber supply of the country, at the present rate of cutting we are using lumber somewhere around three to four times the rate of the annual growth. In other words, we are rapidly coming to an end of the natural lumber resources and the end is within sight and, unless something is done about it, we will become a very large lumber importing nation, the figures showing that it will be from 20 to 40 years when that will come about. Now, take this second, third, fourth growth land.… Say there are five thousand of these saplings to the acre.… They go in there and take out the crooked trees, the dead trees, the bushes and stuff like that that has no value as lumber, and leave approximately one thousand trees to the acre. That means that they are sufficiently spaced to get plenty of light and air and there is not too much of a strain on the soil. Those trees then eventually will become a very valuable lumber crop. That is the simplest way of explaining the operations so far as the trees themselves go.³⁷

The practicality and wisdom of Roosevelt’s plan to have the CCC reforest the country had been questioned by some foresters, but praised by another as “the most unique and outstanding of its kind in the history of American forestry.”³⁸ The latter appraisal turned out to have been the correct one. Thanks to Roosevelt’s vision, by the end of the program in 1942, nearly three billion trees had been planted, white pine blister rust had been brought under control, and the eradication of tree-killing insects resulted in the preservation of forests. In addition to these measures, the CCC, in cooperation with a remarkable cadre of architects, engineers, landscape designers, and park planners, had created an estimated 800 new state and county parks and an infrastructure for their ongoing maintenance, as well as trails, overnight cabins and shelters, campgrounds, dams, and ski runs to facilitate their recreational use.³⁹

Thousands of acres of grazing lands in the West were re-grassed by the CCC, fences and bridges built, and rodent-control schemes enacted. One feature of the effort to recover the Great Plains was Roosevelt’s own idea, pushed over the objections of most professional foresters. This was a “shelterbelt” of drought-resistant trees that were planted in 100-mile wide rows crosswise to the prevailing winds in order to break the winds, anchor soil, and retain moisture. By the end of the decade, shelterbelts of over 22 million trees had become a prominent feature of the Plains landscape and had achieved all the success predicted by their proponents.⁴⁰ Moreover, by 1942, the CCC’s firefighting efforts had succeeded in reducing the acreage lost by fire to its lowest point ever, even though a record number of fires were reported. The CCC also successfully fought seventeen subterranean coal fires that had been burning for years in Wyoming.⁴¹

By the start of the Depression, the United States had experienced nearly 300 years of unchecked wildlife destruction, which was revealed by the President’s Committee on Wildlife Restoration, appointed in 1934. At the Committee’s insistence on action, a wildlife restoration program was devised, and the CCC was used in its implementation.⁴² CCC enrollees developed sub-marginal land as wildlife refuges; built fish-rearing ponds and animal shelters; developed springs; planted food for animals and birds; constructed nesting areas and reintroduced wildlife to depleted areas; stocked streams, dams, and rivers with fish; and collected, treated, and released sick or injured creatures on federal refuges. Some camps were involved in wildlife research, and many more were tasked with the monitoring of wildlife. By 1938, the most serious aspects of wildlife wastage had been ameliorated, and funding for wildlife administration had increased by 450 percent. Other activities included the preservation of historical sites and monuments and irrigation and flood control projects, including the construction of major dams.

Despite Roosevelt’s desire to make the CCC permanent and its director’s plea for a permanent CCC before the Senate Unemployment and Relief Committee in 1938, the return to nearly full employment during World War II meant that the program could no longer justify its existence to its critics. There were certainly functions that a reorganized permanent youth service corps could usefully perform. Preservation and restoration of the environment, after all, would be an ongoing necessity; but the exigencies of its origins, the opposition of conservatives to any permanent work program, and the attention now focused on preparing for the United States’s involvement in World War II meant that it was doomed to temporary status.

The Soil Conservation Service

As we have seen, soil conservation had also been central to Roosevelt’s early development as an environmentalist. Although some farmers practiced soil conservation, soil erosion continued to be a problem in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and none of the agricultural agencies created during the latter half of the nineteenth century saw soil conservation as a priority.⁴³ By 1933, however, dirt from the Dust Bowl had settled over the halls of Congress and the Department of Agriculture, where soil conservation scientists were still trying to figure out what had gone wrong. In 1929, a dynamic soil scientist, Hugh Hammond Bennett, who had made a reputation as both an alarmist and an evangelist for soil conservation, had been hired to head up what was called the Soil Erosion Service in the Interior Department. Seeking a firmer legislative foundation for soil conservation, Bennett successfully promoted passage of the Soil Conservation Act of 1935, which created a Soil Conservation Service in the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Bennett served as its first chief until his retirement in 1951. Travelling by train across the United States in 1934, Roosevelt had seen for himself the devastation that improper farming methods had wrought on the northern Plains. As he rode toward Green Bay, Wisconsin, he had a vision of America that one of his biographers described as an “organismic watershed concept”:

There was in Roosevelt’s mind a vivid, though vaguely defined, sense of water, flowing water, as means and organizing principle of Union. The watershed became metaphor. It bespoke the unity of nature and the bitter wages of man’s sinning against this unity. By the same token, it bespoke the natural necessity and the basis in nature for defining individual freedom as a cooperative enterprise in any truly civilized human society, especially one of advanced technology. The America it stood for would be possessed of that “which a young Franklin Roosevelt … struggled so hard to describe two decades ago.…⁴⁴

Following Roosevelt’s vision, the Soil Conservation Service was to set up a series of Soil Conservation Districts to be selected, wherever possible, on a watershed basis. The program represented the first major federal commitment to the preservation of privately held natural resources.⁴⁵ Roosevelt saw that if members of Congress could see the positive effects on the reduction of flood heights and the deposition of silt from rolling uplands, they would be more likely to fund the program. Within a few weeks, Bennett had selected a staff “notable, even among New Deal agencies, for zealous, youthful dedication to its work.”⁴⁶ Within a few months, forty erosion control projects encompassing 4 million acres were operating in thirty-one states, and scores of CCC camps were working with local farmers.

The Coon Valley Project in southwestern Wisconsin established the model for the rest of the soil conservation projects. Here everything was interconnected by running water. Water not only compelled cooperation among farmers, but created interdependencies and cooperation among a variety of technical experts—agronomists, soil chemists, foresters, wildlife specialists, agricultural engineers, agricultural economists. All these came into Coon Valley to make a concerted attack on soil erosion in cooperation with CCC’ers and local farmers. In less than a year there was marked improvement in both Coon Valley’s physical appearance and, interestingly, in the growth of community among its inhabitants—an outcome Roosevelt had foreseen in his early conviction that ecological health was necessary for community health. Within four years of the Soil Conservation Service’s inception, over half the farms were operating in accordance with complete farm conservation plans.⁴⁷ By 1938, the CCC had developed more than 500 soil project areas in forty-four states, employing about 60,000 youths annually. Their work consisted of demonstrating practical methods of soil conservation to farmers, actual work on private land in cooperation with landowners, and the development and improvement of erosion control techniques through research. The agency’s work and staff spread nationwide, eventually cooperating with nearly 3,000 locally organized conservation districts. The conservation districts proved to be very popular in the field.

The Tennessee Valley Authority

The Tennessee River and its tributaries had always been volatile; relatively placid in some seasons and wild and uncontrollable in others. The Mississippi flood of 1927 had established flood control as a continuing responsibility of the federal government, and one of the initial purposes of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was to control hillside erosion through proper soil conservation and to create a series of reservoirs and dams to mitigate flooding and harness the river’s potential to provide power and navigation to the region. Roosevelt’s vision of the project was a multidimensional one and perhaps the boldest challenge to the established order, as it had the potential to demonstrate that planning and community cooperation could work and that a government-owned business could compete successfully with private enterprise.⁴⁸ It would link water power, flood control, forestry, conservation, reclamation, agriculture, and industry in one vast experiment that, if successful, could be replicated in other major watersheds around the country. It was to be the basis of a new kind of economy. “Could the valley be so transformed by regional planning,” he asked, “as to support not only those now living in it, and at a decent standard of living, but also others who moved in, myriads of others who now, jobless and hopeless, walked the city streets?” His vision was of a kind of back-to-the-land movement where people could be spiritually and physically restored through useful work in small industries “where the people can produce what they use, and where they can use what they produce, and where, without dislocating the industry of America, we can absorb a lot of this unemployment, and give the population a sound footing on which it can live.”⁴⁹

In the structure of its governmental relations, the TVA was without organizational precedent, occupying a place midway between the national government and the states. Directed by a three-person board appointed by the president, it was nevertheless accountable not only to the federal government, but to state, county, and local governments. This required a complex network of agreements with states, cities, counties, the U.S. Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Agriculture Department, the U.S. Public Health Service, and many private organizations such as farmers’ cooperatives. In the complex federal structure of the United States, with its myriad levels of government each having different jurisdictional authority, often in competition with each other, and with the endemic fear of “Big Government” that had been built into the political culture from the founding, this was no easy task. As one of its staff members recalled, the TVA became an illuminator of a number of dichotomies that had plagued—and still plague—American political life: centralization vs. decentralization; uniformity vs. diversity; regionalism vs. sectionalism; public vs. private realms. Amazingly, the TVA was able to hold both sides of these dichotomies in creative tension, at least for a period of five years. It was a centralized agency working in a decentralized manner that actually empowered states and local governments, giving them responsibilities not formerly within their province. Employing the vision of a unified region defined by its particular ecosystem required diversity in organizational structure, procedures, and methods. The TVA sought to build a strong regional economy that could contribute to a stronger national economy. While recognizing the importance of the work of specialists, it insisted on an integrated approach to development.⁵⁰ Each issue TVA faced—whether it was power production, navigation, flood control, malaria prevention, reforestation, or erosion control—was studied in its broadest context and weighed in relation to the others.

The TVA built locks and cleared channels for river transportation, exorcised the curse of periodic floods, developed fertilizers, taught farmers how to improve crop yields, improved agricultural tools, replanted forests, controlled forest fires, and improved habitats for wildlife and fish. With passage of the Flood Control Act of 1936, policies to control floods were put in place that endure to this day. The remarkable engineering projects carried out by the Corps of Engineers have saved billions of dollars in property damage and protected hundreds of thousands of people from anxiety, injury, and death.

Prior to the establishment of the TVA little attention had been given to water quality, and little knowledge was available. The TVA undertook a survey of the extent of stream pollution. The facts collected provided a basis for the development of the first stream pollution legislation in various states and laid the groundwork for implementation of the 1948 Federal Water Pollution Control Act.

Within sixteen years of the TVA’s operation, malaria had been completely eradicated through a scheme of water fluctuation measures for its reservoirs, creating an environment in which the larvae of mosquitoes were unable to thrive. Unlike the modern tendency to treat insect infestation with chemicals, in this case an ecologically consonant remedy was found. By collaborating with health institutions in the search for knowledge and control, the TVA helped stimulate greater interest in malaria control in areas far beyond the zone of direct influence.⁵¹ Fertilizer production was revolutionized not only in this country but abroad, so that fertilizer is now made with the aid of TVA technology.⁵² But the most dramatic change came from the electricity generated by TVA dams. Within a decade, the TVA had built 21 dams, and by the early 1940s, one out of every five farms had been electrified. Electric lights and modern appliances made life easier and farms more productive. Electricity also drew industries into the region, providing desperately needed jobs.

Limitations of the New Deal Programs

While providing very important and lasting legacies for generations to come, neither the CCC, the TVA, nor any of the other stimulus programs devised by the Roosevelt Administration was able to bring the country out of the Great Depression. The business community refused to allow government stimulus spending anywhere near what was needed, and Roosevelt himself did not veer from his commitment to a balanced budget until he was persuaded to reverse his disastrous 1937 budget balancing decision and to increase WPA spending substantially, though not enough to end the Depression. Thus, the works programs of the New Deal that brought hope to so many and did so much to conserve the environment and culture, improve health, and build the infrastructure that is still in use today were doomed to be temporary, all of them ending with the onset of World War II.

This is not to say that there were no problems in the execution of these programs. In an era of deep racial segregation, with congressional committees headed by Southern Democrats and a federal system dictating that most programs had to be implemented by the states, blacks in work programs faced discrimination both in hiring and pay scales. The CCC was an exception. Roosevelt stipulated that the CCC employ African Americans, which it did in about the same proportion as their representation in the population, yet they had to serve in segregated units. So too, when the TVA built model communities, they were racially segregated. Like so many of the New Deal work programs, the CCC was conceived as a males-only program, depriving women of the opportunity to gain new skills and to contribute to the nation’s conservation; and the New Deal’s emphasis on development often clashed with Native Americans’ cultural rootedness in the land. Moreover, the CCC’s educational program, tacked on after it had begun, was never well supported at either the local or highest administrative levels, preventing it from achieving even more significant educational gains.⁵³

Although the idea of combining relief with environmental conservation was a “brilliant idea” and contributed to the program’s popularity, this combination was also its undoing. As sociologist Robert Leighninger has noted, “the balance of conservation and relief was more delicate than Roosevelt understood. Underneath the compelling synthesis were several issues that posed threats of cleavage: education, class, and military control.”⁵⁴ As time went on, Roosevelt himself lost sight of the program’s double mission, with the result that critics from both the right and left were able to weaken Congress’s commitment to the program’s being made permanent. For example, conservative critics were able to redefine the program as a relief program and thus to characterize the work as “make-work.” Isolationists, on the other hand, criticized the program’s military orientation, and Roosevelt, himself, finally had to resort to defending the program on the basis of its contribution to war readiness. The fact that protection of the environment amounted to a national security issue as much as war preparedness and that a permanent civilian conservation corps could contribute to two ongoing national needs—countercyclical employment and environmental protection, conservation, and restoration—were lost in the fights over the program’s extension.⁵⁵

Not all of the New Deal’s environmental programs were environmentally beneficial, due in part to the conflict inherent in attempting to balance the needs of the natural environment against those of a growing population, in part due to the still-incomplete scientific understanding of ecology existing at the time. Opening up the national parks to human traffic made possible by the CCC was a point of contention between the wilderness preservation and conservationist wings of the environmental movement of the time, and is a point of tension with many environmentalists today.⁵⁶ The CCC’s planting of the kudzu vine, a non-native species, to prevent soil erosion in the Southeast, proved to be an ecological disaster as it spread quickly and widely, smothering native growth. It was finally declared a weed by the USDA in 1953 and outlawed for use in soil erosion.

Despite many New Dealers’ assertions that humans had to adapt to the harsh environment of the Great Plains, and some, like Harold Ickes, who recommended not doing anything to help people remain on the Great Plains so that the land could return to nature, Roosevelt’s commitment to saving both people and land resulted in a kind of compromise between the two, even though the scientist in him counseled that “at least one hundred million acres of land now under the plough ought not to be cultivated again for a whole hundred years.”⁵⁷ The report of the government’s Great Plains Committee had called for a “new economy based on conservation and effective use of all the water available. Intelligent adjustment to the ways of Nature,” the Report said, “must take the place of attempts to ‘conquer’ her.”⁵⁸ Consequently, techniques such as fallowing, greater crop diversity, contouring, and stubble retention allowed farming and grazing to continue, but it had to be supported with federal subsidies.⁵⁹ The CCC’s aggressive fire prevention and suppression activities were later criticized by scientists who came to understand the role played by fire in forest progression.⁶⁰

The TVA was always more controversial than the CCC, since it required the cooperation of so many different interests; challenged those of private energy companies which complained that the government had an unfair advantage in that it could borrow unlimited funds at low interest rates and deprive private energy investors of their equity; and required people at the local level to change their land-use habits.⁶¹ The dams built by the TVA and the other large dams constructed by the New Deal, while bringing electricity, industry, and development to underdeveloped areas, also displaced thousands of families from their homes and made land that could have been used for agriculture unavailable. Another example of the law of unintended consequences due to insufficient understanding of environmental systems is the fact that large dams, once thought to be “clean” sources of energy, have been found to interfere with fish runs and have recently been discovered to be producers of methane gas, a more potent contributor to global warming even than carbon dioxide.⁶² Moreover, in providing electricity at cheaper rates than private companies, the TVA inadvertently invoked “Jevons Law.”⁶³ The increased demand for electricity that resulted was not, in hindsight, an ecologically sound basis for energy conservation, because it led to increased use of coal that resulted in strip mining and eventually nuclear power, unleashing powerful entrenched interests in those industries that are now resisting the need to move toward a clean energy economy.⁶⁴

In addition, within five years, the comprehensive vision for the region that had enlivened Roosevelt became narrower as TVA officials found themselves capitulating to local political interests. A bill that had envisioned the development of seven regional authorities modeled on the TVA fell afoul of state’s rights interests, lobbying by power companies and political infighting over turf within the Roosevelt Administration.⁶⁵ The TVA’s laudable focus on grassroots involvement also meant that Southern conservatives could influence the implementation of the program, steering its benefits to already existing political institutions, such as the white land-grant colleges and to white grassroots communities, depriving African Americans of access to the benefits of this national program.⁶⁶ The TVA eventually devolved from a grand experiment in national planning into a government wholesale power supplier.

Learning from the New Deal Environmental Experience

Perhaps one of the most important lessons to be derived from the limitations of the New Deal’s environmental programs is that protecting and preserving the environment both for current and future generations requires an ongoing commitment of national and international political will, resources, and energy. Population growth, technological change, and consumption habits driven by capitalist growth imperatives continuously threaten to destroy the natural basis of all economic activity. We can learn much from the conservation and reclamation efforts of the New Deal administration about the resiliency of eroded natural systems, given the right mix of policy responses. However, without an ongoing international, national, and, of course, regional and local commitment to continuous environmental preservation, conservation, and reclamation, the earth’s carrying capacity—its ability to sustain human life itself and all economic activity—will eventually die. Ecologists tell us that as a species we are now in a condition of “overshoot.” We are currently using up, in less than a year, more biocapacity than the entire earth produces in one year. As of 2008, humans were demanding 1.52 planets to maintain their lifestyles, 2.5 times more renewable resources than were required in 1961. Moderate United Nations scenarios suggest that if current population and consumption trends continue, by the 2030s, we will need the equivalent of two Earths to support us.⁶⁷

A long-term commitment to the environment requires national planning. Roosevelt had been very clear in his views on this. As early as 1933, he established the National Planning Board (later the National Resources Planning Board- NRPB) which was tasked with taking an inventory of both the human and natural resources of the country with a view to planning for the long-term sustainability of both. In his State of the Union message in 1935, FDR, reiterating his commitment to “the security of the men, women, and children of the Nation” as his defining mission, spoke of environmental sustainability as requisite to the security of the American people. Indeed, he placed it first, and hinted that long-term planning involved far more than the concrete environmental programs he had already initiated.

A study of our national resources, more comprehensive than any previously made, shows the vast amount of necessary and practicable work which needs to be done for the development and preservation of our natural wealth for the enjoyment and advantage of our people in generations to come. The sound use of land and water is far more comprehensive than the mere planting of trees, building of dams, distributing of electricity or retirement of sub-marginal land. It recognizes that stranded populations, either in the country or the city, cannot have security under the conditions that now surround them.⁶⁸

As he had when he had described his vision in 1933 for the Tennessee Valley as one of planning, not only for an entire region, but for “generations to come,”⁶⁹ so in response to a reporter’s question about whether the Ohio River flood of 1937 was going to result in more flood control work, Roosevelt responded with even more specificity about planning:

… we have in the last three or four years been developing a synchronized program to tie in the entire field of flood prevention and soil erosion. That is one reason why I hope, in the Reorganization Bill, we can have a Central Planning Authority, which will be responsible for, let us say in the case of all of the waters of the Mississippi, responsible for a plan which will cover all of the watersheds that go into the Mississippi. And then all the work that is being carried on will have some relationship to the work that is being carried on at some other point.⁷⁰

Since the TVA experiment, however, there has been no governmental emphasis on long-term planning. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter tried to raise the need for a national energy policy to deal with growing demand and diminishing resources, but he was drowned out by the then still largely invisible propaganda campaign of the fossil fuel industry and Republican right, and his energy proposal went nowhere. In 1980, instead of the “pessimistic” realist who had urged the nation to face the facts, the country elected Ronald Reagan, the sunny optimist, who immediately took the solar panels off the White House, killed funding for mass transit and alternative energy programs, and steered the country toward dominance by large, wealthy corporations—especially the fossil fuel industry.⁷¹ More recently, President Obama suggested that we need to plan for the future by creating a modern energy grid, developing every source of American-made energy and investing more heavily in renewable energy, but he has not pushed these ideas very hard, afraid that in a volatile climate any suggestion of planning may be labeled as “socialism” or “government control” by his political adversaries. And unlike Carter, he has not dared to suggest that perhaps Americans should try to reduce their energy consumption. The result, which the White House even brags about on its webpage, is that energy consumption has steadily increased during the Obama Administration.

The tendency of capitalist economies to treat the environmental effects of productive activity as “externalities” makes applying the lesson about long-range planning extremely difficult, especially in the United States where free-market fundamentalism seems to permeate the national culture more than in any other country. The denial of the centrality of the environment to human development is also exacerbated by the short-term nature of the decision-making process that is built into the American political system. Long-term planning and long-term commitment are made extremely difficult by election cycles that, for all practical purposes, have gotten shorter and shorter. As the TVA experience shows, national planning is also hampered by the long-standing ideology of states’ rights which is a product of the American federal system, by the multitude of powerful private interests that would be threatened by such planning, and by the entrenched fiefdoms that exist in a federal bureaucracy that came into being at differing times.

The complexity of the natural environment dictates that we cannot know ahead of time what consequences our actions will have on it. Thus, another lesson to be drawn from the negative experiences of the New Deal’s attempt to conserve the environment is the need to apply the precautionary principle to every new policy, program, and technology that has environmental consequences, using the best science that is available at the time. Had Roosevelt’s foresters made use of the precautionary principle, they might not have been so ready to use kudzu to prevent soil erosion or have allowed energy demand to grow without placing some limitations on its use and the sources from which is derived. Fortunately, we have today so much more knowledge of how natural systems work than we had in the 1930s as well as analytical tools developed by complexity theorists to anticipate many of the effects that our actions will have on the environment. We should therefore be able to apply the precautionary principle with a great deal more precision. What is lacking is the political will.

Despite the numerous limitations of the New Deal environmental programs and the lessons we could derive from them, there are also many positive lessons that can be drawn from these experiences of massive social and physical engineering. Foremost among them were a president and administration that were willing to think big and to go far beyond the strictures of the private market. Especially important was tackling the root causes of the environmental crises, rather than treating them as temporary aberrations. As Woolner has noted, it is thanks to the New Deal’s Soil Conservation Service and the Great Plains Shelter Belt that we have not experienced another Dust Bowl—even in the face of such severe conditions as the droughts of 1956 and 2012.⁷² Second was the enlightened vision and political skills of President Roosevelt himself. As Tarlock has noted, more than any other president, FDR “had an acute awareness of the potential limits that the environment places on humans and the need to understand those limits.”⁷³ The application of science-based ecological principles to solve long-standing environmental problems was a critical aspect of this leadership, as illustrated by the eradication of malaria in the Tennessee Valley, not through the use of pesticides, but by using the life cycle of the mosquito against itself. Other aspects of Roosevelt’s leadership were his understanding of the interrelationships of human and non-human ecologies, his ability to bring creative, visionary leadership into his administration, his capacity to promote the institutional changes needed to carry out the vision, and his recognition that the public needed to be educated about conservation if they were going to support it.

Contrast this with contemporary administrations. While the findings of science itself were disdained by the George W. Bush Administration, the Obama Administration, which claimed to restore science to its rightful place in policymaking, often capitulated to the interests of the fossil fuel industry and to the consumer-driven quest for greater energy consumption. Unlike Roosevelt, Obama did not use the bully pulpit to educate the American public about how the environment works. His tepid support of climate legislation saw the legislation go down to defeat. Nor did he seek aggressively enough to rally the country to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or to prepare for the adjustments that will have to be made in our lifestyles as climate change deepens. His public pronouncements fell short of the deep understanding of ecology that Roosevelt demonstrated seventy-five years ago.

While Obama faced far greater political obstacles to effective environmental policy making than Roosevelt—a Republican Party that has been wholly captured by the now powerful fossil fuel industry and a Democratic Party that is deeply divided over energy issues—he could still have used the mandate he was elected with in his first term far more effectively than he did. In the areas where he had complete control, he failed tragically to exhibit the kind of leadership required of a president facing looming environmental problems. He gave tepid support to his first environmental regulator, Lisa Jackson, in her effort to strengthen clean air regulations. To the consternation of many environmentalists, he pushed so-called “clean coal” and nuclear energy, supported hydraulic gas fracturing, and after placing a moratorium on offshore oil drilling following the disastrous Gulf Oil spill, eventually capitulated by promising to allow exploration of oil off the Atlantic waters within five years. He opened up a large chunk of Wyoming public land to coal mining, and, after being pushed by a massive environmental civil disobedience campaign to place a moratorium on the Keystone XL pipeline, he again capitulated by agreeing to the building of a southern section, which environmentalists argue is just a wedge into completion of the pipeline in the future. While giving lip service to environmental protection and enacting some positive measures through executive orders, such as increased auto fuel efficiency standards and funding some energy efficiency and renewable energy projects with the stimulus bill, the best that can be said about Obama’s first term is that he helped fend off an all-out assault on environmental policies and regulations by the Republicans and their Tea Party and fossil fuel supporters.⁷⁴

After the massive destruction of Hurricane Sandy on the East Coast in the fall of 2012, Obama came out more forcefully, at least in rhetoric, at the start of his second term about the need to tackle climate change, vowing to use his executive powers if Congress did not act. In contrast to his first term’s commitment of public lands to oil and gas leasing, near the start of his second term he designated five new national monuments which will preserve thousands of acres of wilderness.⁷⁵ Yet he failed to commit himself to any of the most important steps to halt climate change, such as calling for a carbon tax, and he remained wedded to an “all of the above” energy policy, refusing a request from the governors of eight states to waive the federal requirement that corn-based ethanol be blended with gasoline,⁷⁶ continuing to expedite oil, natural gas, and nuclear power leases while also funding renewable energy and calling for a market-based approach to greenhouse gas reduction. Despite his new rhetoric, he appeared to be oblivious to the contradictions embedded in his approach to energy policy and continued to support economic growth without acknowledging that the kind of growth we have been pursuing is destroying the planet. Moreover, hidden in his 2014 budget is a proposal to privatize the highly popular Tennessee Valley Authority that has provided the region with low-cost energy, navigation, land management, and flood control for over eight decades.⁷⁷

Another lesson of the New Deal experience is that hiring young unemployed people to work in conserving the environment is far more cost-effective than using that same money in other ways, such as tax reduction, and meets two needs at once. Throughout the tenure of the New Deal, critics on the right complained that the work-relief programs were costing too much. Nevertheless, the long-lasting achievements of the CCC are incalculable and far outweigh the yearly per capita cost of $1,004, which in 2012 inflation-adjusted dollars comes to about $17,731. Compare this figure with the cost of Obama’s stimulus program, which, as of the first quarter of 2011 had cost $666 billion and produced or saved between 2.4 and 3.6 million jobs at a cost per job of $278,000 as estimated by the conservative Weekly Standard, or somewhere below $100,000 per job as estimated by the liberal Economic Policy Institute.⁷⁸ Or compare it to the estimated $1.4 million the Pentagon spent in 2012 to deploy each soldier in the Middle East.⁷⁹ For a mere fraction of the cost of either the stimulus or our bloated military budget, the CCC essentially reforested a country whose original forest cover had been decimated, adding 20 million acres in the East and Midwest to the nation’s forests. A 1960s study noted that half the trees ever planted in the United States up to that time were planted by the CCC. The program added more park acreage than Teddy Roosevelt’s administration, turning the National Park System into a truly national system exhibiting much more diversity and including culture as well as nature preservation. It more than doubled the number of national wildlife refuges; and, in conjunction with the Soil Conservation Service, restored much of the nation’s topsoil to health. The CCC’s hiring of so many landscape architects generated a new interest in the field, leading to rising pursuit of interest in professional degrees in landscape-related fields, as well as new programs to provide such training.⁸⁰ And both the CCC and TVA contributed greatly to the future environmental movement, creating a base of knowledge about what works and does not work to preserve and restore the landscape.

Moreover, the role of the CCC as a conserver of the human resource base can in no way be measured economically. Despite the limitations of the CCC educational program, by June 1941, over 100,000 illiterate persons had learned to read and write, over 25,000 had received eighth-grade diplomas, over 5,000 had graduated from high school, and 270 were awarded college degrees.⁸¹ The on-the-job technical vocational education was, of course, a component as well, providing many graduates of the program with skills that they could turn into paid work upon completion.⁸² A Library of Congress study concluded that the CCC “is now one of the important educational organizations in the country.”⁸³ As one historian remarked, the young men of the CCC did more “than reclaim and develop natural resources. They reclaimed and developed themselves.”⁸⁴ When the program started, the majority of enrollees were malnourished. Records showed that the men gained weight, muscle, and height, and their disease and mortality rates were lower than the national average for men of their age group. They had not only gained education and health but new vistas for future employment, an appreciation for the natural environment, hope for the future, and a new faith in the country and its possibilities. In addition, their pay, which was required to be sent home, helped sustain their desperate families during the worst years of the Depression.

During crises of such magnitude as those experienced in the Great Depression, when local communities can see the benefits of federal help flowing to their entire community, Americans’ traditional fear of big government and top-down planning greatly diminishes. The CCC was the most popular of all the New Deal programs, and few in the TVA region would wish that the federal government had never been involved in rural electrification or ridding the region of periodic floods and malaria. Moreover, the program’s focus on environmental conservation engendered a national dialogue about the meaning of conservation that forced members of the Roosevelt Administration to accept a more holistic and increasingly ecological approach to federal planning.⁸⁵ Through aggressive educational campaigns that used print, film, and photography as well as presidential addresses, the idea of conservation had been broadened in the public mind into what we would now call an ecological understanding of the deep relationship between human development and sound earth-management principles. Human health, human development, human community, human rights, and even human spiritual well-being were all tied to the health of the land. The evolution in Roosevelt’s own thought and in the thought of his Brain Trust is exemplified in his desire to make the National Resources Planning Board permanent. In 1942 the NRPB issued a report that was an effort to craft the blueprint for continuing to expand the government’s social welfare and employment programs in the years after the New Deal. While a permanent work program to conserve the environment was not foreseen by the NRPB’s report, the need for an ongoing federal commitment to full employment was; and since ongoing work to restore and sustain the environment had been in Roosevelt’s original vision for the Board,⁸⁶ it is not inconceivable that, had such a national planning agency been established, it might have added environmental programs as new environmental challenges in the years ahead made their appearance.⁸⁷

The CCC had laid the groundwork for the national environmental movement that emerged in the late 1960s. Thousands of former enrollees in the CCC went on to take jobs in the field of conservation and to join or form environmental organizations, while the next generation who learned to love the outdoors through family camping experiences became the environmental activists of the 1970s. It was only through the efforts of those environmental activists of the 1970s and some sympathetic members of Congress that the United States has any environmental regulations today. Perhaps Roosevelt’s own assessment, made in a speech in 1937, best sums up the lessons of these years:

If, for example, we Americans had known as much and acted as effectively twenty or thirty or forty years ago as we do today in the development of the use of land in that great semiarid strip in the center of the country that runs from the Canadian border all the way down to Texas, we could have prevented in great part the abandonment of thousands and thousands of farms in portions of ten states and thus prevented the migration of thousands of destitute families from those areas.… We would have done this by avoiding the plowing up of great areas that should have been kept in grazing range and by stricter regulations to prevent over-grazing. And at the same time we would have checked soil erosion, stopped the denudation of our forests and controlled disastrous fires.⁸⁸

To bring the lessons of this aspect of the New Deal programs up to date, it is worth speculating that, had the CCC, the Soil Conservation Service, and the TVA not existed, the nation might have experienced the tipping point for climate change and species destruction much earlier in our history. Indeed, had the work of the CCC and the Soil Conservation Service not happened, the 2012 drought experienced in the Southwest and Midwest would have immediately turned into a dust bowl.

Tragically, however, the more impressive accomplishments of the New Deal programs lost much of their momentum and support by the end of World War II. But even as early as 1937, the New Deal had been losing ground as a result of the fight over expansion of the Supreme Court and a weakening economy, which Roosevelt’s turn to deficit reduction only exacerbated, with the result that the country suffered a “depression within the Depression.” The New Deal as an attempt to restructure the American economy virtually ground to a halt in 1938.⁸⁹ The war itself ended the CCC, but with the untimely death of Roosevelt in 1945, the forces of reaction were able to mobilize more effectively. The TVA was to be the first and only experiment in comprehensive regional development; and the National Resources Planning Board, which had drawn up plans for the demobilization of the war machinery, a postwar full-employment economy, and an expanded welfare state was disbanded even before the war’s end, the victim of fierce attacks by conservatives in Congress.⁹⁰

Today, the family farms that once dotted the Great Plains are gone, leaving in their wake a string of ghost towns except in the areas where newly discovered oil and natural gas have created overnight boom towns. The Southern Plains and the Southwestern part of the United States are facing a water shortage as great as that faced by those who experienced the Dust Bowl.⁹¹ In the last three or four years, parts of the United States have been hit with an increasing series of environmental disasters—hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, wildfires, droughts—yet not enough is being done to mitigate the greenhouse gases that scientists say may be largely responsible for the increasing frequency and severity of these disasters.

Moreover, a recent study revealed that in 737 U.S. counties out of more than 3,000 (most in the region that New Deal policies were meant to improve), life expectancies for women declined between 1997 and 2007, reversing nearly a century of progress in public health, a trend not seen since the great influenza epidemic of 1918.⁹² The natural and physical infrastructure of the nation has been badly eroded, yet budget cuts have closed state and local public parks, threatened food safety inspection, and other vital public services. The immanence of possibly catastrophic climate change means that we must move very quickly to make our economy environmentally sustainable. This makes national government intervention, planning, and financing—not to mention international coordination—all the more urgent; yet even here we see the failure of the Obama Administration to respond to the severity of the problem. At both the 1999 Copenhagen and 2012 Rio Earth summits, the United States played a conspicuous role in dampening efforts to achieve a coordinated international attack on greenhouse gases, pushing instead for vaguely worded national voluntary efforts.

The situation today, differs, of course, in several important respects from that faced by the Roosevelt Administration, making the solving of these problems infinitely more complex. Unlike in the 1930s, the United States is now a debtor nation. To move at the speed and with the resolve displayed by the Roosevelt administration would require taking on more public debt—at least in the short run—a course that appears at the moment politically unsolvable unless, of course, we decide to create different ways of financing these programs. In contrast to the United States in the 1930s, we are now saddled with an enormously powerful military industrial complex that eats up over half the discretionary federal budget. With its tentacles in every congressional district in the country, providing jobs, revenue to state and local budgets, and campaign contributions, it has become almost impossible to dislodge.⁹³ Reducing the military budget to that which is needed to defend the country from attack would be one important revenue stream, but that is not even on the political radar screen. The National Guard could provide the quick logistical support needed to get a national Youth Service Corps something like the CCC off the ground. Such a corps, while engaged in ongoing needed work, could also be trained and mobilized quickly to provide emergency relief and recovery in cases of national disasters, like hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. Here again, the New Deal provides a precedent. WPA workers were mobilized in just this way during the great Ohio River flood of 1937. According to a local journalist,

Trained military forces could hardly have done a better job of flood rehabilitation than did Fifth District WPA workers.… They were everywhere, from start to finish, doing all kinds of jobs—constructing sanitary toilets over sewer manholes to protect the city’s health; carrying relief supplies over precarious catwalks, cooking, and serving meals for refugees, soldiers, and coast guardsmen, disposing of garbage and refuse, rescuing livestock and persons, cheering, and entertaining refugees.⁹⁴

Not only has the idea of national or regional planning been abandoned, but any attempt, howsoever mild, to suggest that the federal government should do more to regulate business and stimulate the economy, let alone plan for the future, is stifled by the pejorative labels “socialism” and “big government.” Our scientific knowledge of the environment has progressed way beyond the conservation underpinnings of the New Deal programs; yet a significant sector of our political establishment and the public (including some scientists)—misinformed by a well-funded global warming denial campaign waged by the fossil fuel industry, by an unwillingness to go against views held by their primary reference group, or by a reluctance to change comfortable lifestyles—is in denial about the preponderance of scientific evidence pointing to human-induced climate change.⁹⁵ Presidential leadership thus far seems woefully lacking in the kind of organic understanding of the relationship between human development and the environment that was present among New Deal leadership. And, finally, we face today an entire country that must be radically reconstructed on a sustainable basis. So the lessons of the New Deal are still applicable. The need to relearn them is urgent, and to the extent that they apply, they may well serve as lessons in many other parts of the world.

Notes

1. A. Dan Tarlock, “Rediscovering the New Deal’s Environmental Legacy,” in FDR and the Environment, Henry L. Henderson and David B. Woolner, eds. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 157.

2. Paul Sutter, “New Deal Conservation: A View from the Wilderness,” in Henderson and Woolner, 88.

3. Joseph Stiglitz, “The Book of Jobs,” Vanity Fair, January 2012, accessed February 12, 2012, available from http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/01/stiglitz-depression-201201.

4. Peter Miller and William E. Rees, “Introduction,” in Ecological Integrity: Integrating Environment, Conservation and Health, David Pimental, Laura Westra, and Reed F. Noss, eds. (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2000), 6.

5. Lorena Hickock, quoted in David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 192–193.

6. Adam Cohen, Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), note 3.

7. In the early 1870s, Arnold Hague of the U.S. Geological Survey warned that deforestation would produce floods. In 1874, Dr. Franklin B. Hough, in a report to President Ulysses Grant’s Secretary of Agriculture, noted that the nation’s forests were being illegally harvested and were rapidly disappearing; in the late 1870s, Rutherford B. Hayes’s Secretary of the Interior, Carl Schurz, had tried unsuccessfully to institute professional forest management but was shot down by Congress. Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: The American Environmental Movement (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 61.

8. President Calvin Coolidge did nothing. Despite pleas from governors, mayors, and other officials in the flooded states, he refused to visit the area. Stephen Ambrose, “Great Flood,” National Geographic, May 1, 2001, accessed April 14, 2012, available at http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/05/0501_river4.html.

9. Ibid.

10. Hurricane Facts, accessed February 19, 2012, available at http://www.hurricane-facts.com/Hurricane-Katrina-Facts.php.

11. American meteorologists rated the Dust Bowl the number-one weather event of the twentieth century. Historians say it was the nation’s worst prolonged environmental disaster. “In no other instance was there greater or more sustained damage to the American land,” wrote Timothy Egan in The Worst Hard Time (Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 10. It was recently listed as one of the ten worst environmental disasters in history. See Maura O’Connor, “The Ten Worst Man-Made Environmental Disasters,” May 3, 2010, accessed February 17, 2012, available at http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/global-green/100502/oil-spill-environmental-disasters.

12. Major John Wesley Powell was a Civil War veteran, explorer, and geologist with the U.S. Geographical and Geological Survey. He had intensively studied the soil, rainfall, water resources and flora and fauna of the West. His report, delivered to the Interior Department in 1878, was entitled, Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, available at http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc125/m1/1/.

13. The Enlarged Homestead Act (1909) targeted land suitable for dryland farming (mostly not very productive land), increasing the number of acres to 320. The Stock-Raising Homestead Act (1916) targeted settlers seeking 640 acres of public land for ranching purposes.

14. Egan, 33.

15. Ibid., 42–43.

16. Ibid., 19.

17. T. H. Watkins, The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression in America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999), 422.

18. Egan, 5.

19. David Woolner, “Is the Drought a New Dust Bowl? No, Thanks to the New Deal,” Roosevelt Institute, July 26, 2012, accessed May 13, 2012, available at http://www.nextnewdeal.net/drought-new-dust-bowl-no-thanks-new-deal?utm_source=Next+New+Deal+Newsletter&utm_campaign=7240140a61-NND_Weekly_7_26_127_25_2012&utm_medium=email.

20. Watkins, 422.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid., 8.

23. John A. Salmond, The Civilian Conservation Corps, 1932–1942 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1967), 4. The Yearbook of Agriculture for that year announced that approximately 35 million acres of formerly cultivated land had been destroyed for crop production, 100 million acres then in crops had lost all or most of the topsoil, and an additional 125 million acres were rapidly losing topsoil.

24. An opposing view—that of naturalists like John Muir—saw nature as a transcendental realm that should not be interfered with by man. This more romantic view helped in the promotion of the idea of the national park system, but it was Teddy Roosevelt’s chief forester, Gifford Pinchot’s, more utilitarian view of nature that ultimately prevailed in public policy.

25. Though he had grown up as a patrician, Roosevelt was sensitized to the economic suffering of the time through the influence of his wife, Eleanor, who would take trips across the country meeting with poor and unemployed people and listening to their stories. She would then badger Roosevelt to take action on what she had found. Earlier, she had introduced him to the suffering documented by settlement workers and to women trade unionists.

26. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Coming of the New Deal, The Age of Roosevelt, Vol. II (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), 224–225.

27. Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The New Deal Years 1933–1937 (New York: Random House, 1979), 386.

28. Brian Black, “The Complex Environmentalist: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Ethos of New Deal Conservation,” in Henderson and Woolner, 25–26.

29. For more detailed accounts of the evolution of Roosevelt’s environmental ethic, see Henderson and Woolner, 7–83.

30. 16 Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Speech before the Troy, New York People’s Forum,” March 3, 1912. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Conservation Vol. 1, 1911–1937, Edgar B. Nixon, comp. and ed. (Washington, DC: U.S. General Services Administration), available at http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/cany/fdr/part1.htm.

31. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Remarks at Welcome Home Party, Hyde Park, New York, August 30, 1934, accessed May 2, 2012, available at http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/php83034.html.

32. The idea of a civilian conservation corps was not uniquely Roosevelt’s. It is likely that he had known about similar programs that had been instituted by 1932 in Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, and Germany. Roosevelt himself had created a prototype as governor of New York. Salmond, 5.

33. Black, 37–40.

34. “Manpower mobilization” refers to the program’s military character. In the first three months of World War I, 181,000 were enrolled, compared with 275,000 during the first three months of the CCC. Many more, of course, were employed by all of the New Deal’s work programs. Robert D. Leighninger, Jr. Long Range Public Investment: The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 13.

35. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Three Essentials for Unemployment Relief,” speech to Congress, March 21, 1933, available at http://newdeal.feri.org/speeches/1933c.htm.

36. In May of 1933, the first contingent of a new Bonus Army—3,000 desperately poor, embittered World War I Army veterans descended on Washington demanding a bonus that had been promised them for service in the war. An earlier Bonus Army had been routed by General MacArthur under orders from President Hoover with nothing to show for their efforts; but this time, President Roosevelt sent emissaries to listen to their grievances, and defused their anger with the promise of jobs in the FERA.

37. Franklin D. Roosevelt, press conference, March 15, 1933, in Nixon, Vol. 1.

38. 113 [Enclosure 2] James Lathrop Pack, “Reforestation as a Means of Emergency Employment: Is it Really Practical or Altogether Wise?” July 11, 1932; and 114 [Enclosure 3] James O. Hazard to Charles L. Pack, July 19, 1932, in Nixon, Vol. 1.

39. Ren Davis and Helen Davis, Our Mark on This Land: A Guide to the Legacy of the Civilian Conservation Corps in America’s Parks (Granville, OH: The McDonald and Woodward Publishing Co., 2011), 48–50.

40. Davis, 386.

41. Salmond, Chapter 7. The CCC spent nearly 6.5 million days fighting fires, a period equivalent to the constant efforts of more than 16,000 men working for a whole year on the basis of an eight-hour day. Forty-seven enrollees lost their lives.

42. Ibid.

43. Douglas Helms, “Soil Conservation Is an Old Time Religion,” in Readings in the History of the Soil Conservation Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture Soil Conservation Service Historical Notes No. 1, 20–22, available at http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb1043484.pdf.

44. Davis, 392.

45. Woolner, “Is the Drought a New Dustbowl?”

46. Ibid., 389.

47. Ibid., 393.

48. Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941 (New York: Random House, 1993), 168–169.

49. Roosevelt, quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval, the Age of Roosevelt, Vol. III 1935–1936 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 323.

50. Gordon R. Clapp, “The Meaning of TVA,” in Roscoe C. Martin, ed., TVA: The First Twenty Years, A Staff Report (Knoxville, TN: University of Alabama Press and University of Tennessee Press, 1956), 11–13.

51. O. M. Derryberry, M.D., “Health,” in Martin, 195–200.

52. Leighninger, 116.

53. Salmond, 168.

54. Leighninger, 12.

55. Ibid, 21–26.

56. Aldo Leopold, for example, lamented in the September 1935 issue of The Living Wilderness that the “hammer of development” now threatened “the remaining remnant of wilderness” though it was wilderness that “gave value and significance to its [the New Deal conservation program’s] labors.” Aldo Leopold, “Why the Wilderness Society?” The Living Wilderness, 1, no. 1 (September 1935): 6. Quoted in Sutter, 89.

57. 583 Roosevelt to Hendrik Willem Van Loon, South Norwalk, Connecticut, February 2, 1937, in Nixon, Vol. III, (Washington, DC: U.S. General Services Administration), available at http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/cany/fdr/part3.htm.

58. 577 [Enclosure]Summary of the Final Report of the Great Plains Committee on the Future of the Great Plains, January 22, 1937, in Nixon, ibid.

59. Tarlock, 165.

60. Davis and Davis, 53–54.

61. Wendell Willkie, president of the Commonwealth and Southern Company, the largest power company in the South and a presidential candidate in 1940, led the fight against the TVA, calling it not only a threat to private industry, but unconstitutional.

62. “Environmental Impacts of Dams,” International Rivers, accessed March 14, 2013 available at http://www.internationalrivers.org/environmental-impacts-of-dams; Philip Fearnside, “Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Hydroelectric Dams: Controversies Provide a Springboard for Rethinking a Supposedly ‘Clean’ Energy Source,” Climatic Change 66, nos. 1–2 (2004): 1–8.

63. Jevons Law or Jevons Paradox, as it is sometimes called, refers to the observation made by the English economist, William Stanley Jevons in 1865, that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase the rate of its consumption. He made this observation in relation to the increased efficiency of coal use. In this case, the reduced cost of electricity made possible by publicly- owned utilities facilitated an exponential growth in the use of energy.

64. Until this time, the philosophy of private power had been to keep rates high and consumption low. Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval, 374.

65. William E. Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 159–195. After reviewing the evidence, Leuchtenburg concludes that, while state and private pressure groups played their part, the proposal for seven TVAs was scrapped primarily because of territorial infighting among administration officials—particularly between Henry Wallace, who headed the Agricultural Department, and Harold Ickes of the Interior. Part of this conflict was personal. Ickes was not an affable person, and many in the administration felt that he was trying to create his own fiefdom in the Interior Department. But it was also a function of the conflict between functional and geographical structure. Agricultural policy was a functional issue, whereas the TVA crossed geographic lines, subsuming all functions within it. Wallace, who should have been for such regional development across the country, felt that the TVA’s monopolization of agricultural policy would make it subordinate to the Department of the Interior, headed by Ickes.

66. For example, the black agricultural colleges had no place in the fertilizer program, and the number of blacks on the extension service in the field had not been utilized. Moreover, the leadership of the agricultural department had been turned over to men with explicit racial biases. Philip Selznick, TVA and the Grassroots: A Study in the Sociology of Formal Organization (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 112.

67. Biocapacity refers to the amount of renewable resources needed to sustain a given population plus handle all its wastes. “World Footprint,” Global Footprint Network, accessed February 12, 2013, available at http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/world_footprint.

68. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Annual Message to Congress, January 4, 1935, The American Presidency Project, available at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=14890.

69. 126 Speech by Roosevelt, Montgomery, Alabama, January 21, 1933, in Nixon, Vol. 1.

70. Franklin D. Roosevelt Press Conference, January 26, 1937, in Nixon, Vol. II.

71. Carter had warned the nation that the failure to plan for future energy needs “is a problem we will not solve in the next few years, and it is likely to get progressively worse through the rest of this century.… Our decision about energy will test the character of the American people and the ability of the President and the Congress to govern. This difficult effort will be the ‘moral equivalent of war’—except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not destroy.” Jimmy Carter, “Proposed Energy Policy,” speech delivered on April 18, 1977, available at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/carter-energy/.

72. Woolner, “Is the Drought a New Dust Bowl?”

73. Tarlock, 158.

74. For summaries of Obama’s environmental record, see: Michael Arria, “Obama’s an Environmental Failure: An Interview with Journalist Joshua Frank,” Motherboard, May 9, 2012, accessed May 26, 2012, available at http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/5/9/obama-s-an-environmental-failure-an-interview-with-journalist-joshua-frank--2; and “Forum: Assessing Obama’s Record on the Environment,” multiple authors, Forum 360, July 25, 2011, accessed May 26, 2012, available at http://e360.yale.edu/feature/forum_assessing_obamas_record_on_the_environment/2427/.

75. The national monuments include the First State National Monument in Delaware and Pennsylvania, the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument in New Mexico, the San Juan Islands National Monument in Washington State, the Charles Young Buffalo Soldiers National Monument in Ohio, and a monument commemorating Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad in Maryland.

76. Environmentalists and food experts claim that growing corn for ethanol uses up too much land that could be used for growing food, contributes to higher food and gas prices, lowers vehicle fuel efficiency, and may be contributing to air pollution. See Diana Furchtgott-Roth, “With Ethanol, Obama Ignores Common Sense,” Real Clear Markets, November 20, 2012, accessed July 21, 2013, available at http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2012/11/20/with_ethanol_obama_skirts_common_sense_99997.html; Mario Parker & Alan Bjerga, “Obama Said to Reject Request to Ease Corn-based Ethanol Law,” Bloomberg News, November 16, 2012, accessed July 21, 2013, available at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-16/obama-said-to-reject-request-to-ease-corn-based-ethanol-law.html.

77. Ironically, it is the region’s free-market Republican congressional representatives who are objecting most vocally to this proposal. Gar Alperovitz and Thomas Hanna, “Shocker: Republicans Fight Obama Plan to Privatize the Hugely Popular, Cheap Energy Source of the TVA,” Alternet, May 19, 2013, accessed May 20, 2013, available at http://www.alternet.org/economy/shocker-republicans-fight-obama-plan-privatize-hugely-popular-cheap-energy-source-tva.

78. The Economic Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Seventh Quarterly Report, Executive Office of the President, President’s Council of Economic Advisors, July 1, 2011, accessed 29 March 2012, available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/cea_7th_arra_report.pdf. The conservative Weekly Standard accused the President of spending $278,000 per job, but the White House correctly pointed out that not only had the magazine used the lower jobs estimate, but not all of the stimulus money went to salaries, but to long-term investments in infrastructure, education, and the like. The liberal Economic Policy Institute estimated the actual cost per job was somewhere under $100,000. Jake Tapper, “$278K per Stimulus Job? White House Says No,” ABC News, July 5, 2011, accessed March 29, 2012, available at http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/07/278k-per-stimulus-job-white-house-says-no/. See also Stephen Clark, “White House Disputes Study Saying Stimulus Cost Taxpayers $278,000 Per Job,” Fox News, July 5, 2011, accessed March 29, 2012, available at http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/07/05/white-house-disputes-study-saying-stimulus-cost-taxpayers-278000-per-job/.

79. Todd Harrison, Analysis of the FY 2012 Defense Budget, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, accessed March 22, 2012, available at http://www.csbaonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/2011.07.16-FY-2012-Defense-Budget.pdf.

80. Tara Mitchell Mielnik, New Deal, New Landscape: The Civilian Conservation Corps and South Carolina’s State Parks (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011), 25–26.

81. Irving Bernstein, A Caring Society: The New Deal, the Worker, and the Great Depression (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1985), 159.

82. Vocational education was generally related to CCC work. Classes were given in truck driving, mechanics, equipment maintenance and repair, landscaping, surveying, carpentry, forestry, and wildlife conservation, as well as in skills related to management of the program such as typing, accounting, journalism, newspaper production, cooking, and baking.

83. Bernstein, 159.

84. Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 339.

85. Neil Maher, Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

86. See 310 Roosevelt to Congress, January 25, 1935 in Nixon, Vol. 1, Part 2.

87. The Department of the Interior created what it called the National Planning Board (NPB). In 1939, it was transferred to the Executive Office of the President, and renamed the National Resources Planning Board (NRPB). A new “Bill of Rights,” going beyond the rights enunciated in the U.S. Constitution, had been at the heart of the philosophy of the National Resources Planning Board. But while beginning as an enormously ambitious project, the NRPB’s report languished as Pearl Harbor interfered. The NRPB was terminated in 1943 due to political opposition. Charles E. Merriam, “The National Resources Planning Board: A Chapter in American Planning Experience,” American Political Science Review, 37, no. 6 (December 1944): 1079–1080. See also Security, Work, and Relief Policies: A Report by the National Resources Planning Board, 1942, available at http://www.ssa.gov/history/reports/NRPB/NRPBreport.html.

88. Roosevelt, speech at the dedication of the Bonneville Dam, Oregon, September 28, 1937, in Richard D. Polenberg, ed., The Era of Franklin D. Roosevelt 1933–1945: A Brief History with Documents (Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 67.

89. Kennedy, 356–363.

90. For discussions of the National Resources Planning Board, see Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1995), 227–264; Merriam, 1075–1088.

91. For a detailed analysis of the coming water shortage, see Frank Ackerman and Elizabeth A. Stanton, The Last Drop: Climate Change and the Southwest Water Crisis (Somerville, MA: Stockholm Environment Institute–US, February 2011), accessed April 3, 2013, available at http://sei-us.org/Publications_PDF/SEI-WesternWater-0211.pdf; William deBuys, A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

92. Noam N. Levey, “Life Expectancy for Women Slips in Some Regions,” Los Angeles Times, June 15, 2011, accessed June 29, 2011, available at http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-na-womens-health-20110615,0,1751262,full.story. Researchers attributed the decline in life expectancy to smoking and obesity, with some relationship to income inequality. While this study did not measure the effects of environmental pollutants on health, it is possible that the health effects were also exacerbated by toxic pollutants. Over half of the top 20 most polluted states are in the South. See Pete Altman, “The ‘Toxic Twenty’: States with the Highest Levels of Air Pollution from Power Plants,” July 20, 2011, Natural Resources Defense Council, accessed June 22, 2013, available at http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/paltman/the_toxic_20_states_with_the_h.html.

93. As of this writing, there is growing evidence of public dissatisfaction with the cost of the nation’s commitment to the military, even among normally hawkish members of Congress. Thus, we may begin to see some change in this area.

94. John A. Ellert, quoted in “Ohio River Flood of 1937,” The Lilly Libraries, Indiana University, Bloomington, available at http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/wpa/flood.html. Original source: Work Relief under John K. Jennings, 1931–1939, Chapter 3, “The Ohio River Flood.” The flood left 1 million homeless, 385 dead, and property losses reaching $500 million ($8 billion in 2012 dollars). “Flood of ‘97, Infamous Floods,” The Cincinnati Enquirer, accessed March 3, 2013, available at http://www.enquirer.com/flood_of_97/history5.html.

95. Andrew C. Revkin, “Skeptics Dispute Climate Worries and Each Other,” New York Times, March 8, 2009, accessed June 6, 2012, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/science/earth/09climate.html?pagewanted=all; Justin Gillis and Leslie Kaufman, “Leak Offers Glimpse of Campaign Against Climate Science,” New York Times, February 15, 2012, accessed June 6, 2012, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/16/science/earth/in-heartland-institute-leak-a-plan-to-discredit-climate-teaching.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all. For more on the climate change denial campaign, see Koch Brothers Exposed: Fueling Climate Denial and Privatizing Democracy, a film by Robert Greenwald available from Brave New Foundation, at http://www.BraveNewFoundation.org. For the psychological mechanisms involved in climate change denial, see Dan M. Kahan, Ellen Peters, Maggie Wittlin, Paul Slovic, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, Donald Braman, and Gregory Mandel, “The Polarizing Impact of Science Literacy and Numeracy on Perceived Climate Change Risks,” Nature Climate Change, May 27, 2012, accessed June 6, 2012, available at http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1547.html; S. Stoll-Kleemann, Tim O’Riordan, and Carlo C. Jaeger, “The Psychology of Denial Concerning Climate Mitigation Measures: Evidence from Swiss Focus Groups,” Global Environmental Change, 11, no. 2 (2001): 107–117.