#274 The Original Green New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps w/ Neil Maher
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 29 May 2023
⏱️ 51 minutes
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Summary
In the last few years, many on the left have been calling for a "Green New Deal," but we might have already had that. Between 1933 and 1942, the Civilian Conservation Corps enlisted more than three million young men in a project that planted two billion trees, slowed soil erosion on forty million acres of farmland, and enjoyed support across political and geographic divides. In this episode we talk with Neil Maher, author of Nature's New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (Oxford University Press, 2008) about how the CCC helped solidify FDR's New Deal and spread the seeds of environmental activism for generations to come.
Dr. Neil Maher is a Professor of History and Master Teacher in the Federated History Department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University-Newark. He is also the author of Apollo in the Age of Aquarius (Harvard University Press, 2017). You can find out more about his work at NeilMaher.com.
This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Ben Sawyer and this is the road to now. |
| 0:11.0 | Guys, Bob Crawford is on assignment today, and by assignment, I mean he is out spreading |
| 0:14.9 | love to the world with his band, the Avid Brothers. |
| 0:17.7 | If you've ever been to a show, you know how that feels? |
| 0:19.8 | If you haven't, go see what |
| 0:21.0 | it's like, avidbrothers.com, all their tour dates. But for now, I am here, and let me tell you, |
| 0:26.5 | I have spent a lot of time sitting in my backyard the last few days reading a great book by |
| 0:33.4 | our guest. The topic is the Civilian Conservation Corps, and our guest today is Neil Marr. |
| 0:40.7 | Neil, welcome to the show. It's great to be here. Thanks, Ben. Yeah. You know, one of the things |
| 0:45.3 | that I was thinking about, and I just want to maybe start off like this, is that in recent years, |
| 0:49.8 | we've heard a lot of people talking about us needing a green new deal. And this has been the kind of |
| 0:56.6 | catchphrase, green new deal, green new deal. But Neil, it might be fair to say that the first |
| 1:01.7 | new deal was in fact a green new deal. That's exactly what I'm trying to argue in the book, |
| 1:07.4 | is that we think of the original new deal as just a work program to put people back to work |
| 1:14.3 | during the Great Depression. But it turns out that Franklin Roosevelt was thinking about a second |
| 1:21.4 | problem that was affecting the country. This had to do with rivers that were overflowing their |
| 1:26.6 | banks due to deforestation. Later |
| 1:29.1 | on in the 30s, it was things like the Dust Bowl. So he saw an environmental crisis occurring |
| 1:34.7 | at the same time as that employment crisis. And then he created all these programs to put people |
| 1:40.5 | not only back to work, but also to conserve natural resources. As he put it, |
| 1:44.6 | we could kill two birds with one stone. So the original New Deal was definitely a green New Deal. |
| 1:51.6 | Yeah, and I agree. I think that when you're trying to teach the class about, you know, the New Deal |
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