Customer Reviews

Nature's New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement

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Neil Maher has written an outstanding account of Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a pathbreaking experiment of the New Deal in which young people were brought together in camps to undertake conservation work on the nation's natural resources. They rescued public lands from desolation by planting trees and undertaking other efforts to return the wilderness to a pristine condition. Millions of Americans worked for the CCC at one time or another, and in many instances they did more than just earn a paycheck.

As Maher makes clear, the primary reason for the program in the first place was to help people destitute during the depths of the Great Depression but it accomplished much more. Those who participated in the CCC, he argues, also gained an appreciation for the importance of America's wilderness areas through their CCC experience and became lifelong devotees of ecological efforts. As a group the CCC veterans emerged from these camps dedicated to preservation of the wilds, making efficient use of natural resources, promoting health through outdoor recreation, and stressing ecological balance. The experience of CCC veterans prompted them to become the shock troops of a modern environmental movement that arose later.

Neil Maher's "Nature's New Deal" tells this story with verve and style. It is even more significant at this time in 2009 as the nation enters into the most severe economic downturn since the 1930s.

This is a history book that reads as gracefully as The Best American Essays about the genesis of the American environmental movement. A favorite chapter covers Franklin Roosevelt's background as a timber conservationist and his passion for public parks, built by the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps. A fascinating read.