‘Hard Work, Low Pay, Miserable Conditions and more!’ California’s conservation corps on the frontlines of wildfires and landslides

For a snapshot of the climate crisis unfolding, look no further than California.

The state suffered 10,000 wildfires in 2020 which left 33 people dead and blazed across more than 4 per cent of land, an unprecedented rate of burning which led to a new word - “gigafire”. California is also in the midst of a multi-year drought, facing another summer of perilously high temperatures, and ongoing threats of sea-level rise and landslides.

While there will be shortage of novel solutions to these myriad problems in tech-dominated California, one increasingly popular idea is relatively lo-fi: to expand on dozens of existing service and volunteering programs in the AmeriCorps national service network to engage in boots-on-the-ground, climate adaptation work.

President Joe Biden’s proposed $2.3 trillion infrastructure bill would allocate $10bn to fund a post-pandemic iteration of Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal conservation corps which helped lift workers out of the Great Depression.

The “American Jobs Plan”, which looks set to come up against a wall of Republican opposition, was described as a “blue-collar blueprint to build America” by Mr Biden during his first address to a joint session of Congress this week.

But unlike FDR’s conservation workforce, which largely benefited white men, a revamped nationwide corps will be equitable and diverse, drawing workers from communities who bear the brunt of the climate crisis and environmental pollution.

The AmeriCorps network of organizations currently has around 25,000 paid workers, but this number would need to increase to staff projects from coast to coast. The climate crisis is impacting all corners of the country, so revamping agriculture in Iowa will be as important as protecting the shoreline in the Florida Panhandle.

Earlier this month, Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and and Senator Ed Markey introduced the “Civilian Climate Corps for Jobs and Justice Act”, which called for employing 1.5 million people over five years.

California starts with a solid base. Since 1976, the California Conservation Corps (CCC) has been rallying young people with its inimitable slogan: “Hard Work, Low Pay, Miserable Conditions and more!”

The CCC is America’s oldest and largest conservation corps. At any one time around 1,400 members, aged 18-25 (up to 29 for military vets), are working in paid environmental and community service projects. In total, the CCC does about 3 million hours of conservation work and disaster assistance each year including emergency response to flood, fires, oil spill clean-up and earthquakes.

The organisation was founded in 1976 by former California governor Jerry Brown, who conceived the program as “a combination Jesuit seminary, Israeli kibbutz, and Marine Corps boot camp”.

Its story is interwoven with some of the most notable events in California’s history: Crews were involved in the clean-up after the 1992 LA riots which stemmed from the acquittal of four white police officers in the brutal beating of Black motorist Rodney King. They also helped with recovery from the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake near Santa Cruz, and the Cosco Busan oil disaster in San Francisco Bay in 2007.

Corps members typically work in crews of 15, led by a supervisor.

“We have a large number [of corps members] that come from underserved communities,” Bruce Saito, director of the CCC who has been with the Corps four decades, told The Independent. Overall, groups in the Corps network are made up of 45 per cent women and 44 per cent people of color, according to Inside Climate News.

Nearly half of young people arrive at the CCC without a high school diploma, and are required to attend one of the organization’s 25 charter high schools.

From the beginning, the CCC mission included tackling “global warming”. An early project was fitting rudimentary versions of solar panels, made from copper, corrugated plastic and two-by-fours, on top of bathroom stalls in California’s state parks.

With California ground zero in climate-driven disasters, CCC teams are finding themselves increasingly on the frontlines.

“We’ve always responded to emergencies but [2020], like the last five or six years, has been the worst ever in California,” Mr Saito said.

A video filmed in September showed one CCC wildland firefighting crew in Butte as they worked in 24-hour shifts during sweltering, triple-digit heat to protect homes from the ferocious SCU Lightning Complex fires.

Crew member Riley “Gilly” Gilmartin described the team’s strategy of controlled burns. “We’re defending people’s homes and that’s very rewarding,” she said.

“You’re not alone on this, you have your brothers and sisters with you on the line, that’s what’s important,” Samuel Parrales, another crew member, added.

The CCC has a dozen Type-1 firefighting crews who attack blazes on the frontlines, and it is set to add additional crews this year. California Governor Gavin Newsom earlier this month approved $536 million for wildfire prevention in the state.

“The state’s goal is to treat over 500,000 acres in the upcoming year with a lot more prescribed burns to prevent those catastrophic fires,” Mr Saito said.

He views the CCC’s role as not just one of tackling climate and environmental issues but also addressing diversity and inclusion.

The CCC’s “Women in the Wilderness” program takes groups of six to eight young women of colour with no previous back-packing experience on an immersive backcountry trip, aiming to inspire future careers in the outdoors.

The CCC has also created, along with the Bureau of Land Management, a majority-female firefighting team in Inland Empire, a desert region outside of Los Angeles, the only hand crew in that area.

"We’re also really excited to be in discussions about creating an internship-like program for a female fire crew, focused on Yosemite National Park. It would be 10-12 weeks of training with the park service for a summer,” Mr Saito added.

“We're always looking for those kinds of opportunities, not just to advance environmental, natural resource and climate issues, but to address diversity and inclusion. These are the communities we need to serve.”

While some crews work on lines, using hand tools to create a break in the flammable materials that allow fire to spread, others provide support for thousands of first responders by setting up camps, distributing food and policing grounds, an operation that took on an added layer of complexity due to Covid.

When the fires are brought under control, CCC teams get to work on preventing erosion. After the Creek Fire burned nearly 380,000 acres near Shaver Lake last year, crews installed motion-control measures in the ground to prevent runoff of hazardous waste getting into the water table.

After the Carr Fire in 2018 burned 230,00 acres, CCC crews seeded and spread hay over thousands of acres of hillsides in Shasta County to protect the soil from erosion.

In other parts of the state, crews are working to combat flooding from extreme storms. The Delta Center in the northern Californian city of Stockton serves as the CCC’s flood HQ, where crews are trained in techniques including constructing sandbag structures, levee protection and public safety. The facilities also act as a staging location for the CCC during flood emergencies in the state.

The work goes beyond disaster assistance. In the past five years, the CCC has been building out its E-Corps program.

“We do energy efficiency audits in schools and public buildings,” Mr Saito says. “And retrofits which entails switching to LED lights over millions of square feet at courthouses, for example, where we see an immediate return on investment.”

In the past year, CCC crews have also taken on projects linked to the pandemic.

“They are doing crowd control and distribution of supplies at vaccination centers,” Mr Saito said. “There’s also a couple of crews working with the San Jose Conservation Corps, another nonprofit, on food bank support.”

Another 50 corps members are part of Project Roomkey, a program in Los Angeles to secure hotel and motel rooms for those experiencing homelessness, to help prevent the spread of Covid-19. 

Mr Saito said that all corps organizations have a reputation for adaptability, and that if the Biden administration was looking for a Civilian Conservation Corps to flourish, they have a solid bedrock to build on.

“We need to rebuild or reinvent the programs in some areas,” he said. “But there are already existing corps which have an infrastructure, track record, and reputation for doing the work.” 

He added: “It’s been trials and tribulations over 45 years to get it right, and we still have challenges. But we are able to respond.”

This article has been updated to reflect Mr Saito’s role as Director of the California Conservation Corps