Privatized Civilian Conservation Corps Could Save Humanity?

Besides climate change, existential crises facing humanity include pollution, biodiversity loss, overpopulation, endless wars, artificial intelligence, resources depletion, and declining metabolic health.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was a popular New Deal program initiated in 1932 during the Great Depression. The CCC provided much-needed jobs for millions of unemployed young men, who worked on America's natural resources, infrastructure, public lands, forests, trails, bridges, and campgrounds, among many other projects. They earned a modest income while finding meaning and purpose.

As society currently faces the existential challenges posed by climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and other interconnected crises, individuals across all age groups and backgrounds might seek to cooperatively work on projects to save humanity. To this end, a privatized, modern version of Roosevelt's CCCs could allow diverse climate activists to address environmental, social, economic, and moral issues while earning a living doing meaningful work in peaceful, vibrant communities. Their diverse tasks could include farming, ranching, renewable energy production, construction, teaching, and healthcare, among many others required in rural communities.

As a former physician at the Los Angeles County—University of Southern California Medical Center, I studied public health along with internal medicine and hospice. Public health includes addressing all threats to human health, including global warming, wars, the absence of meaning and purpose, and poor metabolic health. Now as few as 7% of U.S. adults are metabolically healthy.

Metabolic health is defined as not being overweight, obese, hypertensive, or diabetic, having a waist circumference of fewer than 40 inches for men and 35 inches for women, and having high-density lipoprotein cholesterol higher than 60 mg/dL and triglycerides lower than 100 mg/dL. This unfortunate direction in U.S. and global health calls for a strategy for modern-day CCCs to improve metabolic health, as described in Good Energy by Casey Means, MD. To address today’s interconnected existential crises, CCCs must practice regeneration (personal, social, cultural, spiritual, moral, ecological, and economic).

My next global modeling step was to determine how much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere could be sequestered into agricultural land globally with exclusively organic farming and ranching in a network of CCCs. I found that 24.1 gigatonnes a year of carbon dioxide equivalent (GTCO2e) could be captured in the ground, versus the 11.9 GTCO2e/year currently emitted into the atmosphere with large-scale chemical agriculture. Humans currently emit about 54 GTCO2e/year of greenhouse gases.

Modeling the effect of attracting four billion people to move to ecovillages (similar to CCCs) globally, using exclusively organic/regenerative agriculture, showed that 98% of human-caused greenhouse gases could be avoided. To complete the strategy, I focused on using CCCs as the places for improving global public health and addressing the numerous other interconnected crises facing humanity.

The model led me straight to Point Reyes, California in Marin County. The current battle over 17,000 acres of ranchlands in the Point Reyes National Seashore represents a lose-lose-lose battle. Environmentalists pay $40 million for the settlement, ranchers and ranch workers lose their homes as 12 out of 14 dairies and cattle ranches shut down. They produced organic food; shouldn’t we have more organic food producers, not fewer? And what about the West Marin economy?

My proposed win-win-win solution is to create three CCCs housing about 1,000 climate activists each in the disputed 17,000 acres. The villagers’ roles would include: producing metabolically healthy diets that feature no ultra-processed foods, added sugars, or refined carbohydrates, and optional weekly fasting; physical exercise including gardening, ranching, construction, walking, jogging, swimming, sports, and other physically demanding work; stress management through hatha yoga, meditation, mindfulness, and immersion in nature; the tracking and research of metabolic health practices with apps; growing fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, grains, beef, dairy, poultry, eggs, fish, herbs, and spices for a complete diet; reducing cattle ranching and dairy operations by about half and selling to Marin County farmers’ markets and restaurants; and a diversity of occupations among the occupants to maximize self-sufficiency of the villages.

To feed 3,000 CCC climate activists and 3,000 other customers, either the Mediterranean diet (modest amounts of meat and high in fruits, vegetables, nuts, and olive oil) or a diet with about double the animal foods as a Mediterranean diet would require about 3,000-6,000 acres, or 1/2-1 acre per person. (The very high animal food containing standard American diet, including 30-40% food waste, requires about 2.7 acres per person.) Vegetarians, vegans, and people on Paleo diets could also be accommodated.

The average American consumes about 81,700 kWh per year of energy (fossil fuel, nuclear, and renewable). I’ll estimate that a frugal ecovillager would consume one-quarter of that, or about 20,000 kWh per person per year. So solar energy would cost 3,000 ecovillagers about 60-gigawatt hours electricity. Renewable electricity for CCC residents and an equal amount of exported electricity to surrounding homes and businesses would cost about $80 million in capital and $4.7 million in annual operating costs and require about 300 acres. The net annual energy cost per CCCer (after sales to neighbors amounting to $2.45 million) would be about $750 per year.

The recruitment of CCC residents could be done through the local media and by word of mouth, highlighting job security, adequate income and benefits, metabolic and overall health improvements, and lives of meaning and purpose in working toward reversing global warming.

Since this would be a carefully monitored academic research project, any applicants should document their use of an app to monitor metabolic health practices for several months.

Funding sources might include donations, research grants, ecotourism and metabolic health guests, the sale of organic food and renewable electrical energy, and the high wages earned by virtual workers. Expanding the CCC network would be facilitated by the net earnings of the first three CCC settlements. The exponential global spread of CCCs should follow the success of this epic Marin County pilot project.

I hope and pray that my family and others have the opportunity to live in or visit one of the first three ecovillages dedicated to modeling how to save humanity. You, dear reader, can help spread the message by forwarding this essay proposal to your friends and family. Your children and grandchildren will thank you. Please email me your thoughts on this proposal to grandbargainsbook@gmail.com.

My website is http://www.grandbargainsbook.com. I live in San Anselmo, California.