“Environmental Service Corps” Proposed

Environmental Building News executive editor Alex Wilson suggests that the United States needs a dramatic new public works program to address the environmental challenges of the 21st century. First proposed in the June 2007 issue of Environmental Building News, the Environmental Service Corps would be modeled after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps and President John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps.

According to Wilson, through a largely volunteer labor force of tens or even hundreds of thousands of Americans, the Environmental Service Corps (ESC) would carry out a range of activities designed to forestall global climate change and address its effects. ESC projects would include energy retrofits of homes, ecological restoration, and invasive species control. Volunteers would typically be recent graduates of high school or college, but could also include people wanting time off from established careers and those looking for meaningful activities during retirement.

Chief among the activities of the ESC would be improving the energy performance of existing homes through a Rebuilding America Program. While most of the green building movement has focused on new buildings, the vast majority of building energy use (and carbon emissions) during the next 30 years will come from existing buildings. “To meet the targets for carbon emission reductions that climate scientists believe are needed to prevent catastrophic climate change,” says Wilson, “we simply cannot ignore existing houses. We need to reduce the energy consumption of existing homes by one-half to two-thirds.” Doing that will require superinsulation retrofits in cold climates—for example, adding four inches of rigid foam insulation to house walls (boosting the insulation value to R-30 or more) and replacing windows. The program could also install renewable energy systems, such as solar water heaters. These retrofit activities would be directed toward homes and rental units of lower-income Americans who cannot afford energy improvements themselves. Remodeling professionals would lead these efforts. In addition to significantly reducing energy consumption, the Rebuilding America Program would create a trained labor force ready to embark on careers in energy retrofits.

In addition to improving America’s housing stock, ESC teams would help restore ecosystems and mitigate other impacts of global climate change. “One priority would be the restoration of wetland ecosystems that protect coastal regions from storm surges,” says Wilson. The loss of wetlands in the Gulf Coast was a major contributor to the extensive damage that occurred with the storm surges that accompanied hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005.

Teams of ESC volunteers would also be involved with removal of invasive species and perhaps planting warmer-climate trees to replace cold-adapted trees should the latter die out with global warming. “It’s a new concept that humans may actually need to intervene with nature as our climate changes,” said Wilson. “Hopefully, efforts to reduce greenhouse gasses can mitigate the worst ecological effects of climate change, but we need to be ready to intervene should ecologists deem such action appropriate.”

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