June 15th, 2009 · No Comments

By Shermakaye Bass
Green Right Now

Last week, the Obama Administration announced a new youth-jobs program designed to simultaneously boost the country’s economy and ecology: a promising, if labyrinthine, new agency called the Office of Youth in Natural Resources (OYNR), which falls under the Department of the Interior. The OYNR debuts with a program, the 21st Century Youth Conservation Corps, patterned after the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930’s (but not expected to create the 3 million jobs CCC did).

The timing couldn’t be better. The White House has been increasingly criticized for the slowness with which ‘Stimulus Act’ money has resulted in actual shovel-ready jobs. Putting kids to work is a great way to counter the criticism.

According to DOI spokeswoman Joan Moody, “the 21st Youth Conservation Corps will be the signature program for the Office of Youth in Natural Resources, which will also coordinate a number of existing programs. This summer, under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (stimulus funds), 5,000 additional jobs for youth are in the process of being added to the 10,000 existing youth jobs.”

The country’s ‘youth’ is defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as between the ages of 16 and 24. However, Moody said the agency and its star pupil, the 21st Century Youth Conservation Corps (let’s call it 21CYCC), have not yet decided what ages will be eligible for the jobs.

Moody said the new OYNR is also hiring a director and several career staff positions (listed on USA Jobs), and these staffers will help to shape the nature of the youth corps as it evolves. The overall plan is for the corps to put approximately 70,000 to 100,000 young people to work each year on public lands. These are ultimately funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act 2009.

“The reason we call the jobs ‘green’ is that they will involve performing conservation and rehabilitation work in national parks, wildlife refuges, public lands, on Indian reservations and in other ‘green’ areas.  Many of the projects on which the 5,000 new jobs will be, include trail building and maintenance, other deferred maintenance projects and assisting in habitat restoration and other land and wildlife conservation programs of the department.

“As just one small example, ten high school and college students have been hired by the U.S. Geological Survey (a DOI bureau) at The Bird Banding Laboratory of Patuxent Wildlife Refuge in Maryland,” Moody told GreenRightNow. “The lab has been the main storehouse of scientific data on the banding and subsequent encounters (recoveries) of birds for all of North America for over 100 years.  The students will be working on getting 700 boxes of older data ready for scanning so they will be available for digital access. These data on migration and other matters are quite important for conservation and regulation purposes.”

Last summer, youth unemployment was up to 13.5 percent, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said last week during the OYNR announcement – the highest rate for July since 1992. But, he said, “jobs are not the only reason for such a program. …When President Franklin Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression, he said, ‘More important than material gains will be the moral and spiritual value of such work.’”

Another element of the OYNR -besides coordinating youth programs across agency lines – is encouraging girls and women to get involved in careers that traditionally have lured boys and men by a substantial margin. Thus the White House Council on Women and Girls is also closely involved, the Council’s chair, Valerie Jarrett, said last week.

Though all federal agencies, departments and bureaus are working together to come up with jobs -beginning now – each will have its particular slant. For instance, the Bureau of Indian Affairs will “be engaging youth through their workforce training programs where participants will receive job skills in the construction trades,” Moody explained.

“The Bureau of Reclamation will engage youth on some of their infrastructure reliability and safety projects, primarily in the  areas of retrofitting of existing facilities to provide ADA accessibility and maintenance activities,” she said.  “The Bureau of Land Management, National Parks Service, Fisheries and Wildlife Service and others are engaging youth in trails maintenance – whether the trails be on the Appalachian Trail or in the middle of Boston Harbor – habitat restoration and deferred maintenance projects. The United States Geological Survey will use interns to assist in their volcano monitoring, earthquake monitoring and data preservation activities.”

In addition, 107 national parks are adding Stimulus-Act related jobs over the coming months. For more information, check out the DOI Recovery Site.

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