Training Tomorrow’s Conservationists
By Patricia Marshall
Forest Magazine
Fall 2006 
Photo © George Filgate
Two fluttering blue ribbons mark the beginning of the trail I’m looking for. So far, the hike a half-mile into the Willamette National Forest in Oregon has been easy, but once I turn onto the path marked by the ribbons, I start trekking in earnest, up two miles of steep switchbacks on a crumbling trail leading to the top of Ogle Mountain. A discarded jacket and shirt lie in the dirt around the first bend, so I know I’m headed in the right direction. When I stop to catch my breath, which happens more frequently as the trail climbs relentlessly, I listen for ringing pickaxes or shouts--anything to indicate I’m close to the work crew I’m looking for--but all I hear is the quiet and my own gasps. Suddenly, I see a flash of movement through the trees, and a teenage girl, wearing a bright orange hard hat over her blond pigtails, barrels down the path, followed by Melissa Bennett, the crew leader.
They’re after a handsaw that the crew needs higher up, they tell me, and though Bennett stops to say hello, they’re both in a hurry to get back up the hill once the saw is claimed. Bennett calls back, “We’re going to break for lunch. You don’t have to come up any farther, we’re eating down there.” She then calls up the hill, “Tool count!” Almost before I have time to step to the side, nine kids in heavy jeans, blue work shirts and boots that look like they have just been broken in come bounding down the path, tools slung over their shoulders. Their hard hats identify them as members of the Orange Crew, part of a team of teenagers who have signed up for a six–week stint working in the woods with Northwest Youth Corps, based in Eugene, Oregon. They flop down on either side of the path, pull off their work gloves--some revealing nasty blisters and taped tendons--and Bennett starts handing out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and trail mix.
This crew has been working together for almost two weeks. They greet the chocolate I brought them as if it were manna from Heaven. They joke about the fortunes in the Dove bars, about bears winking in the woods, about sleeping in--it’s noon and they’ve been working since seven a.m. with only a fifteen-minute break--and about the food. Two boys demonstrate their Mountain Dew–chugging prowess, then offer to do it again. The lunch break passes quickly, but when Bennett announces that it’s time to get back to work, they get up without protest, readjust their hard hats, pick up their tools--a hefty, short-handled, square-bladed instrument called a hog–hoe, and its fingered counterpart, the McLeod--and are off up the trail.
This ragtag group of kids burning up calories, swinging hoes and scraping brush off the trail could look an awful lot like the future when it comes to public lands. The Northwest Youth Corps, and corps like it across the country, combine teenagers’ youthful energy with languishing public–land projects and create something greater than the sum of its parts. For some kids, working with a corps will be a life-changing experience, leading them to careers in natural resources, maybe with the U.S. Forest Service or land management agencies. Others will choose different professions, but the summer work will give them a greater appreciation for the outdoors, one they might not get otherwise in today’s technology-oriented society. Given that our public lands are under constant assault--this year alone, the administration has allowed logging in roadless areas, increased drilling and mining permits and proposed selling off excess Forest Service acres to pay for hurricane debt--safeguarding the forests for the future is going to be a monumental task, and these future stewards need all the preparation they can get.
For this crew, however, the distant future is the least of their concerns. They want to get through the afternoon, return to the campsite and have a hot meal and maybe a swim before falling into bed. It’s hard work, but it beats flipping burgers or spending the summer watching the tube. This morning, they “brushed” the entire trail up Ogle Mountain, removing vegetation and leveling the path. Tomorrow, they’ll be back, cutting tread and digging drainage ditches, reconstructing a trail that will last for years.
OFFSPRING OF THE CCC
President Franklin Roosevelt hit on the idea first. In 1933, he offered employment to men who would go out in the woods to work on conservation projects. The Civilian Conservation Corps provided jobs and restored the spirits of young men beaten down by the Depression. By the fall of 1935, there were 505,000 enrollees in 2,600 camps, workers whose monthly earnings of about thirty dollars helped their families ward off financial hardship. The Conservation Corps legacy remains today on public lands: walkways and walls around the historic lodge at Crater Lake in Oregon; thousands of trees planted in Michigan; walls, bridges and buildings that have endured for decades in national parks. Portions of the Appalachian Trail were constructed using corps labor, as were parts of the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Roosevelt’s idea has endured and grown. The National Association of Service and Conservation Corps lists 108 youth corps in thirty-seven states. Of those, approximately 55 percent focus on conservation and restoration programs. Though the purpose of today’s youth corps is not to provide a living wage, the corps’ effects on public lands are similar to those of their predecessors. Projects that might otherwise not get done for lack of manpower, or that would be too costly, are tackled with some government assistance.
Brian McGinley, a recreation planner on the Willamette National Forest in Oregon, has worked with various youth groups ranging from correctional teams of kids who must serve out detention through community service, to what he calls the hotshots: Northwest Youth Corps crews. He says the partnerships with youth groups allow his forest to tackle work that might not be completed otherwise. “If we had to rely strictly on appropriated or Forest Service dollars to do this work, then we would be doing less trail miles per year [and] our trail system would be in poorer shape,” he says.
For big projects such as bridges and roads, McGinley says the forest is required to hire contractors because they must meet certain government standards. But trail work involves a wide range of difficulty, from simple pickup and clearing to rebuilding tread and drainage. The Northwest Youth Corps crews are the most experienced he works with, he says, mostly because the same crew works together for five or six weeks, as opposed to other groups that may include new faces every day. The Youth Corps crews include trained crew leaders, too. McGinley treats these crews more like he would a regular contractor but economically, the arrangement works out a little better for the forest, he says, because the Corps shoulders some of the costs of the work.
Youth corps nationwide got a federal boost in 2005, when Congress passed the Public Lands Corps Healthy Forests Restoration Act. The act allows federal agencies to non-competitively hire corps to work on projects related to conservation, and establishes a priority for jobs that are linked to ecosystem health. It also allows public land agencies to grant credit to new applicants for the time they have put in on corps work. Since many corps members go on to work in seasonal forest jobs, the experience is advantageous for both the agency and the applicant.
In addition to the economic incentive for the forest and the boost to the future workforce, McGinley thinks one benefit often goes unnoticed. “There is significant conservation education, or awareness, that goes on with these jobs. We’re building clientele, not from a business standpoint, but we’re building empathy with the national forest and the resources that are on national forest land with the next generation,” he says. “When they become adults, [former crew members] are more inclined to volunteer, to do simple stuff to help…[they’re] just more involved in things out there, and just more aware of [our] mission.”
A SUMMER SELF
In the latter part of the twentieth century, and on into this one, cultural attention has focused on technology: first the wonders of television, now Ipods, BlackBerrys and TiVo. But a uniquely American longing for wilderness persists, as evidenced by a growing number of outdoor programs. Sally Prouty, the director of the National Association of Service and Conservation Corps, says many popular recreation programs, such as Outward Bound, can cost thousands of dollars a week, limiting those experiences to an elite group that can afford them.
“In corps, you are doing very similar work and getting a very similar end product but you’re getting paid to do that work,” Prouty says.
And that leads to greater diversity. Most corps offer their members a stipend, and in the case of Northwest Youth Corps it’s a reasonable amount, especially considering there’s no chance to spend it for five weeks. In the five- and six-week-long summer programs, members can take home $200 a week, depending on bonuses and food allowances. Out of that money, their biggest expense will be weekend showers and laundry. The wage means more minorities and more kids from small towns with limited job opportunities will be attracted to the program.
Land management agencies are not typically known for their diversity, Prouty says, but “we see the corps as being an avenue to change that. As much as ethnicity is tied into income, that is a significant factor.”
Justin Crabtree, who grew up in Junction City, a small town north of Eugene, started working with the Corps in 1992, the year environmentalists and the timber industry were at war over old-growth protection and habitat for the spotted owl. “The people at Youth Corps had a different mindset than I was used to,” he says. “[Where I lived], everyone had yellow ribbons on their mailboxes to support the timber industry in Oregon.” His first crew was made up of people from all over the country, and he was surprised to find that many of them had a more sophisticated environmental ethic. Though he feels that the Corps didn’t promote a particular ethic, he found he couldn’t get away with sound-bite slogans. “My first crew leader would question and challenge your beliefs and thoughts and make you support them…I realized that I couldn’t.”
Crabtree was a Corps member for two years, and later went back as a crew leader. “One crew I was on, we had three kids whose fathers worked for a sawmill in Forks,” he says, referring to the Washington town that was the epicenter of the spotted owl wars. “By the end of the session, we had common interests and ideas and goals about wilderness and the natural world.”
Ryan Aeby, another Youth Corps alumnus, had a similar experience. He says differing ethics and backgrounds weren’t much of an issue. “It doesn’t really matter as much where you’ve been, as to how you act while you’re at [Northwest Youth Corps].”
In high school, Aeby was focusing on art, but after his Corps experience he attended forestry school at Oregon State University. “My parents say that I have a summer self,” he says. “I have a whole different personality when I’m out in the woods.” He worked on temporary crews for several years, building trails and firefighting, and just began a permanent job with the Forest Service as a fire dispatcher.
What both Aeby and Crabtree stress is that their experience with the Corps didn’t just change the direction of their lives. “If people stuck around for very long they [realized] that they could take care of things,” Aeby says. “You’ve got a rock the size of your twelve-passenger van; how do I move this with just hand tools?…You just figure out what it’s going to take and [whether] you have the resources to do it.”
BUT WHAT’S FOR DINNER?
The Northwest Youth Corps was started in 1984, and that first year, it employed fifty-two teens. It has since served more than 10,000 youth, taking them out to the woods to teach them fundamental ecology and conservation skills. The Corps attracts kids from across the country, some of whom are from the East and have never seen big mountains. A boy from France signed on to a crew this year, and past crews have included kids from India, Papua New Guinea and Latin America.
Alex Lowe, a Youth Corps recruiter who processes applications, says that although the Corps has a reputation among some parents for hiring at-risk kids, hirings are done on a case-by-case basis. He doesn’t automatically dismiss kids whose applications indicate a troubled past, but he may ask them to write a letter explaining what happened, and challenges them to make their case for why they should become part of the Corps. And if they are caught lying on the application, they’ve weeded themselves out. About half of the applicants don’t follow through, and if they don’t have the fortitude for that, they probably weren’t a good match for the Corps in the first place.
“They have to prove that they want to do it,” he says.
The Corps’ sprawling headquarters, a former elementary school it purchased in 2003, is crowded with buses painted with the group’s logo. By mid-June, four crews of forty kids each have already left for five- or six-week stints in the woods. In midsummer, more crews will depart. Over the course of the year, the Corps will accommodate about 1,000 kids: younger teens who work in local, weekday programs; students who attend the program’s accredited Outdoor High School; and the summer conservation crews.
Like an army, the Youth Corps travels on its stomach, and it’s no small feat to feed all these hungry teens. A hallway outside the classroom-sized food storage room is lined with stacks of giant coolers, numbering at least 150. The long conveyor belt in the center of the storage room is surrounded by tables, boxes of food and still more coolers. At one end, a newly installed walk–in cooler sends out a blast of cold air, and along a wall that used to be lined with refrigerators, shelves now hold cases of canned tuna, bags of rice and trail mix--an ever-changing combination of nuts, seeds, dried fruit and something sugary: gummy bears, jelly beans or chocolate-covered raisins. The Corps literature claims that they go through 1.1 tons of trail mix a year. It’s easy to imagine.
THE BEST PRIZE
The success of this food coordination is on display at a weekend camp a few weeks later in the Rogue National Forest in Oregon. The kitchen dominates the campground. Late Saturday afternoon, one team is busy chopping vegetables and slicing cheese for dinner. Stoves, coolers, water jugs and wooden boxes packed with dried food and giant pots rest under tarps. The kids not assigned to dinner prep are kinetic, wrestling with each other, gathering in loose groups, singing along with a guitar or visiting. This is their weekend off, but there’s still plenty to do: check personal gear, write letters home, tend to bruises and blisters.
Each summer conservation crew is made up of four teams, divided by the color of their hard hats, and all four teams meet on the weekends at a common campsite, giving them a chance to relax and mingle with the other kids. During one or two of the weekends, parents are invited to join the campers, and this weekend a few campsites are scattered some distance from the two rows of white crew tents set up on either side of the trail.
For the most part, the kids I talk with like the work they do and the program, but there are exceptions: one boy says he signed up for the crew because he basically wanted to get paid for doing nothing. When I wonder aloud how that’s working out, a girl next to me mutters, “Yeah, he keeps trying.” Another girl tells me that she doesn’t mind the work, but that the time off is boring. While other kids complain about the noise from the all-terrain vehicles roaring through the campsite, she says, a little wistfully, “You should see my uncle’s new machine. It’s really sweet.”
Before we eat dinner, family-style, at ten long picnic tables set end-to-end, one corps member offers a quote from Teddy Roosevelt, “The best prize life has to offer is to work hard at work worth doing.” The quote draws cheers and high-fives from the crew members.
The next morning at seven a.m., a rooster call from a crew leader announces wake-up. Like a well-oiled machine, the crew starts its day. Bleary-eyed kids emerge from their tents, lugging backpacks and sleeping bags to piles sorted by team color. The woods ring with the sound of aluminum poles clanging as the kids disassemble their tents. When those chores are done, they are free to eat breakfast. “We’re first,” muses one of the boys who is sampling the French toast the crew leaders have prepared. “The girls usually kick our butts.” An hour later, it’s time for more chores: clean the vans, sort the food and tools, consolidate the coolers. The teams get their work assignments and destinations for the coming week: one crew to the Fremont National Forest to work on trail restoration, one to nearby Diamond Lake to pile slash as part of a fuel reduction project. Soon, the vans are loaded with kids, gear and food, and they are on their way, leaving nothing behind but dust and mosquitoes.
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