The lockdown recession will have devastating effects on employment. And as Kathleen Henehan of the Resolution Foundation points out, the least advantaged young people will get the worst of it:

Emergency measures like the furlough scheme will go some way to help existing workers, but they won’t do much for school leavers and graduates struggling to get their first jobs — or a replacement job after being made redundant.

An extended period of mass employment will have long-term scarring effects on those most directly impacted — setting them up for decades of economic disadvantage. To rescue a potentially lost generation, there’s a case for a state programme to provide the missing jobs directly.

But what sort of programme? What could an army of the unemployed usefully do that can be scaled-up as required, but also scaled-down as the regular economy returns to strength?

Writing for The New York Times, Collin O’Mara looks to an example from Depression-era America — the Civilian Conservation Corps:

O’Mara argues for a modern-day Conservation Corps (female recruits included) to occupy at least some of 7.7 million young Americans who are currently unemployed. The idea is just as applicable over here. After all, we need more trees. Landscape-wise, Britain is one of the most naked countries in Europe and it’s time we covered-up.

Admittedly, there’s more to conservation work than planting trees — and more to planting trees than the dark and lifeless conifer plantations that still haunt the countryside. We shouldn’t recruit a tree-planting army unless we have some clued-up generals to direct their efforts. But Britain has a lot of conservation expertise — it can’t be beyond our wit to devise a decent strategy.

As long as we choose the right species for the right places, planting trees is an ideal focus for a temporary employment scheme:

Firstly, once they’re established, trees get on with the job — growing away over the decades without the high manpower requirements of the start-up phase. Secondly, this isn’t just make-work. I don’t suppose that service in the tree-planting army will pay very well, but its soldiers will leave behind a visible legacy they can be proud of. Thirdly, such an employment scheme would bequeath future generations a valuable asset. In the process of becoming mighty oaks, little acorns not only create new habitats, they sequester vast amounts of CO₂ (pandemic disease isn’t the only global crisis we’re wrestling with).

Economic recovery schemes don’t always make the world a better place. State-led efforts in the post-war era left behind a dystopian legacy of concrete eyesores that we’ve struggled with ever since. But if, in the year 2120, our descendants can walk through wildlife-rich woodlands that we planted, well, they might just remember us fondly.

Assuming, that is, they’re not still paying off our debts.

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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