The Lungs of Our Land
In 1937, in a letter to the nation’s governors, President Franklin Roosevelt wrote: “Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.”
Forests played a major part in the New Deal. FDR’s “Tree Army,” the Civilian Conservation Corps, enlisted millions of young men to fight wildfires, replant forests and restore spent land. The lesser known Resettlement Administration (RA), enacted in 1935, (later renamed the Farm Securities Administration) aspired to house the thousands displaced by the Dust Bowl and made jobless by the Great Depression. The RA’s town planners envisioned affordable, well-built homes surrounded by “green belts” of fields and forests. Congress considered the plan socialist and cut off funding. Only three “greenbelt towns” were built. With the climate and housing prices wildly overheated, the New Deal vision might offer the “fresh strength” we need today.