In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, Jedediah Britton-Purdy lauds the emergence of a Green New Deal on the national political agenda, and argues that it represents the recovery of an important historical awareness. “Curiously,” he writes, “the idea that environmental policy could ever be separated from the larger economic order, or from fights over fairness, is recent, a product of an unusually technocratic period in American politics.”8 Just as MacKaye once understood that the problems of forest management and urban labor policy could be brought together in a bold project of regional recreational development, so are we now starting to realize that atmospheric decarbonization, urban housing, and economic justice are all aspects of the same challenge. Our solution may not be a hiking trail, but we will need to think and act on a vast scale, geographically and conceptually, if we are to have any chance at all.9
An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning (1921)
by Benton MacKaye
Something has been going on these past few strenuous years which, in the din of war and general upheaval, has been somewhat lost from the public mind. It is the slow quiet development of the recreational camp. It is something neither urban nor rural. It escapes the hecticness of the one, and the loneliness of the other. And it escapes also the common curse of both — the high-powered tension of the economic scramble. All communities face an “economic” problem, but in different ways. The camp faces it through cooperation and mutual helpfulness, the others through competition and mutual fleecing.
We civilized ones also, whether urban or rural, are potentially helpless as canaries in a cage. The ability to cope with nature directly — unshielded by the weakening wall of civilization — is one of the admitted needs of modern times. It is the goal of the “scouting” movement. Not that we want to return to the plights of our Paleolithic ancestors. We want the strength of progress without its puniness. We want its conveniences without its fopperies. The ability to sleep and cook in the open is a good step forward. But “scouting” should not stop there. This is but a faint step from our canary bird existence. It should strike far deeper than this. We should seek the ability not only to cook food but to raise food with less aid — and less hindrance — from the complexities of commerce. And this is becoming daily of increasing practical importance. Scouting, then, has its vital connection with the problem of living.