A few weeks after being announced, the Biden Administration’s American Jobs Plan is set to be stripped of most social and ecological elements in favor of hard infrastructure repairs. This would be a mistake. An infrastructure bill addressing climate change requires rethinking and reorganizing current infrastructure systems, not reinvesting in 20th century infrastructure reinforcing 20th century risks and injustices.
Current infrastructure systems enable carbon intensive lifestyles, have enormous ecological impacts, and underpin racial segregation and inequality. The plan must go beyond a repair and replace mentality and evolve infrastructure systems to address urgent challenges of climate change and environmental justice. To do so it must reimagine infrastructure as part of living systems. Key areas for this reimagination include expanding park and trail networks, treating human health as part of ecological health, combining climate adaptation with mitigation, transforming agricultural systems, investing in community planning capacity, and using ecological ethics to guide infrastructure investments.
Invest in Parks and Trails as Critical Infrastructure Systems. The Plan will invest in nature-based infrastructure through the Outdoor Restoration Force Act. That Act however, focuses on natural areas in the West, even though the majority of Americans live in cities and rely on state, municipal, and private green spaces. COVID-19 has made it clear that urban parks and green spaces are critical nature-based infrastructure for adapting to extremes, whether from climate change or pandemics. Many of the jobs provided through the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps involved building trail and park systems, which now rely on volunteers for maintenance. The Plan should provide more direct support for open space, trails, and parks acquisition and maintenance, especially for cities. Building networks of diverse conserved and working landscapes is the only way the administration will meet its conserved area goals.
Focus on Health. The Plan recognizes the relationship between infrastructure and health, especially in improving water supply systems and remediating brownfields. The Plan should go further in eliminating negative impacts of current systems, such as waste water pollution, and the myriad pollutants, toxic chemicals, and toxic social systems causing health disparities. Preventative measures, like protecting and restoring critical watersheds for clean water sources, and investing in community safety, are lacking. The Plan should emphasize the mental and physical health benefits of recreation provided by high quality and accessible public green and open spaces. Centering preventative and active health benefits will address the ongoing mental and physical health crisis undermining the US’s economic competitiveness.
Adapt and Mitigate. The language of the Plan largely focuses on climate adaptation and mitigation as separate endeavors, with the exception of the pending Civilian Climate Corps proposal. Hard infrastructure models of adaptation have enormous climate impacts. The Plan’s focus on electric vehicles will not necessarily provide large climate benefits given reliance on a largely fossil fuel based electric grid. The Plan should prioritize adaptation programs while maximizing mitigation, which can be better achieved by focusing on nature-based infrastructure within a transformative approach. Such a goal requires integrating nature-based principles and elements into all infrastructure investments, and setting hard targets for the life cycle environmental impacts and performance of gray infrastructure systems.
Transform Agriculture. The Plan makes some minor commitments to agricultural innovation. More focus is needed on an activity using over 50 percent of the land base and generating over 10 percent of US annual greenhouse gas emissions, threatening our climate resilience, and water supply. Regenerating agricultural lands as critical nature-based infrastructure should be a major focus of the Plan. Treating agricultural lands as part of larger ecological and food systems must be grounded in the relationships of Tribal Nations with landscapes. Agricultural systems must be transformed to be treated as part of ecological systems, not the primary cause of their degradation.
Invest in Community Planning Capacity. Realizing the full potential of infrastructure requires larger investments in community planning capacity than the $5 billion currently in the Plan. Ongoing work shows that cities often fail to involve affected communities in planning nature-based infrastructure. Planning systems in the U.S. remain largely fragmented with no strong federal leadership. Visionary ideas, like the Buffalo Commons, the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission, and the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative are led by non-profit and Tribal coalitions. European countries have much higher economic output per unit of investment in infrastructure due to strategic spatial planning. The Plan should allocate more funds for community led and cross jurisdictional planning.
Embed Ecological Ethics in Infrastructure. Past decisions, from how the New Deal was structured, to how land grant universities were founded, indicate that large federal programs can have mixed impacts despite good intentions. The current administration can be commended for bringing in greater diversity to appointees and centering social justice in federal policy. However, the Biden Administration needs to undertake similar work on reframing the human relationship with nature and infrastructure. Conservation science and environmental ethics must center Indigenous knowledge and value systems in order to achieve environmental justice. Native scholars and activists are already leading the way to a just future, and can be supported by rural and urban Americans concerned with the future of our health, our society, and the planet. The ethical frameworks of biocultural conservation and kinship ecology transcend the utilitarian divide of the classic conservation versus preservation debates, and can forge new ties between diverse constituencies required to pass the administration’s ambitious legislative packages.
To avoid the mistakes of 20th-century infrastructure, we can’t rely on 20th-century thinking. To meet the admirable goals of the American Jobs Plan, we must treat infrastructure as part of the living systems that make human life possible.
Dr. Zbigniew J Grabowski is a Geographer and Environmental Scientist working at the intersections of infrastructure evolution, biocultural conservation, and just governance. He specializes in team based interdisciplinary research, publishing in a variety of peer reviewed journals. He works as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, a Visiting Scholar in the Urban Systems Lab at the New School, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Portland State University.
Dr. Timon McPhearson is Director of the Urban Systems Lab and Associate Professor of Urban Ecology at The New School in New York City. He is a Senior Research Fellow at The Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In 2020 he was named an NYC Climate Hero by the NYC DOT and Human Impacts Institute and appointed by the NYC Mayor to the New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC).
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