How many times is too many to text my 18-year-old to let her know that the American Climate Corps (ACC) applications are live? “Your climate career starts here!” says the brand new green jobs website. I texted that verbatim, and a few other things, hoping to entice.
I’ll stop now and hope she takes the heavy hint. But I’m excited! And I’m not the only one. I’ve been waiting for this anticipated launch since the Biden-Harris administration first announced it back in September 2023. Environmentalist Bill McKibben, who, like me, has a “like/hate relationship with X” posted: “This may be my single favorite thing the government has done this millennium!”
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It is pretty cool. ACC will pay 20,000 young people to essentially fight the impacts of the climate crisis all while training them to be part of the future clean energy and climate-resilience workforce. On the ACC website, there are thousands of positions in 36 states, some starting as early as May 5. That’s so soon! There are summer jobs and others that last into next year and beyond, like an Island Institute Fellow gig with the Maine Climate Corps Network that starts September 1, 2025, and lasts until August 31, 2027.
Here are a few immediate jobs with application deadlines later this week:
- OysterCorps Conservation Corpsmember, Eastpoint, Florida
- Trail Crew Individual Placement, Glenwood, New Mexico
- Big Sky Watershed Corps Member, Bozeman, Montana
- Internship—Invasive Plant Manager-Seeds, Anchorage, Alaska
- Field Leader—Seattle Urban Green Crew, Seattle, Washington
If you can’t pull it together to apply that quickly, there’s still plenty to choose from in upcoming months. The jobs pay pretty well too. That Seattle job is $22.50 an hour and offers a monthly cell phone reimbursement. It’s not for my kid, though, as the age requirement for it is 21 and up.
There are openings for hydrologic technicians in California and a chance to use terrestrial Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR)–based forest vegetation surveying/monitoring in Massachusetts. You can try your hand at being a forestry or wildlife technician in California, a fishery intern in Alaska, or work at national and state parks all across the country from Yosemite to the Adirondacks. All of it sounds amazing.
The user-friendly website lets applicants sort by state, time of application, and work environment—indoors, outdoors, urban, rural, and so on. You can also sort jobs by focus: environmental justice, Indigenous knowledge reclamation, coastal wetlands restoration, and so much more.
Some jobs offer health care, childcare, an education award opportunity, and even housing. Each job is different—just click “learn more” to get all of the details about any given job listing.
Our 2021 summer intern Julie Silverman once spent a summer in upstate New York doing invasive species removal on a local lake through a project funded by a local college and New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation Invasive Species Rapid Response and Control Grant Program. It’s not the same thing of course, but she says she would jump at the chance to apply to an ACC job. “As I learned from my summer doing invasive species removal, it is extremely inspiring to work with a group of like minded individuals toward a common goal of improving the environment. The American Climate Corps is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get paid to fight the climate crisis in our local communities and nationwide,” she says.
The administration said within three weeks of launching the ACC late last year that more than 40,000 people expressed interest in the initiative. Now that it’s officially open for the first cohort of members, it will be interesting to see how many join. If you know someone in the 18 to 35 range who wants to be the change, let them know about the opportunity. Maybe don’t text-nag, though.