The New Conservation was a movement for social and environmental justice. Building upon the arguments of the Progressive era, these land planning specialists and rural electrification advocates asserted that rural resources should be developed for the use and benefit of an area's most immediate inhabitants. Their arguments gained political power and state-building capacity after the onset of the Depression. With the economic crisis came the widespread belief that the collapse had somehow begun in the rural sector, and that the nation as a whole would remain mired in depression as long as farmers continued to lag behind. Many New Dealers assumed that rural assistance would function as an engine for national recovery, and they launched genuine efforts to provide inexpensive electricity to underserved rural areas and to help farmers remain in place with commodity-support programs and better soil management practices.

There is no doubt these efforts constituted a real redistribution of wealth and opportunity. Rural electrification was so effective – and so profitable – that after the war private utilities adopted the models developed by the New Deal's public agencies. Areawide coverage at reasonable rates is no longer the hotly contested issue it once was. Wartime industrialization, made possible in large part because of this government-sponsored infrastructure, decentralized economic power and launched the postwar development of the South and West.

The New Deal also introduced lasting and positive environmental change.