Americans Face Test of Community, Citizenship

Each of us Americans conducts our daily life in bubbles, all shockingly siloed from each other. These days, we don’t share much common ground between our circumscribed worlds based on culture, zip code, religion, and political beliefs.

We feel empathy toward others inside our comfortable corrals. But too often, mutual support doesn’t reach outward. Mistrust replaces compassion.

I spent late April in my conservationist bubble. Since the first Earth Day in 1970, I’ve tried to take stock of how we treat our home planet. For this year’s “Earth Week,” I celebrated past successes rather than present catastrophes.

I was on a radio panel recounting unlikely partnerships that led to the protection of public lands. I attended an event honoring Dave Livermore for a lifetime of Nature Conservancy triumphs in Nevada and Utah. And I delighted in an exhibit of photographs of Glen Canyon, emerging from drought-diminished Lake Powell.

My compatriots and I relaxed inside our green bubble for a moment. Then we looked outward and found Interior Secretary Doug Burgum operating from starkly different values. As a wildly successful businessman, Burgum lives in a bubble of unimaginable wealth and power. In his confirmation hearings, he called America’s public lands “assets” on the “national balance sheet.”

Secretary Burgum had no qualms about delegating nearly all administrative decisions to a former oil executive turned DOGE operative. His Interior Department has abandoned regulations that protect our health, water, and land to fast-track mining operations to demonstrate compliance with decades of settled environmental law.

The secretary is preparing to eviscerate six national monuments. He’s talking about transferring public lands to the states for development and disposal. He sounds eager to turn our cherished public lands into cash cows churning billions to cover a national debt accelerated by tax cuts for the wealthy.

Ensconced in their own bubble, Trump administration officials believe they have a mandate to act without opposition. Their certainty is an illusion.

Four in five self-identified MAGA voters want to keep existing national monuments, and 85 percent of Utahns prefer rangers, scientists, and firefighters to make decisions about public lands, water, and wildlife, not political appointees from industry.

Every day brings new blows to our nation, not just public lands and national parks. Scientific research, the arts, the humanities, veterans’ health, services for Medicare and Medicaid clients, food for the hungry, international aid, and climate action—all are under attack.

President Trump’s supporters cheer his actions, paying attention to the media, which mostly tells incomplete stories. Their opponents, turning to legacy media for their news, rally against what seems to be the president’s vindictiveness. The courts push back against the administration’s disdain for the law, pausing 180 of their initiatives.

We won’t escape this impasse until we somehow pop our bubbles. We won’t be able to resist Trump’s drive toward authoritarianism without talking to each other, young and old, finding shreds of common ground across the infinitely varied spectrum of America.

To create a national movement to counter Trump’s chaos and cruelty, our society needs more of what Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, calls “social capital.” In the mid-20th century, we lost our cross-bubble associations, the clubs, churches, unions, and neighborhoods that connected us across class and culture.

Putnam documents today’s “political polarization, economic inequality, social isolation and cultural self-centeredness,” which is, in part, the consequence of our separate bubbles and one of the major reasons Donald Trump won the election. To connect, to pierce our bubbles, and to build social capital, Putnam advises us to “join or die.” Reciprocity builds social capital, and social capital builds trust.

What makes democracy work? Community. But now, AmeriCorps volunteers have been terminated, and the Peace Corps may be next. We are losing every program that brings us together.

Still, the diversity and number of citizens who have resolved to march in protest give me hope. Their chants ring in our streets: “The people united will never be defeated.”

“The power of the people is greater than the people in power.”

“Democracy is not a state, it is an act.”

An act takes actors, and every one of us has a role. I’m taking heart in this cast of millions. We’re connecting, we’re finding allies. And as we do so, the people in power will have no choice but to listen.

Stephen Trimble is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a writer and photographer who lives in Utah.