America is divided. Recent political violence has revealed how deep and dangerous the divide has become, but the cultural and political chasm separating us has been widening for decades, if not longer.
If you were to explain the political divide in America to an outsider, you could say this: it’s between cities and rural areas. Americans in cities interact with a diverse array of other city dwellers but often know little about rural life. Americans in rural areas are afraid of the cities and their diversity, and their leaders prey on and inflate these fears to gain financial and political power.
That’s it. That’s the divide. The political divide in America is one of geography and ignorance.
It is important to note that urban-rural political differences are mainly found among white Americans and not people of color, but as white non-Latino/Hispanics make up over 59% of the US population, their growing division is greatly impacting US politics.
We are a massive nation; we have tremendous swaths of barely inhabited land and also enormous cities teeming with a beautiful mix of souls. The inhabitants of these different regions have formed opposing sides that fear and misunderstand one another. That’s it. That’s the problem that has led to all this hate.
So many people in the United States live in echo chambers or social bubbles where they only interact with the people that live where they do or the people online who think like they do. We Americans have become clannish and fearful of the people we rarely interact with.
There is also a rise in loneliness and a growing social disconnect, especially among young, white men. Many of these young American men are finding brotherhood and a sense of belonging in white supremacist groups and other neo-nazi organizations that unite through hate. Why don’t we give them another option, one that fosters belonging for all of us?
In the Democratic primary for the 2020 election, there was significant discussion from the candidates about national service to combat America’s cultural division. Pete Buttigieg, who won the Iowa Caucuses, spoke often about the importance of national service in bringing Americans from different backgrounds together, using his own military service as anecdotal evidence.
One of Elizabeth Warren’s many plans during her primary campaign was to propose the creation of a new national service corps that would rebuild America’s failing infrastructure in national parks, forests, and other public lands, similar to the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) of the 1930s, a group of young people which built much of the original infrastructure on America’s public lands but was terminated in 1942 after America’s entry into World War II.
Joe Biden, who would eventually win the primary and be elected president, incorporated many of these ideas for national public service into his campaign, and in 2024 his administration announced the creation of a nationwide Environmental Justice Climate Corps, though the idea was terminated a few months later by the next president.
When I was young I served for a year in an Americorps program that took me (a middle-class white person) into low-income schools to teach about the environment. That year of service led to me becoming a national park ranger and gave me a lifelong passion for environmental and social justice.
The current Administration has gutted funding for Americorps programs (including the one in which I served), programs that were already not large and widespread enough to foster opportunities for all of our young people to serve their communities.
We need a new and larger national service program.
So where do we start? To break down cultural barriers and build a unified nation where we all feel like we belong, we will need to do something that sounds almost impossible these days. We will need to get to know one another.
In a way, national parks are the cultural bridge between the two sides of our political canyon. Both sides (generally speaking) seem to like national parks and what they bring to our nation. Both sides benefit from them economically, environmentally, culturally, and/or recreationally.
America’s national park sites exist in both rural and urban areas. While many of the larger sites designated “national parks” are often in rural areas out West, there are also hundreds of smaller national park units across America including in cities, like the twelve national park units in New York City.
There are iconic national landmarks of nature and of history throughout our cities and our rural areas, and we as Americans share ownership of and responsibility for them all. Many of these publicly protected spaces are now understaffed and underfunded. Can we come together to protect our beloved national parks?
We can if we bring back some version of the CCC that built them in the first place.
As I know from years of being a national park ranger, service on America’s public lands is a great way to introduce different kinds of people to one another. We can bring young people from across the nation out of their cities and rural areas, drop them somewhere new, and unite them around a common goal–that of caring for public lands.
We can ask our young people to give a summer or semester or year of service to their nation. Send them to America’s national parks, forests, and other public lands. Have them clear a trail of brush or pick up trash in an urban park. Teach them valuable skills of service, leadership, and community-building. Foster in them a love of their nation’s shared spaces and a greater understanding of the people they will be sharing a nation with.
As of this writing, America is most likely entering a recession (and to many of us it feels as though we are already in one). We are also in a cultural crisis that is leaving us divided, lonely, and angry.
Moving forward, as we reframe our fractured democracy and regrow our economy, one spoke of the wheel of progress must be dedicated to renewing our trust in one another.
Just as we must steward the land we love and depend upon, we must also steward the nation we’ve chosen to build together. A democratic republic and publicly protected lands are not eternal institutions unless we make them that way. Every generation must choose them anew if they are to survive. We need to take bold action to maintain them both.
Let’s create a national service program that would help generations of Americans build a nation of belonging, rooted in the public lands that belong to us all.