Lucas Jackson/Reuters

President Trump talks with the US Ambassador Nikki Haley as they attend a session on reforming the United Nations at UN Headquarters in New York, Sept. 18, 2017.

President Trump has already shaken the post-World War II global order by pulling the United States out of American-led international pacts like the Paris Climate Accords and the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal – and by threatening to dump others, like the Iran nuclear deal.

He has cast doubt on longstanding US-led alliances like NATO and those covering Northeast Asia, recently blasting US trade arrangements with South Korea even as the two allies take on the building bellicosity of North Korea.

And his administration has called for a nearly one-third reduction in State Department and foreign-aid spending, a cut many see as unavoidably limiting America’s diplomatic reach and influence.

Now this week, the US is participating in the world’s biggest annual diplomatic event, the opening of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, with roughly half the delegation of senior diplomats and foreign-policy advisers brought by past administrations.

And that poses a fundamental question: In the realm of global leadership, can the Trump administration do more with less?

For many in the community of 193 UN member states who have been anticipating General Assembly week to see for themselves how Mr. Trump intends to meld his nationalist policies with America’s global role, the impression may be that of the incredible shrinking superpower.

Senior administration officials contend it is nothing of the sort, that the US will demonstrate this week how it intends to lead the world while strengthening the nation first and being more efficient.

The many dozens of world leaders assembling in New York “are going to find out we are going to be solid, we’re going to be strong,” the US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, told reporters at a White House press conference Friday. “No one is going to grip and grin, the United States is going to work.”

But for others, the US retrenchment at the world’s preeminent diplomatic gathering is further evidence of what a key Senate committee last week denigrated as “the administration’s apparent doctrine of retreat.”

Trump will be in New York for four days, and will deliver on Tuesday a much-anticipated speech outlining US global priorities. By tradition, the US president speaks third, after the UN secretary-general and the president of Brazil.

For many, the reduced cadre of US diplomats and specialists in a wide range of international issues will be at least as important in cementing global impressions of US intentions under Trump.

“What looks like a significant downsizing of the US presence will have a considerable signaling implication,” says Sheba Crocker, who served as the assistant secretary of State for international organization affairs in the Obama administration. “It’s sending a clear signal that the US is not playing the same role it has played traditionally and throughout many decades of multilateral diplomacy and engagement.”

Reshaping alliances

Noting that the smaller US presence at the UN comes after months of other actions suggesting a reduced US diplomatic profile, Ms. Crocker, now vice-president for humanitarian policy and action at CARE USA, says, “I suspect this is being seen around the world as further evidence that the US is pulling back from the leadership role it has traditionally played on the world stage and in driving the global conversation.”

Indeed, the UN week downsizing is likely to confirm the view among many leaders of other countries that it is time to look more to other powers for leadership, other former US diplomats say. Foreign leaders “already … have begun to reshape alliances and reconfigure the networks that make up the global economy, bypassing the United States and diminishing its standing,” writes Elliott Cohen, a senior State Department official in the administration of President George W. Bush, in the October issue of The Atlantic.

What Mr. Cohen sees as the “withering” of “high-level diplomatic contact” in an administration that has yet to nominate many critical undersecretaries of state or ambassadors is likely to accelerate with fewer of those top diplomats attending the UN opening session.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who is orchestrating his department’s reorganization and ordered the UN presence downsizing, is doing both in the name of cost-cutting and efficiency. His aides say US diplomacy at the UN will be just a “robust” as ever.

“Some folks like to focus on the overall size of the footprint,” Mr. Tillerson’s spokeswoman, Heather Nauert, told journalists last week. “The secretary firmly believes coming out of the private sector that we all need to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars,” she said, adding, “Have you checked [New York] hotel rates?”

Even advocates of a broad and, yes, expensive US diplomatic presence at the UN acknowledge that efforts to rein in bloat can be necessary.

“It’s always fair to raise questions about delegation size, sometimes trimming around the edges can make sense,” says Crocker, who organized President Obama’s high-level meetings on strengthening UN peacekeeping during the UN week in 2015, and then last year on addressing the refugee crisis.

Where to find efficiency

Others note that using UN week right can actually enhance the kind of efficiency Tillerson is trying to encourage.

“I don’t think every senior official needs a large entourage, and sometimes the US delegations to UN meetings can get unnecessarily large, but on the other hand, it’s very important to have the senior officials focused on the many issues of importance to the US participating in New York,” says Kristen Silverberg, who served as assistant secretary of State for international organization affairs in President Bush’s second term.

“For me, the week in New York was always one of the most productive of the year,” she adds. “All of your colleagues are there from every part of the world, so it can be a very effective time.”

Indeed, Ms. Silverberg says she saw many times when key officials heading up Bush’s priority international initiatives – such as the Darfur humanitarian crisis and the Africa AIDS and malaria program – were able to organize impactful meetings with foreign colleagues in New York without undertaking expensive overseas travel.

Others say the reduced US delegation at what is referred to simply as “UNGA” – the UN General Assembly opening – sends another message to the world.

“If your idea of diplomacy is building and sustaining relationships to serve and further US interests over a wide range of issues from global security to nuclear proliferation and international development, then having a large number of diplomats to build those relationships is important,” says Michael Doyle, director of Columbia University’s Global Policy Initiative.

“But reducing that range and participation of diplomats further systemizes the transactional element of Trump foreign policy,” adds Dr. Doyle, who served as a special adviser to former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. “If you’re only really interested in the transactional, as seems to be the case in the world of Secretary Tillerson, then you don’t need all these seasoned diplomats,” he adds. “The deal of the week does not require a large delegation.”

Trump’s national security advisers note that the president and Vice President Mike Pence will take full advantage of the global leadership’s presence. Trump joined UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres Monday in convening a high-level meeting on UN reform.

Filling the void?

The president’s speech Tuesday will tout US global engagement and review what the US sees as the world’s pressing priorities.

“I personally think he slaps the right people, hugs the right people, and he comes out with the US being very strong in the end,” Ambassador Haley said in advance of Trump’s speech.

But others caution that any sense of US withdrawal from its global leadership role can prompt others to begin maneuvering to fill the void. Indeed, Mr. Cohen says, China is already responding accordingly.

“The large US presence at UNGA helped ensure that everything in New York was focused on our priority issues, rather than letting someone else decide what the agenda of the week would be,” says Silverberg, now managing director of the Institute of International Finance in Washington.

“If there’s a vacuum, if the US is stepping back, then other countries are going to fill it,” says Crocker. “And what we’ve learned from experience is that the countries stepping in don’t always have the same aims and priorities the US has – and has been able to keep the world focused on because of our leadership on the international stage.”

Two weeks after hurricane Harvey, Soni Herrera is trapped at her home – a home she and her family cannot yet live in.

Like many of the tens of thousands of Houstonians flooded out of their houses, Ms. Herrera, her husband, Jaime, and their four children benefited from the indiscriminate bravery of her community during and immediately after the storm. Neighbors helped them flee as the floodwaters crept under their doorway and rose past their knees. Friends took them in, squeezing them and another family of five into a three-bedroom home within earshot of the controlled explosions at the Arkema chemical plant.

But now, particularly for low-income families like the Herreras – Jaime is an analog x-ray technician, while Soni is on disability – the receding waters have only exposed a new raft of challenges.

Children need food, clothes, and a place to sleep. Flooded homes have to be cleaned out. Long waits in lines for donations, and on hold for relief claims, have to be endured. Plans for the school year have to be made.

Henry Gass/The Christian Science Monitor

Jaime and Soni Herrera stand outside their home in Beaumont Place, in northeast Houston, on Sept. 9. After the Herreras and their four children fled the floodwaters with help from neighbors, finding help to gut the house has been one of many challenges as the family tries to recover from hurricane Harvey.

For nine days, Herrera wrestled with these problems at her friends' house. It took days before she was able to tell her sister her family was all right. She was on hold for 1 hour and 47 minutes with the Federal Emergency Management Agency before the call dropped. With Herrera and her young autistic son diagnosed with conditions that weaken their immune system, going to a shelter is not an option. After nine days, they were able to book a hotel for one night. They haven’t been able to secure temporary housing through FEMA, so they’ve been devoting hours each day to driving around the city searching for another room for another night – all while gutting their home, finding food and supplies for their children, and starting the claims process with FEMA.

A week earlier, when the demolition began, hives broke out all over Mr. Herrera’s tattooed skin after ripping Sheetrock out of their waterlogged walls. But with the help of local church volunteers recruited by Herrera’s sister, the gutting of their home for the past four years is almost complete.

It affords a rare moment of rest for Mrs. Herrera, and she sets down her walking stick and eases onto a bench under a tree in her yard. The sodden contents of her home are piled up around her, drying in the sun. Rotting Sheetrock and floorboards are piled on the side of the street. The house had never flooded before Harvey dropped an unprecedented 52 inches of rain on the city.

“I don’t know how other people are doing it,” she says, speaking through a white mask covering her nose and mouth in her Beaumont Place neighborhood in northeast Houston.

“We have to be here because we have to put a roof over our kids’ heads. We know there are donations going on, but we have to be here,” she adds. “Not everyone has the availability and access to go wait in line.”

The Herreras’ situation illustrates a trend in how cities recover from natural disasters: Inequalities that existed in cities before disasters tend to be exacerbated afterward, research has shown. As it dries out and rebuilds, Houston – one of the most multicultural, but economically disparate, cities in the country – has the opportunity to break from this trend in a way that benefits its poor and immigrant communities, experts say.

“Historically, [with] disaster recovery dollars … money follows money,” says Robert Bullard, a professor at Texas Southern University in Houston and an expert on environmental justice. In other words, it is easier for disaster survivors with more resources to recover than those without – either because they can access aid programs more easily, or because they can afford to move away.

But Harvey presents opportunities to start addressing some of the systemic inequalities in these regions, says Dr. Bullard.

“We should break that paradigm and talk about trying to address that legacy,” he adds. “This is a real opportunity … to make this city greener, healthier, more climate resilient, but also fairer when it comes to quality of life.”

In the aftermath of hurricane Irma, Florida has similar challenges and opportunities. One in five Floridians is an immigrant, and 20 percent are undocumented. Florida has 3.3 million residents older than 65, more than any state other than California. Some 10 percent of the state's more than 20 million people lives in mobile homes – and are thus ineligible for FEMA relief – according to the most recent Census figures.

Disaster's effect on inequality

If Houston is able to recover from Harvey in a way that doesn’t maintain or exacerbate inequality in the city, it will become an exception to the rule for disaster-hit American cities.

In a study of disasters in the United States from 1920 to 2010, a group of researchers from around the country found that poverty rates increased by one percentage point in counties hit by disasters that resulted in 100 or more deaths.

“Natural disaster exposure risk could become another cause of rising quality of life inequality between the rich and poor,” the researchers wrote.

Furthermore, research has uncovered inequalities in how aid is distributed in the aftermath of natural disasters. Black-owned firms were “frozen out of the clean-up and rebuilding of the Gulf Coast” after hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, and “only 1.5 percent of the $1.6 billion awarded by FEMA went to minority businesses, less than a third of the 5 percent normally required by law,” wrote Bullard and a co-author in the book, “Race, Place, and Environmental Justice After Hurricane Katrina.”

In the case of Houston, while the city’s population and ethnic diversity has skyrocketed in recent decades, so has its income inequality.

The poverty rate of Harris County, which surrounds the city, rose from 10 percent to 17 percent between 1980 and 2014, according to a 2016 report from the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University in Houston. That poverty was also increasingly concentrated in specific areas, while the city’s high-income residents “are becoming increasingly isolated from the rest of the region.”

“That’s the economic segregation we must acknowledge, and hopefully address,” through Harvey recovery, says Bullard. “There have to be some special initiatives to address that.” 

For low-income and immigrant communities, figuring out what kinds of help are available after a natural disaster – let alone applying for them – can be difficult. Bullard says officials need to communicate more and be open with different communities about how recovery funds are spent.

Houston’s recent emergence as the most diverse city in the country could also challenge the equity of its recovery process, particularly within its immigrant population.

The number of foreign-born residents jumped 60 percent since 2000, twice the national growth rate, according to the Migration Policy Institute. The varied experiences of that group so far illustrates how the Houston’s long-term recovery effort may have to be as diverse as its population if it doesn’t want anyone to be left behind.

Finding help

Maria Barrios and Francisco Zamora say they have been pleasantly surprised by their experiences since they waded out of their north Houston home in almost waist-deep water. The two Mexican immigrants, speaking in early September at the NRG Center downtown, say the shelter is comfortable for them and their five children. They also got help in applying to FEMA for aid.

“We saw what happened with Katrina, when people came in and how disorganized it was.… We just didn’t know what to expect,” says Mr. Zamora, through a translator.

“I still can’t believe we’re here,” he says he tells Ms. Barrios when he wakes up at night.

Post-Harvey recovery may be more uncertain for the city’s estimated 600,000 undocumented immigrants – even those with American-born children who are eligible for FEMA aid.

After President Trump entered the White House in January promising a crackdown on illegal immigration, Houston has seen some of the most aggressive enforcement. The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office in Houston, which covers southeast Texas, has been one of the most active offices in the country this year, making more than 2,000 arrests from January through mid-March.

While ICE reportedly suspended immigration enforcement in the days after the storm, Kate Vickery, executive director of Houston Immigration Legal Services Collaborative, says the fear of enforcement could still scare some immigrants away from seeking help as they recover.

“We’ve seen since President Trump’s election that people without legal status don’t apply for federal benefits out of fear that applying on behalf of a citizen child will make them a target for immigration enforcement,” she adds.

Filling out a FEMA aid application “require[s] them to fill out form to the US government with their name and address on it, and nobody can say there’s no risk associated with that.”

“That’s what we’re concerned about, that people who are undocumented don’t have access to same type of relief as people who are citizens,” she adds.

From Jacksonville to Miami to rural Immokalee, Florida will now be wrestling with many of the same questions.

Irma destroyed 200 acres of seedlings in Immokalee, a city that grows a significant portion of the country’s tomatoes every year, providing vital income to low-income residents.

“I just hope and pray that as soon as we can, we can get back to the fields,” Anita Martinez, an Immokalee resident, told the Miami Herald.

'A long road ahead'

In Houston, Maria Molina is juggling three jobs and helping the Herreras recover.

Ms. Molina is one of the tens of thousands of Houstonians who, thanks to Harvey’s haphazard devastation, didn’t see significant flooding. So she has thrown herself into helping Herrera, her sister.

Between working multiple jobs, she called FEMA, the American Red Cross, Mayor Sylvester Turner, even the organization behind Houston Texans linebacker J.J. Watt’s relief fund, to ask for donations and help gutting their home. Eventually, she found the volunteers from the local church through a co-worker.

“The whole world is pulling together to donate,” she says on the phone earlier in the week, fighting back tears, “but no one [seems to be] giving anything.” Molina says she was talking about the federal and state governments, as well as large charities – not the individuals whose generosity became a byword during the storm. Every website she encountered had a "give here" button, but she couldn't find anywhere to help her sister ask those groups for help.

She is speaking after spending the afternoon getting new shoes for Herrera’s children. In the rush to evacuate during the storm, the family forgot to move the children’s shoes from under their beds. The floodwater took them.

“The water was in the neighborhood for three days, and she can’t recover from that, not right away,” she says. “I’m glad neighbors can help, and [that] churches are reaching out. I just hope we can keep finding people who can help. She and her family have a long road ahead.”

Ryan Lenora Brown/The Christian Science Monitor

The partially-finished Freedom Bridge crosses the Nile River in Juba, South Sudan. Only a temporary structure was completed before civil war stalled construction in 2016. The final bridge (r.) remains unfinished, with no date in sight for resuming construction: a quiet reminder of how war has stalled even the most basic attempts at nation-building here.

On its face, the plan was simple. South Sudan’s largest city needed a new bridge, and a Japanese aid agency was going to build one.

It was 2012 when the announcement was made, and the capital of the world’s newest country was growing up and out hungrily: a sudden glut of new huts, new houses, and new hotels poking up from the green flatlands.

“The way the city was growing was unbelievable,” says Justin Tata, the head of the department of architecture and urban planning at the University of Juba. “But the problem was the people came first, then the plans for what to do with them afterwards.”

Indeed, the bones of the city – its roads and plumbing and power grid – couldn’t keep up with the massive growth spurt. Perhaps most alarmingly, the city had only a single, rickety bridge slung across the Nile River to connect it to the country’s most important highway, a 120-mile artery stretching south to the border with Uganda.  

Every day, a huge portion of the country’s economy rattled over the 45-year-old bridge’s two narrow lanes, as heaving 18-wheelers carried imported goods from the port of Mombasa, in Kenya, into the growing capital city. Traffic snarled at both ends of the bridge as vehicles waited hours to cross.

“Bridges are the main gate for our development,” says Roman Marghani Lukak, the regional director for roads and bridges. He meant that metaphorically, but as the trucks packed with grains, medicine, building materials, and books queued up, it seemed true in an almost alarmingly literal sense, too.

South Sudan, after all, has one of the most lopsided economies in the world. Oil accounts for roughly 99 percent of its exports. The country imports nearly everything else it needs – from food and medicine to building materials and cars – at enormous cost through neighboring countries. In no small part because of its wobbly infrastructure, the price of importing goods is about three times the regional average, driving up prices for people with little money to pay.

Five years after the first promise of a new bridge, however, the project remains unfinished, its construction now indefinitely on hold. And like the overgrown remains of factories on Juba’s outskirts or the rotting piles of uncollected garbage lining many city streets, the half-a-bridge stands as a quiet reminder of how civil war has stalled even the most basic attempts at nation-building here – in a physical sense as well as a political one.

A new bridge “would be really good for us,” says Bullen Maker Kang, who lives a few hundred yards from the construction site for the new bridge. When the project was first announced, he says he would let his mind run wild with the possibilities of what it could mean. Maybe he would build a small general store to serve the passing truck drivers. Maybe the road to his house, which turned to a deep, impassable lake in the rainy season, would be paved over. With government soldiers patrolling the bridge, maybe the neighborhood’s security would improve, too. But now all those maybe-futures are drifting away. “We just hope every day [construction] will start again.”

A city unshaped

When South Sudan became independent in 2011, it was, in many ways, a shell of a country. Since the 1980s, an estimated 80 percent of its population had been displaced at some point by fighting, and most of those who remained in their homes had long ago gotten used to getting by without – without schools, without clinics, without roads or electricity or bridges.

At independence, the tattered infrastructure presented the new country with enormous challenges, says Mr. Tata, but it also gave it a strange sense of possibility. Here, after all, was an almost entirely blank slate for new developments.

And at first, the city planner in him was optimistic. Juba was nearly a century old, but for most of that time it had been little more than a sleepy provincial town. Indeed, it hadn’t had a bridge at all until the 1970s – residents simply crossed the river by boat.  

So when the population began to boom in the years just before and after independence, Tata says, Juba seemed a new city altogether. And it had the feeling of unset clay – a place that could become anything, depending on how it was molded.

“This is the youngest capital city in the world,” he remembers thinking. “So we have the opportunity to build a capital city better than any that exists in the world so far.”

With that in mind, city planners and humanitarians built Juba its first stop lights, and USAID paved the road to the Ugandan border, cutting travel time to reach it from eight hours to two and a half. Renovations began on the capital’s river port. And the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) announced that it was donating a new bridge to South Sudan’s capital, which it gave a name befitting of its heady historical moment: The Freedom Bridge.

But the opportunity to build a new and better capital city didn’t last long. In December 2013, fighting broke out between the country’s president, Salva Kiir, and his deputy, Riek Machar. Within months, it had escalated into full-blown civil war. Construction on the new bridge halted, and its Japanese engineers went home.

They returned a few months later, only to be driven out again by renewed fighting in the capital in July 2016.

Today, the unassembled pieces of the Freedom Bridge lie across a grassy construction site like giant Lego blocks. A temporary bridge stretches across the river.

When fighting broke out last year and soldiers blocked off the main bridge leading out of the city, thousands of Juba residents broke into the construction site and used it to escape. But most of the time, it stands vacant save for the skeleton crew who still work the site, clearing river debris and making sure the construction equipment doesn’t rust away.

Mr. Lukak, the regional head of roads and bridges, says he is optimistic that the Japanese will return soon. For its part, JICA is a bit cagier. A spokesperson writes in an email that it is “carefully watching the situation in South Sudan [and] collecting and analyzing relevant information.”

But in the diplomatic community here, there are whispers that the project is likely dead for good. Anyway, many wonder, what would be the point of building a bridge only to see it destroyed again by war?  

Tata sometimes asks himself questions like that too. For now, he’s not working on any projects for the city at all. Instead, he’s thrown himself into to teaching South Sudan’s next generation of architects. His small office on the campus of the University of Juba is jammed with their final projects. There are riverside hotels and nongovernmental organization compounds, bridges and roads – flimsy miniatures of a future city he still hopes they’ll someday build.  

Story Hinckley/The Christian Science Monitor

Captain JC Hudgins stands on his dock in Mathews, Virginia. In the mornings, Captain Hudgins collects his crab pots and in the afternoons he takes visitors and locals out on "eco-tours" where he teaches them about the Chesapeake Bay. Hudgins' family has lived in Mathews for four generations.

Like his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather, J.C. Hudgins has spent his entire life in Mathews, Va., making his living off the Chesapeake Bay.

In the mornings, Captain Hudgins pulls up his crab pots and sells some 10 bushels to the nearby J&W Seafood on Gwynn’s Island. His afternoons are often filled with eco-tours, where he teaches passengers what it takes to be a sustainable crabber or oysterman aboard his boat “Risky Business II,” before settling in for the night with Fox News.

“It’s a living, but you don’t get rich,” says Hudgins, looking out at the water from his dock. “I’ve worked hard all my life, nobody has ever given me anything.”

That’s a sentiment Americans are accustomed to hearing from working-class conservatives. Hudgins’ opinions on environmental policy, however, take a sharp turn from the stance that many liberals associate with people from conservative communities. But to Hudgins and many of his neighbors living on Virginia’s Middle Peninsula, conservatism and conservation go hand-in-hand.

“I’m very frustrated that people think by default that Democrats are pro-environment and Republicans are not,” says Jack White, the chairman of the Board of Supervisors in Mathews County. “Conservation is at the heart of conservative principles. You're operating on the same root word.”

Conservatives in the Middle Peninsula – an area slightly larger than the state of Rhode Island – explain their political leanings with the same rationale they use to explain their loyalty to the bay. Because manual labor, much of it tied to the Chesapeake, has defined this area’s economy for generations, locals feel equally sensitive to entitlement programs and environmental degradation. Both tax increases and pollution increases, for example, are discussed in terms of forgone bushels of crabs.

Conservative values are “fundamental” for reducing environmental degradation, says Mr. White. Humans aren’t born Republicans or environmentalists, he says – rather they become either or both of these things after witnessing waste.

Conservative conservation

The Middle Peninsula’s melding of conservative and conservationist values has brought Republican voters and politicians to the same table as environmental activists, says Chris Moore, senior regional ecosystem scientist at the nonprofit Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) in Annapolis, Md.

“Fortunately, when it comes to issues of the bay, we get wide support from both sides of the aisle. A lot of it is due to concerns that the legislators bring from their own districts,” says Mr. Moore. “We are in a place with bay issues where people understand the connection between the land and the water quality and they want to find ways to move forward.”

The six counties in Virginia’s Middle Peninsula – Essex, Gloucester, King and Queen, King William, Mathews, and Middlesex – have a history of voting Republican in presidential elections. President Trump won the whole peninsula in 2016, beating Hillary Clinton in three of the counties by more than 35 percent. But Mr. Trump’s favor soured in the area when he proposed cutting the $73 million Chesapeake Bay cleanup fund in the 2018 budget.

“I wasn’t real happy about that,” says Hudgins, shaking his head, on the dock next to “Risky Business II.”

Hudgins grew up hearing tales of clear water with too many crabs to catch from his great-grandfather, a skipjack who ferried watermelons across the Chesapeake. That image was hard to reconcile with the waters he saw growing up – so dirty he couldn’t see his own feet when standing in the shallows.

It’s a lot better now, says Hudgins, thanks to clean-up efforts by locals, CBF, and the government.

“The oysters are coming right up,” he says. “There’s a lot more underwater vegetation. It’s not 100 percent, but it’s better.” Later he adds, “Everybody needs to do their own part.”

More than 150 rivers and creeks flow into the bay, making it the largest estuary in North America and the third-largest in the world. And the bay’s vast geographical reach across six US states makes it difficult to protect. Since 1985, high levels of nitrogen and phosphorus from pollution have sustained an average 1.7-cubic-mile dead zone – an area of water where no life can survive. According to CBF, the bay that Captain John Smith saw in the early 1600s had 10 times more oysters, 4 times more underwater grasses, and 5 times clearer water than the bay in 2016.

Today, the bay is the cleanest it’s been since CBF started issuing annual reports almost two decades ago. 

“It's been an all hands on deck approach,” says CBF’s Moore. “[There has been a] huge increase in people who are taking actions on their private property to help bay water quality.”

Story Hinckley/The Christian Science Monitor

Delegate Keith Hodges represents the 98th District in the Virginia General Assembly, an area that consists of all six counties in Virginia's Middle Peninsula. Delegate Hodges is a Republican, but he has proposed innovative environmental solutions in his region on issues ranging from living shorelines to stormwater management.

For one thing, homeowners are increasingly interested in maintaining living shorelines, stabilized by grasses and other native vegetation rather than artificial retaining walls or bulkheads. Keith Hodges, the Republican delegate for all six counties on the Middle Peninsula, helped drive the surge in living shorelines.

Although the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality favors living shorelines, there had been no economic incentive for homeowners to take down existing seawalls. In fact, says Delegate Hodges, until recently there was an economic disincentive: Any renovation to remove seawalls or bulkheads was subject to home improvement taxes.

“There was no carrot, there was just a stick,” says Lewis Lawrence III, executive director for the Middle Peninsula Planning District Commission.

In an effort to soften that stick, Hodges proposed and helped usher two bills through the General Assembly that were designed to remove financial hurdles to living shoreline development: one that eliminated the taxation of living shoreline-related home improvements, and a second that allotted funds for a revolving loan program for residents, the first of its kind in Virginia. Both passed with bipartisan support. Within the first two months of the loan program, four loans for living shorelines had already been approved. Mr. Lawrence expects the program’s $250,000 worth of loans will be lent out by the fall.

Hodges says he isn’t doing anything extraordinary. Instead, he says he is simply representing the interests of his constituents on the Middle Peninsula: Republicans who want jobs for their families and protection for their bay.

Threading the needle

At Diggs Seafood in Mattaponi, Va., customers pull up to the shopping center with fishing nets sliding around in the bed of their trucks. Diggs has been a local favorite in this tight-knit community since the 1930s. As the standing-room-only shop fills up with customers, owner Crystal Carter works swiftly, doling out crab muffins and deviled crabs to eight customers in a matter of minutes. One man doesn’t even have to tell Ms. Carter what he would like – she sees him walk in and rings up two crab muffins and a Mountain Dew.

“People here care about the environment because it is in your face – it’s real,” says Ms. Carter. When asked how many crab muffins she makes in a day, she laughs: “Whatever it is, it’s not enough.”

Her shop is one of just a few small businesses on the peninsula. Hodges estimates there are fewer than 800 jobs in either King and Queen or Mathews County. Of King and Queen County’s 6,945 residents, for example, more than half of the population commutes out of the county for work. All six Middle Peninsula counties have unemployment rates comparable to the state average, but they all also have longer commutes, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the US Census.

“How do you develop policy that works in an area so heavily dependent on a clean environment and [in need of] economic development at the exact same time?” asks Mr. Lawrence of the planning district. “So how do you thread the needle?”

Lawrence and Hodges see these two priorities as interconnected. 

“People have to work, and the Bay is our biggest asset,” says Hodges. “We want to protect it more than anyone. It's in our backyard. But at the same time, it creates a tremendous number of challenges and ties our hands.”

In the 21st century, the Virginia Chesapeake has experienced sea-level rise of 3 to 5 millimeters per year – a rate that exceeds the global average. The region’s gradually sinking land makes the area “more vulnerable than many other coastal regions,” says the US Geological Survey, causing this rate to likely triple in coming decades. 

The Middle Peninsula has a chance to rewrite its history, says Cathy Cameron, a host at the two-room Town of Urbanna Museum in Middlesex County, where she teaches visitors about local history. Hundreds of years ago, tobacco farming was a central market and it “ripped” the soil of everything. Now, locals see the water as their lifeline and they are reluctant to sacrifice the long-term health of the bay for immediate profits.

“There are some things you are born into understanding,” says Ms. Cameron. “Being born here, I know everything we have is limited.”

Cliff Owen/AP

Sen. John McCain, (R) of Arizona is pursued by reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington in July. He opposed an effort to pass health care reforms with only Republican votes, saying in an impassioned speech that Congress needs to make more effort toward bipartisan policymaking.

In 2015, shortly after selling her family’s food-products business, CEO Katherine Gehl had an epiphany: What if you analyzed the US political system as an industry? Suddenly, new answers appeared for questions, such as: Why are politics so partisan? Why can’t Washington get things done? Ms. Gehl teamed up with Harvard business professor Michael Porter, a consultant for her family business, to investigate the industry of politics. On Sept. 13, they released a report, “Why Competition in the Politics Industry is Failing America.” Here are edited excerpts of their conversation with Monitor business writer Laurent Belsie.

What kind of industry is the US political system?

Katherine Gehl: Eisenhower in 1961 said: Beware the military-industrial complex. He said that the industry could become so powerful and would put its own aims ahead of what it was supposed to be for. What Michael and I are saying today is beware the political-industrial complex. That business, that industry of politics, has its own gain-seeking behavior. And that industry is thriving even as customers, citizens, are increasingly dissatisfied.

Why do you say it’s thriving? Most people say Washington politics is broken.

KG: The system is designed to deliver what it’s delivering. The challenge is that it’s not designed to deliver for citizens, for the public interest. Instead, our system has been designed and optimized over time to benefit the interests of our two political parties and all their associated industry allies.

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And that’s the problem – two parties?

Michael Porter: If you have two dominant competitors, the last thing they want to do is compete for the same customers. They’d rather divide up the customers, because then they can differentiate themselves. Their respective loyalists will then be very dedicated to support them and give money and vote.

How does the industry’s structure frustrate voters?

KG: Partisan primaries combined with gerrymandering constitute the largest impediment to compromise…. The partisan primary was originally introduced as a political reform by the progressives designed actually to make the political system more responsive to what voters wanted by taking the selection of candidates away from the smoke-filled back rooms. But it turns out that the unintended circumstance is that it now cements this control of extremists on both parties.

Is this a recent phenomenon?

MP: This was not a grand conspiracy where a bunch of people got into a room and said: “We’re going to totally take over our system.” It was rolled out over time. But the net effect is that over the last 20, 30, 40 years, we start to see the failure of our system to deliver solutions. And it’s gotten now to be super acute. We can’t solve anything now…. Particularly tragic is that this competition we’ve created among the parties – not to serve the middle but to serve their constituencies on the extreme – is driving a discussion and a set of norms that are really tearing our country apart. We are turning Americans against Americans and the enemy is our fellow-citizens.

Is the Trump phenomenon a healthy rebellion against the system?

KG: The election of Donald Trump is, first of all, an endorsement of this widespread view that the public is dramatically dissatisfied with what’s coming out of Washington, D.C. So Donald Trump represents the public trying to do something different and perhaps drain the swamp. We don’t, however, believe that Donald Trump’s election fundamentally changes the structure.

How do you change the structure?

KG: We want to see the implementation of nonpartisan primaries, nonpartisan redistricting, and ranked choice voting [where voters rank candidates in order of preference, rather than picking one person]. Together those reforms introduce a new level of accountability and lower barriers to entry to new competition that could better serve the public interest.

MP: What we’d love to do is file an antitrust case against the political parties. Unfortunately, the parties are exempt…. In the short run, we talk about this idea of jump-starting new moderate competition. We have the Senate fulcrum strategy – just electing four or five centrist senators to actually create a swing coalition or a fulcrum.

How do you run candidates that have a viable chance of getting elected?

KG: In the case of the Centrist Project – full disclosure, I’m on the board there – our plan is to strategically select states where there is a viable electoral opportunity open to an independent. Then you have to find the right compelling candidate the same way that Democrats and Republicans have to do. It is not rocket science, but it is hard.

Your long-term solutions also look hard.

KG: Each state decides how its going to run its election system. In 27 states, they have citizens referendums. That’s where you’re going to get the first breakthrough on changing the rules of this game. And we’ve seen it. Nonpartisan primaries and nonpartisan redistricting passed through citizens referendum in the states of California and Washington. Ranked-choice voting passed by citizen referendum in the state of Maine. There’s a case going to the United States Supreme Court, which is from my home state of Wisconsin, that will be heard on Oct. 3 that is challenging partisan gerrymandering.

Is change possible, realistically?

KG: It’s transformational looking at the problem through a new lens…. [Benjamin Franklin] knew a long time ago that it wasn’t a given that this American experiment was going to work and that it was going to endure. When he was leaving the Constitutional Convention, he was reportedly asked: “What have you given us?” And he said; “A Republic, if you can keep it.” And that is the question for us. It’s in danger right now.

AP Photo

Angela Ahrendts, Apple's Senior Vice President of Retail, discusses updates at Apple stores at the new Apple campus on Sept. 12,, in Cupertino, Calif.

Ten years after Apple made the smartphone “cool,” it wants to turn its retail stores into something warm. It announced last week that the nearly 500 Apple Stores will no longer really be stores but “town squares.” In the era of social everything, Apple’s glass-and-white-walled boxes are to become gathering places. People will be invited to “relax, meet up with friends, or just listen to a local artist on the weekends.”

If that sounds a lot like your local mall, Starbucks, or even McDonald’s – commercial places designed to be social spaces – Apple’s idea goes further. It wants to attract “influencers,” or thinkers and leaders who can create new connections or spark new ideas. The “genius bar” will become a “genius grove,” with plants that might promote friendliness. Courses such as photography will be offered in “forums.” Children can attend a “kids hour” on Saturdays. Apple products will be sold in “avenues.” Local entrepreneurs can use rooms to work. The open spaces will be “plazas,” suitable for concerts or lectures.

Apple is hardly the first American tech firm to encourage and satisfy people’s desire for a sense of belonging, either in cyberspace or physical space. Google claims it offers “a rich experience for community conversations.” Airbnb encourages guests to join common activities, or “experiences.” The world’s greatest connector, however, may be Facebook, with more than a billion users. It claims to “make it easy to coordinate with friends near and far.”

As French writer Alexis de Tocqueville noted in the 19th century, “Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations.” And that is why the US Constitution protects the right of peaceable assembly. The Digital Age isn’t just about hardware, software, or “the internet of things.” It can also be an “internet of community,” or what Wired magazine described in 2005 as an “electricity of participation.”

The biggest gap between countries today, says Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, isn’t as much about the disparity of wealth as it is about those who are connected and those who aren’t. According to a new report by the United Nations-backed Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development, 52 percent of the world’s population still do not have internet access. Most of those people are in Asia and Africa. Yet, in a sign of how people can leapfrog old technology, two-thirds of people do have access to mobile phones – more than those who have electricity at home, a bank account, or running water. People crave the bonds of community as much as their worldly needs.

The Digital Age comes with many problems, writes Mr. Schwab in a new book, “The Fourth Industrial Revolution.” But it can also “lift humanity into a new collective and moral consciousness based on a sense of shared destiny. The choice is ours.”

Apple’s ‘town squares’ may be only one of many shared places to come up with that shared destiny.