Phelan M. Ebenhack/AP

Donald Trump speaks at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit, July 23, 2022, in Tampa, Florida. Testimony before the Jan. 6 committee and actions by prosecutors at both federal and state levels has hinted at the former president’s legal exposure for his efforts to hold on to office.

It’s become clear in recent weeks that the United States is edging closer and closer to a confrontation that would be unprecedented in the nation’s history: the criminal prosecution of a former president by the administration of his successor.

Newly revealed actions, from subpoenas and search warrants to the calling of grand jury witnesses, indicate that the Department of Justice has been quietly forging ahead on a criminal investigation of former President Donald Trump’s inner circle for election fraud and activities linked to the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, say legal experts. The investigation appears to include a probe of Mr. Trump’s personal role, though he is likely not a target per se.

It’s highly unlikely that Attorney General Merrick Garland has already decided whether to include the former president in any prosecution, say former prosecutors. He would want first to let his department’s gathering of evidence run its course.

But bits that have emerged – plus testimony from the congressional Jan. 6 committee – show that it is indeed possible Mr. Trump could be indicted for some of his actions, say experts. For Attorney General Garland, the choice may turn on a more difficult and politically fraught question: Would such a prosecution be good for the country?

On the one hand, not prosecuting could send the message that for practical purposes a president is indeed above the law. It might invite worse from future chief executives.

On the other, such a case could infuriate Trump supporters, feed distrust of U.S. political institutions, and establish a dangerous precedent. 

It’s almost a no-win choice – and perhaps indicative of forces that have been eroding American democracy for years, says Rebecca Roiphe, a former Manhattan prosecutor and professor at New York Law School.

“A healthy democracy does not face this situation, where one administration has to seriously consider a prosecution against the head of the previous administration,” says Professor Roiphe. “I certainly don’t envy Merrick Garland.”

The combination of Jan. 6 panel testimony and recent legal maneuvering by prosecutors at both federal and state levels has hinted at former President Trump’s legal exposure for his efforts to hold onto office, and gripped Washington over the past month.

Numerous witnesses for the Jan. 6 committee said that following the November election, the former president was told many times by different advisers that he had lost, that claims of widespread voting fraud were false, and efforts to interfere with counting of Electoral College votes were illegal and could result in federal charges.

Some legal experts say this testimony could be used to establish that the former president knew what he was doing was wrong – a requisite for prosecution. Others believe proving such intent remains a key problem facing any federal case. Mr. Trump himself has continued to insist publicly that the election was stolen and he is the one who is on the right side of the law.

What about the false electors?

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice has executed several search warrants for the electronic communications of lawyer John Eastman, who helped the Trump team develop alternate slates of fake “electors” that might help GOP state legislators overturn the 2020 results. Federal authorities in June searched the home of Jeffery Clark, a former Justice official who wanted to send letters to Georgia and other states claiming, falsely, that the department had evidence of widespread fraud in those states.

The DOJ has sent subpoenas to many of the people who signed their names on false “elector” slates. Two top aides to Vice President Mike Pence have testified before a federal grand jury about the pressure put on Mr. Pence to block the counting of Electoral College votes on Jan. 6.

From all this, it is fair to conclude that Mr. Trump’s closest advisers are being investigated for fraud, says Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney who is now a law professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

“The most likely crimes remain conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding by interfering with the January 6 vote certification, and conspiracy to defraud the United States by attempting to interfere with the lawful transfer of presidential power based on the lie that the election was stolen,” writes Professor McQuade in an email.

Another charge federal prosecutors might be looking at is seditious conspiracy, says Professor McQuade. That would require proof that a person entered into an agreement with someone else to interfere with the lawful transfer of presidential power. Some members of the extremist Proud Boys and Oath Keepers groups are already facing seditious conspiracy charges for their actions dealing with Jan. 6.

“Several members of the Oath Keepers have pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate. [DOJ] also has the phones of the group’s leaders,” she says.

The former U.S. attorney believes that another charge federal authorities could make is involuntary manslaughter, to account for the people who died during the Jan. 6 fighting at the Capitol. Involuntary manslaughter requires only that a person caused the death of another by failing to exercise “due care.” It doesn’t require intent – only gross negligence.

The Fulton County investigation

But Washington is not the only source of legal troubles for Donald Trump. In Georgia, Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis is forging ahead with a wide-ranging investigation of Trump administration efforts to overturn the 2020 vote in her state. (Fulton County is the most populous county in Georgia and includes Atlanta, the state capital.)

It’s possible the Georgia case will come to fruition before its federal counterpart. Ms. Willis has been moving aggressively. She has experience using Georgia’s relatively expansive RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) statute in complex cases. Her evidence includes a taped phone call between Mr. Trump and Georgia’s chief election official in which the former asked the latter to “find” an additional 11,870 votes in his favor, an increase that would have flipped the state electoral result.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp has already testified. Ms. Willis has subpoenaed some of Mr. Trump’s closest allies, including Rudy Giuliani and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. 

Her efforts dialed up this summer as she convened a special grand jury and, just in the last month, issued target letters informing recipients of possible charges to a wide range of people who may have been cogs in a wider conspiracy. They include everyone from the state GOP chair to a local car salesman – people who participated in the formation of Georgia’s alternate slate of fake presidential “electors.”

Ms. Willis is “casting a wider net,” says Anthony Michael Kreis, a constitutional law professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta. 

But there may be risks to such an approach. One judge has already reprimanded Ms. Willis for attending a Democratic fundraiser for a race involving one of the recipients of her target letters.

Professor Kreis says that as a general matter he is concerned about over-prosecution and stretching past the limits of the law. 

But more often than not in U.S. history, those who try to usurp elections have gotten away with it – particularly post-Reconstruction era Southern elections. Given that context, a Georgia case over the 2020 election might be fitting, he says.

“If this is the case that the buck stops in Fulton County, there’s something that’s historical about that in a good way, in the sense that there will be justice for trying to undo a legitimate election,” says Professor Kreis.

But the most important decision regarding any prosecution of former President Trump or his associates remains with Attorney General Garland.

The choice to proceed or not with a federal case that could conceivably jail a former occupant of the Oval Office would be a profound one. No former president has ever been charged with a crime.

On one side are legal experts who think the former president’s actions don’t meet the standards of an actionable offense under the relevant statutes. Others warn of the cost of failure – a “not guilty” verdict could embolden future presidents to go beyond Mr. Trump’s attempts to remain in power. Still others say the political divisions a prosecution would produce could make the nation’s current polarization much worse.

Those on the other side say that not prosecuting Mr. Trump’s actions would also embolden further such lawbreaking. And non-prosecution, some say, could also widen division. It can be “divisive and destructive of civic peace ... to see criminal behavior prosper,” tweeted Cato Institute senior fellow Walter Olson.

That may be the real challenge to America in the current situation, says Professor Roiphe of New York Law School. Whatever the attorney general decides, a large portion of American voters will be outraged. A long decline of faith in the nation’s political, judicial, and civic structures has been exacerbated by the norm-breaking, confrontation, and strains of the Trump era.

“I’m not worried about another Jan. 6,” she says. “I am worried that we may no longer have enough faith in these institutions to decide matters in a way everybody can say was fair.”

In her fourth-floor apartment, down a dark, tight hallway, Olena Kolinovych walks into the room she no longer uses.

It’s piled with mementos – a model John Deere tractor on a shelf, a Chinese fan on the wall. She takes a jacket from a hanger and points to a tear, showing white synthetic down. Shrapnel did that, she says.

On the far end of the room there’s a broken wall exposing a broken balcony. Both were damaged by Russian artillery in March, when Horenka, this small town north of Kyiv, was on the front lines. Almost all of its buildings need to be repaired, or entirely rebuilt.

Ms. Kolinovych hopes hers will be soon. She and her husband fled March 4 for the southwestern city of Vinnytsia and returned in mid-May. For weeks, they’ve lived without running water, electricity, or gas. They’ve compartmentalized their damaged items into the damaged room. Now, they live on the other side of the small apartment, stay cheerful, and wait for help.

“We hope that someone will help us and they will fix our house,” she says. “We don’t want to leave this place.”

The war in Ukraine has destroyed more than $100 billion in public and private infrastructure, according to the Kyiv School of Economics. And in the eastern Donbas region, where Russia refocused its invasion, that devastation is still ongoing. In places like Horenka, though, the new front lines are hundreds of miles away, and people are starting to rebuild.

Creating a blueprint for the process has become a national dilemma. Atop the wreckage, the government in Kyiv will inevitably want to design and build a 21st-century Ukraine. But leading a project of that scale takes time and resources – both scarce during war. And right now, people need shelter, infrastructure, and work.

Ukrainians have already shown they can survive a brutal, senseless war. Recovering from it will demand a different kind of resilience – not to endure loss, but to effectively heal from it. But Ukraine must fight its war and rebuild from it at the same time.

“People are already returning,” says Emily Channell-Justice, director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program at Harvard University’s Ukrainian Research Institute. “They’re going to rebuild anyway. So why not be more systematic and think of it as a contribution to the war effort?”

Scott Peterson/The Christian Science Monitor/Getty Images

Apartment block residents listen to Andrii Titarenko of District 1, a rebuilding nongovernmental organization, as he discusses required permissions and reconstruction possibilities in Horenka, Ukraine, June 22, 2022.

“What do we have to do now?”

Early in the afternoon on June 22, Ms. Kolinovych joins a small crowd at the apartment building across from hers. District 1, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to rebuilding Kyiv, is trying to renovate both buildings and is hosting a town hall with the remaining residents.

Wearing a black hoodie and sweatpants that read “no problemo,” District 1 co-founder Andrii Titarenko tells the crowd what it’ll take to fix their homes, outlining a near civics lesson on bureaucracy. The group plans to provide a tent with water tanks, generators, a portable shower, and other utilities.

But District 1 can’t work on the buildings until an official inspector assesses the damage. Its volunteers will lobby the local government, says Mr. Titarenko, but it’s already afraid its contact will stop picking up the phone. So everyone should prepare for a long wait.

Kids play in the background, as members of the crowd joke about the red tape. Next to them, the middle of the apartment building is missing a 30-foot, five-story section – leveled in March by a Russian bomb. Cabinets and cucumber preserves hang on kitchen walls left without a kitchen floor.

Mr. Titarenko waits for questions. “What do we have to do now?” a resident asks.

Give interviews and think of ways to get donor attention, Mr. Titarenko tells them. “For the government it’s like one of the hundreds – thousands – of buildings around Ukraine.” Even if it weren’t, Kyiv is fighting other battles. “They are now concentrated on the war,” he says.

Fight or rebuild?

At this stage, focusing almost only on the war may be the right strategy, says Charles Lichfield, deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center. It doesn’t make sense for the government to waste resources rebuilding parts of the country the Russians may yet attack.

According to estimates from the Kyiv School of Economics, the war has destroyed some $104 billion in fixed assets – including roads, airports, houses, and rails. Around 861,000 families have lost their homes. More than 3.5 million Ukrainians are without permanent housing altogether.

“I’m not so optimistic as other people who believe that we should rebuild Ukraine as fast as we can,” Minister of Finance Sergii Marchenko said during an Atlantic Council event in late May. “I am very pessimistic in this endeavor, because we should win this war first and then we can start that process.”

Waiting to start has its advantages. It would allow more time for the government to improve infrastructure and urban planning, and even tie the funds to corruption and judicial reforms.

But delays have costs, too, as the residents in Horenka make clear.

When Ms. Kolinovych and her husband returned on May 14, they found an improvised camp set up like an outdoor living room. Two black kettles sit next to a fire pit and a propped-up watercooler. Under the nearby tree, there’s a kitchen table with mismatched chairs. She’s been cooking there ever since.

Scott Peterson/The Christian Science Monitor/Getty Images

Tetania cries, alongside her two boys, Dima, 4 (right), and Sasha, 8, as she describes damage to their apartment block, which was hit by a Russian rocket in early March, in Horenka, Ukraine, June 22, 2022.

Others don’t have that option. Tetania, who didn’t give her last name, attended the short town hall while her two young boys, Sasha and Dima, played nearby. For 12 years, Tetania lived down the hall from Ms. Kolinovych. This March, Russian missiles completely destroyed her apartment. She, her husband, and her two boys have since moved to a one-bedroom apartment in neighboring Hostomel.

Her children – one of them wearing a Lightning McQueen hat from Pixar’s “Cars” – make engine noises while “driving” rubble down fallen fence posts. Tetania looks up at the black walls that used to be her home, and starts to cry. What hurts most, she says, is that the photo albums of her boys were burned in the fire. She hopes one day to again live where those memories were made.

“I understand that it might not be quick, but in principle I would like to stay here,” says Tetania. “I love this place.”

The future of Irpin

In the wealthy suburb of Irpin, just miles away, it’s Mykhailo Sapon’s job to help people like her get their homes back. Mr. Sapon is the city’s chief architect, and his office is a litter of maps and photographs, strewn across walls and tables. For a city in disrepair, it’s fitting.

In the five years before the war, Irpin had thrived. Among other projects, it added a stadium, a school, six parks, 50 playgrounds, and five kindergartens. Then came the invasion, and 40% of the city was under occupation. In the end, 70% of Irpin was destroyed and 3,000 homes were damaged – half of them beyond repair.

Windows are now broken, bark is torn from trees, and buildings are charred. The municipal center, where Mr. Sapon works, is one of the only places that looks untouched. He wasn’t. During the occupation, Mr. Sapon barely survived a Russian bullet while leaving his house, 12 miles north of the city, for medical supplies.

Scott Peterson/The Christian Science Monitor/Getty Images

Mykhailo Sapon, the chief architect of the northern Kyiv suburb of Irpin, speaks of rebuilding efforts in his office in Irpin, Ukraine, June 22, 2022.

Mr. Sapon and his office, working 10 hours a day, six days a week, are trying to solve a child care problem, a housing problem, and an employment problem all at once. Their master plan for Irpin’s future will take months. But for some problems, like schools, they can’t wait that long.

“We have to in some ways to rebuild and to reconstruct it in the shortest way,” says Mr. Sapon. Irpin’s residents, he says, “are waiting [for the city] to do something to make their life better.”

The call of home

Ms. Kolinovych, too, is waiting.

Back in March, she and her family sheltered in a garage close to the apartment building for eight days. They were panicked, she says, crying out of fear and praying for safety. She and her husband left only after their children and grandchildren did, when the bombing became too intense and they could hear helicopters flying above.

They fled in a friend’s car and stayed for 70 days in Vinnytsia, southwest of Kyiv. “Everything was fine there,” she says. “But I really wanted to go back home.”

No home is worth a life, but her life felt incomplete without her home.

Walking past the campfire that’s become her kitchen, up the concrete stairs with broken glass and bullet holes, and into her damaged apartment, Ms. Kolinovych smiles. She’s happy she came back.

Even if her apartment isn’t fixed by the winter, she’s not leaving. Her friends are here. Her community is here. Just being back, she says, is like an answered prayer.

“This is the place where we were born, spent our lives, and our children were born,” says Ms. Kolinovych of her apartment. “It’s just like our motherland.”

Oleksandr Naselenko supported reporting for this story.

One morning in May, Zina Mustapha stood before her 20 students and wrote two mathematical problems on the whiteboard. “To solve these, you can use the coordinate formula or the vector formula,” she said.

As the teenagers chorused the formulas back at her, the scene could have been a typical high school in Nigeria. But the Future Prowess Islamic Foundation is unlike any other in Africa’s most populous country.

In the heartland of a war that has pitched the jihadist sect Boko Haram against the government, the private Quranic school has opened its doors to Muslim and Christian children of both insurgents and government soldiers, as well as those orphaned by both groups in the brutal conflict. Even as Boko Haram extremists raze and attack thousands of schools in the northeastern state of Borno, Zannah Mustapha, the school’s founder, preaches a different kind of radicalism: love for everyone.

Since 2002, Boko Haram has gunned down some 35,000 people and displaced 2 million in its battle to carve out an Islamic state in Nigeria, and to abolish perceived Western education and influence. In 2009, the group attracted global attention when it began attacking state symbols like military posts and public schools. Five years later, insurgents abducted 276 girls from their school dormitory in a remote village called Chibok. 

But some teachers continue to defy them.

“Education is ... the right of every human being,” says Ms. Mustapha, readjusting her hijab. “With the gun, we can kill terrorists, but with education, we can kill terrorism.” 

War on education

In 2009, around the time Boko Haram turned its sights on education, Fatima was due to start first grade. But her mother couldn’t afford it, and 6-year-old Fatima was wrestling with a crushing sense of guilt.

She believed she was responsible for her father’s death at the hands of the extremists. 

Innocent Eteng

Fatima, whose father, Bukar, was killed by Boko Haram in 2007, inside the principal's office of the Future Prowess Islamic Foundation school in Maiduguri, Nigeria, in May.

Bukar, her father, left home every morning for the market where he was a trader and returned at night, never failing to bring some candy for Fatima. One evening, Fatima was disappointed he’d forgotten. “I ran to welcome him, only for him to remember that he had not bought me my favorite candy,” she recalls. 

Her father stepped back outside, but Boko Haram was trailing him. “They shot him in his head,” Fatima says. “That was the end of my joy – he never came back.”

For years, Boko Haram had killed those who criticized its extremist views – including moderate Muslims like Bukar. When they targeted families, the insurgents sometimes killed the men and spared women and children, and sometimes murdered both parents. Today, thousands of orphaned and fatherless kids roam the streets of Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, and refugee camps.

The loss plunged Fatima, her five siblings, and her mother – now a single housewife – into grief and destitution.

Then, in 2010, Fatima’s mother learned about a school offering free education to Muslim orphaned children affected by the insurgency. To Fatima’s great joy, the school was just a few miles away – walking distance – and her mother was able to sign her up. 

“If I didn’t come to this school, maybe I would have been by the roadside hawking,” Fatima says.

“Boko Haram lawyer”

For more than two decades, Mr. Mustapha, a towering man who favors the flowing robes of Egyptian jalabiyahs, was a sharia court lawyer in predominantly Muslim northern Nigeria, where such courts operate alongside a Western-style judiciary. In 2007, disturbed by the number of haggard-looking orphaned children begging on the streets of Maiduguri during school hours, he quit his job to start the foundation. It began as a single building of two classrooms, with 36 pupils and two teachers.

Shortly afterward, Boko Haram’s campaign against education escalated. The group, whose name means “Western education is forbidden” in northern Nigeria’s Hausa language, began detonating bombs and carrying out horrific shootings and assaults on schools. Rights watchers estimate the sect has destroyed or forced the closure of around 2,500 schools in the region, killed 611 teachers, and displaced 19,000 more. 

The effect has been devastating in a region that is already Nigeria’s most impoverished. Borno state, which has only a 23% literacy rate, has seen the number of out-of-school children more than triple since 2008 to 1.8 million today. 

All this only spurred Mr. Mustapha. After approaching private donors and international humanitarian organizations, he expanded to 40 classrooms spread over four separate community schools.

Innocent Eteng

Zannah Mustapha, founder and director of the Future Prowess Islamic Foundation, sits outside his home in Maiduguri, Nigeria, in May 2022.

He also began accepting children who had lost parents due to the crisis – regardless of the side for which their parents had fought. The decision sparked criticism and rejection from some parents and community members.

“A lot of these Boko Haram elements were killed. Their wives and children were cast on the street. ... Society considered them taboo,” says Mr. Mustapha. 

“If I said I’m going to work on orphans, are [Boko Haram members’] children not orphans? Or are we going to [judge] them for the offense of their parents or husbands?”

And Mr. Mustapha’s compassion paid off. While Boko Haram targeted other schools in the state, forcing weekslong closures, it never attacked Mr. Mustapha’s. He was able to offer uninterrupted education to some 2,200 kids even at the height of the insurgency.

Avoiding discrimination

Among Fatima’s classmates is Nur, whose father was a soldier. Like her, Nur lost both his father and uncle after they were gunned down by Boko Haram. But at school, both children found a respite from tragedy – happily busy, they rarely had time to think of it, and some of their close friends include children whose fathers were in the sect.

It helps that Mr. Mustapha gives all incoming students psychosocial support before admission – part of that includes encouraging them to see and relate to themselves and each other with love and to avoid discrimination, he says. 

But despite his effort to convince some to accept an inclusive approach, he still faces criticism. He says some whisper about his intentions, calling him “Boko Haram lawyer” – a reference to his role as a go-between in securing the release of 103 of the girls Boko Haram abducted in Chibok. 

Still, he is undeterred. With support from the International Committee of the Red Cross, Mr. Mustapha also opened a center that trains widows in livelihood skills. Some of them are widows of Boko Haram members.

Meanwhile, Mr. Mustapha receives far more admission requests for his school than he has the capacity to handle. He wants to expand further, but doesn’t have the money. 

His greatest pride, he says, comes from seeing the kids happy, especially girls who, as is often the case among impoverished families in northern Nigeria, would likely have been forced into child marriages to bring in a dowry. Instead, those at his school have a chance to chase their dreams. 

“I want to become a nurse to help less privileged people, especially children and pregnant women,” says Fatima. 

This article was produced with the support of the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture, the John Templeton Foundation, and Templeton Religion Trust. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of these organizations. 

Soon funnel cakes will melt in mouths, lines for lemonade will form, the arena will ring with the national anthem, horses will buck, and fringe will fly. 

But first, cowboys pray.

The cowboy church service at Cheyenne Frontier Days, an iconic Wyoming rodeo, offers an hour of grace before the games begin. Last Sunday’s blend of Christianity and the American West convened disciples in denim and 10-gallon hats. The open setting – a rodeo arena – reflects an open attitude: Come as you are and find respect.

Organ prelude out. Johnny Cash in. 

“One piece at a time ...” Mark Eaton sings a line from the Cash track playing as folks find bleacher seats. Like many here, the pastor wears a button-down shirt, jeans, and boots. 

Beyond faith in Jesus and the Bible, he tells the Monitor, the setup isn’t Christian in a traditional religious sense, his fingers wrapping air quotes around the word “Christian.” 

“In church, we’d have an organ playing. And these people won’t show up,” he says. “They’re tired of somebody who doesn’t understand their lifestyle telling them they need to do more and try harder.” His talk today is on being good.

“A good God makes good people, and good people make good societies,” he says, pacing in front of the dirt expanse.

Mr. Eaton comes from the “coffee culture” of Seattle. Married to Christian singer Susie McEntire-Eaton (sister of the Grammy-winning Reba McEntire), he now lives on a family ranch in Oklahoma. 

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

Pastor Mark Eaton implores a cowboy church congregation to be good people during a Sunday service at Cheyenne Frontier Days, an iconic Wyoming rodeo, on July 24, 2022. Cowboy churches, which can be found in several states, are known for their distinct blend of Christianity and Western culture.

Ms. McEntire-Eaton couldn’t come to the service due to a COVID-19 diagnosis, Mr. Eaton tells her fans. A co-host of Cowboy Church TV and descendant of rodeo royalty herself, she began holding these Cheyenne Frontier Days services in 1986. Republican Gov. Mark Gordon, briefly taking the mic, leads a prayer that includes her. Prayers here cue cowboy respect: Remove your hat as you bow your head. 

Beyond pop-up services held at rodeos like this, similar cowboy churches have cropped up across the country – since at least the late ’80s – in dedicated spaces. Sometimes that means a barn. “Cowboy Christians” author Marie Dallam writes in an email that the church aims to welcome worshippers who have been marginalized from mainstream Christian congregations. (For others, “biker church” meets a similar need.)

The cowboy church is “defined mostly by behaviors and structures, and perhaps somewhat by values and expectations, but not by theological differences,” adds Dr. Dallam, a professor at the University of Oklahoma. “In its ideal form, the cowboy church is an evangelical Protestant church that eschews formality and deliberately lowers social barriers in order to welcome people who don’t typically feel comfortable in traditional churches.”  

For some, it’s their first time here.

“It just seemed like an open-air atmosphere would be good,” says Randall Shedd, a Republican state representative from Alabama. He’s one of several out-of-towners. 

For others, it’s a homecoming. 

“As cowboys and Christians, we all share that same – those values and those morals. ... Helping each other out, showing love,” says Willy Evans of Torrington, Wyoming, who’s attended similar services. Ms. Evans, who rides horses with her granddaughter, says she competed in rodeos growing up as a cowgirl.  

“As I got older, goat tying became my favorite,” she says, here on a date. Her American flag earrings dangle.  

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

Willy Evans (right) and her date, Randy, await the start of a cowboy church service at Cheyenne Frontier Days in Cheyenne, Wyoming, July 24, 2022. Ms. Evans, who rides horses with her granddaughter, says she competed in rodeos growing up as a cowgirl.

Mr. Eaton dips briefly into politics in a way that squares with Old West individualism. He laments the idea that it’s “the nation’s responsibility to take care of me.”

“You cannot legislate kindness. And if you try, it always looks like taxation,” he says to some chuckles. He competes with the low hum of what looks like tractors rumbling across the arena. 

After the service, cowboy Wil Nichols saunters past vendors selling jerky and rope. He’s inspired by the call to be good and appreciates the fellowship. He says cowboys walk the talk of Christian values.

“Friendship and looking out for one another,” he offers as examples. “When you compete against other people, but you cheer them on just as much as you want to win.”

No matter that he didn’t qualify to compete in team roping. He came to the rodeo Sunday, a spectator this time, to cheer on others.

AP

Candida Valeria holds up a beetroot at a community garden in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in June.

Sixty percent of the world’s population will be living in cities by 2030, according to the United Nations. That is a projected 5.2 billion people, equivalent to the total human family in 1989. In the United States, 559 points on the map will have between 1 million and 5 million residents.

Urban growth tends to be seen as bad news for the environment. It results in shrinking farms (60% of the world’s most productive cropland is on the outskirts of cities), lost habitat and biodiversity, and less capacity for absorbing carbon from the atmosphere.

Yet a study published this month by the Ecological Society of America offers a hopeful counterpoint. Based on work by scientists in the U.S., Australia, and Germany, it found that urban gardens are important diversity boosters for foundational ecosystem role-players like plants and insects. That shifts the view of humanity’s impact on nature. It shows that the qualities people express in their flower beds, like joy, beauty, and nurturing, can be vital factors of environmental health and its shared benefits.

The research suggests “a strong effect of human management on urban biodiversity and ecosystem function,” the paper concluded. “Careful design of urban gardens to include more rare plants may provide for increased rare bee species that in turn provide better pollination services across seasons and allow for longer crop production periods.”

The study is based on observations and species surveys in 18 urban community gardens in three counties in California. It found an important difference between natural ecosystems and those shaped by people. In the former, rare species tend to be highly susceptible to climate change and other habitat disturbance. But urban gardens have higher rates of well-tended rare (or infrequently found) species, reflecting the conscious decisions of gardeners. And rarity, the study found, begets rarity. More individuality from one urban garden to the next means more diversity of bees and birds.

The social impact of urban gardens may be just as important. The study found that urban gardens promote a sense of shared purpose within communities, and that rarity within those gardens more often reflects the environmental and social concerns of women.

One who might agree is Holly Caggiano, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment. As a climate scientist, she wrote in an essay in Grist last month, she battles feelings of hopelessness, anger, and betrayal. But through “generosity and connection,” she noted, “people who steward their local neighborhoods witness environmental transformation firsthand, and it makes them happier.”

As cities continue to grow, the buzz in their green spaces offers evidence of humanity’s capacity for enhancement.