(Tom) This week on Arizona Illustrated, raising awareness of permaculture techniques.

(Bali) If we're doing good in our community, that's one thing, but if we can show other people how to do good in their own community, I think that's going to be one of the most fundamental things for us.

(Tom) One man's quest to understand the impact social media is having on our politics.

(Yotam) Something that has emerged in this divide recently is something called effective polarization.

This idea that it's not just issues that we have differences about, but we actually dislike members of the other party.

(Tom) The Tohono O'odham's resilience and community action in the face of climate change.

(Jacelle) Our livelihood as O'odham was taken away from us.

We maintained the water source in the Santa Cruz River, and then it was just gone.

(Tom) And a community space in Tucson where you can make practically anything.

(Steven) But we have all the people, and that's the skill set.

And everyone here wants to help everyone else.

(Tom) Hello and welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara, and we're joining you today from the recently renovated Tucson Food Co-op East Entrance right off of Fourth Avenue.

The Food Conspiracy Co-op is a unique place with nearly 3,000 community owners founded in 1971 with a mission of making natural food products more available to Tucson.

To celebrate over 50 years in business, they recently expanded and added this new entrance with educational gardens, natural light, rainwater harvesting, solar power, and a water-permeable parking lot.

The project was completed with architect Rob Paulus and the local organization Awareness Ranch, and that is who our first story is about today.

Awareness Ranch uses permaculture to grow food and create buildings.

By thinking globally and acting locally, they believe that their sustainable agriculture and construction can be adapted to many settings.

And by cultivating an awareness of our interconnected world, they believe that we can create abundance while honoring the Earth.

♪ CALM BELL CHIMES (Gurudas) In permaculture we say that the problem is often a solution for something else.

So like a classic example is, snails in the garden are a solution to how to feed your ducks.

Just bring your ducks into the garden and now they'll eat all the snails.

Awareness Ranch started as a farm project where we were exploring more sustainable ways of producing agricultural products in a desert setting using aquaponics and merging like modern technology with ancient knowledge.

So using adobe, natural plasters, stone and mixing that with like solar powered, air-lifted water circulating systems.

The fish produce wastes.

Those waste get converted into useful nitrate fertilizers for the plants.

The plants clean those nitrates up and the clean aerated water goes back to the fish tank.

So it creates a healthy environment for both the plants and the fish.

We started a workshop series and every Saturday we would have people come to the farm and help us.

build hoop houses and grow beds and plant things and harvest things.

And then you're gonna drive it back in.

- Got it.

- We're installing a stem wall made out of lavacrete for a small bath house.

We like to build with what we call the overflowing resources of the city.

So everything we've built here on site is made out of reclaimed and recycled materials.

And part of natural building is looking at the full life cycle of the building.

So when we build with adobe, when we build with straw bale or rammed earth, at the end of the useful lifespan of that building, the building can just go back into the earth.

Somewhere in there, I qualified for commercial and residential contracting licenses and decided to provide our building services to the community.

Now we have Awareness Ranch Foundation, which is just the farm activity.

And we're applying for our nonprofit status and then Awareness Ranch, Inc, which is this construction services company.

(Kailee) Imagine trying to keep the tent down the whole time.

(Cassandra) I've taken over the gardening portion from Bali used to be the farmer here.

And he's taken over more of the natural building.

And then she used to do the natural building, but she really likes working with plants.

- For almost six years, five or six years, I was doing the natural building and I still love doing plastering.

We're building our own house right now in a central Tucson.

Because a plaster is like my first love, but my second is gardening.

(Phil) I think that if we see ourselves as an integral part of nature, we can do all the things we wanna do and we can still maintain a high level of biodiversity.

Like at Phil's house, we've created habitat while also creating human infrastructure.

This is a greenhouse that we built.

It's made out of lavacrete.

You know, we worked around our roots.

We do have a cistern and attached to this building.

So all the rainwater that falls onto this building it's collected into a cistern.

We are on the south side of my property.

All these buildings, the aquaponics system is run off grid.

So here we're standing in front of the bath house made out of lavacrete.

It's got two systems to heat the water.

One I'm standing next to over here, which also serves as a bread oven or pizza oven if you'd like.

And the hot water is rainwater.

♪ CALM BELL CHIMES ♪ (Gurudas) So Awareness Ranch installed this landscape just over a month ago.

We intentionally capture all of the rainwater off of the roofed surfaces.

And it's distributed into these four rainwater culvert cisterns.

(Christian) My role within Awareness Ranch is all correspondence, communications, I deal with a lot of the financials.

I come from a straight background of full finance, corporate, all of that.

It's night and day, you know, from what I do now.

You know, when I was growing up on the Island of Guam I never had an abundance of money, but I always had an abundance of love and support and relationships.

Meeting these guys and seeing the culture, the habits, the discipline that it takes to develop the awareness around like what is regenerative, what is healthy.

[ BIRDS CHIRPING ] (Gurudas) So one of the last industries to be disrupted is the building industry.

Building construction has stayed pretty much the same for a long time, but it is starting to change.

And we wanna be a part of that change and we wanna be a catalyst for it, help speed it up a bit.

We will have to amend our current building codes to allow for new building methods that are more efficient, that are more sustainable.

We're in conversation with this collective of... We're in conversation with this collective of... agencies like county, and city, and state agencies to create new regional building codes.

Some of our construction sites, they just seem like a normal conventional construction site.

But there's an aspect of relationship building that's there, that's different.

Awareness Ranch is founded on the basis that we will be a cooperative company that will be employee owned and employee based.

Right now we're currently here on the San Javier reservation working on two emergency houses for the Tohono O'odham Nation for one of the elders.

We've had days where we take a break for an hour just to touch base with people because one or two people are really having a bad time in their lives.

And to me that's incredibly important because if someone's not okay at home, they're definitely bringing that to work.

And these are people that I care about not just at work but off the clock.

My brother and I were raised in the Hare Krishna movement which is a pretty alternative religion that believes in vegetarian diet in order to maintain a perspective of respecting all living things, cycle of reincarnation, cycle of taking care of the earth and being really good with what you have and reciprocating that back to the universe.

We've been documenting throughout the whole process and we're really looking forward to creating curriculum and content that we can broadcast out that can be very educational and accessible for people.

If we're doing good in our community that's one thing but if we can show other people how to do good in their own community I think that's going to be one of the most fundamental things for us.

(Gurudas) You can have a really nice looking building but if the process to get to that nice looking building hurts everybody it's not going to feel good to interact with in the future.

Permaculture design system is a design science that's based in ethics and the three ethics are really simple.

Care for the earth, care for people and fair share return the surplus.

And an easy way to remember those three ethics is earth care, people care, fair share.

By engaging in resource efficient strategies and creating resilient infrastructure we can meet our needs today without compromising the needs of the future.

(Tom) As we head into election season, it's important to remember that social media plays an increasingly pivotal role in shaping the political process.

Next, we introduce you to a computational social scientist at the University of Arizona who's at the forefront of this burgeoning new research field.

And he notes that this might be a temporary blip in the history of democracy.

♪ PEACEFUL MUSIC (Yotam) When I graduated with my PhD, nobody called themselves a "computational social scientist."

And I think 2016 was really this turning point where an increasing number of social scientists became interested in Internet data.

Social media has become a crucial part of the political landscape.

How nonsense on one website breaks out to become a trending article on Facebook or Twitter.

(Yotam) Studies were trying to get hold of how much misinformation is out there, how many people are being exposed to it, how many people are sharing it, how big of a problem this was.

♪ PEACEFUL MUSIC CONTINUES For me as a social network scientist, a lot of what the web provides is information about the contexts that people are in.

If you're getting information about a video that gets you possibly information about who's shared the video, who is commenting on the video, who likes the video, and so what you can do is you can start a data collection procedure and then you can do a new round of data collection around those- that initial set of videos.

People who share messages from Democratic candidates and people who share messages from the Republican candidates are very different.

You see very little overlap.

You see very few influencers or people in general that would retweet a message from a Republican congressional candidate and a Democratic congressional candidate.

And so in addition to misinformation, what doesn't get talked about enough is misperceptions.

Social media provides a very skewed version of members of the other party.

And when you look at how people actually think about issues, And when you look at how people actually think about issues, we're not that far apart.

If you look at some of the new numbers out suggesting that we Americans agree far more than we disagree on the country's fundamental values.

(Yotam) One of the interesting bits of research that I've come across recently is a book called The Other Divide.

Typically as political scientists, we think about the divide as being between Republicans and Democrats.

And something that has emerged in this divide recently is something called effective polarization.

This idea that it's not just issues that we have differences about, but we actually dislike members of the other party.

And we've seen that kind of effective polarization grow over time, at least partly as a result of social media.

♪ PEACEFUL MUSIC But the other divide is between people who make politics central to their life and people who don't.

And it turns out that effective polarization really only exists among people who make politics very central to their life.

But many voters don't see politics as the main thing that they care about, the main thing that they're thinking about, the more anything that they're engaging with.

There are a host of other things that people are into that fill up their time, their energies, their enthusiasm, than politics.

And so I think a lot of these platforms do a poor job of putting politics outside of our other interests.

Where you see some glimmers of hope are in these spaces that are less devoted to politics.

One of the earliest studies about the effect that the internet has on people showed that the internet creates loneliness and depression and a host of other negative outcomes.

But that study was overturned in 2001 or 2002, where the scholars agreed that what they had found was not a result of the internet, but a result of using the internet for the first time.

It could be that as a society, we're going through an extended version of this kind of growing pain.

And that what we're seeing right now is the consequences of a sudden change to the structure of personal connection and personal relationships.

But then in 10 or 20 years, we'll look back and say, "Okay, that was a tough time, but we made it through, and now this tool is just part of our life, but maybe we'll get a little bit better at either sifting it out or creating a space for it that's not all-encompassing."

♪ PEACEFUL MUSIC FADES OUT (Tom) Our next story highlights the collective action that Tohono O'odham tribal members took to return water and farming to the San Xavier District.

Now this short film, Making Arizona, is part of a documentary and educational series by filmmaker and University of Arizona assistant professor Michael Mulcahy.

And the project showcases the intensifying effects of climate change and highlights the stories and resiliency of Arizonans experiencing it.

♪ LIGHT STRING MUSIC PLAYS (Jacelle) When we go out and we harvest the saguaro fruit, it's a team effort.

So you have one person that's actually picking the Saguaro fruit.

You have another person that's collecting it in the bucket.

You also have another person that's a spotter that's going ahead and figuring out the next Saguaro to pick from.

♪ VIOLIN MUSIC ♪ MUSIC SOFTENS AND FADES (Jacelle) Alright!

Awesome job!

That's how we are resilient is being with each other and being together in cooperation is how we make it through the world.

That's how we are successful.

[ JACELLE SPEAKS IN O'ODHAM ] Good day, my name is Jacelle Ramon-Sauberan and I come from the San Xavier District on the Tohono O'odham Nation.

♪ DREAMY SYNTH MUSIC FADES UP Everything was really centered around the Santa Cruz River for us in San Xavier.

Women would go down with their pottery and fill up at the river.

Children would go and play in the river, you know, wash clothes down at the river.

Growing up, my grandma always told me stories and some of those stories involved here, where she grew up and for water they'd go down to the Santa Cruz River and collect water and come back up and my grandma used to talk about playing in the Santa Cruz River, but also too just how lush and green the Santa Cruz was.

Prior to 1900s, there was a steady flow of water in the Santa Cruz.

It was something that was used on a daily basis, something in terms of a resource.

With us being taught and told by our creator to always be in tune and pay attention to the environment, pay attention to the landscape, your surroundings, we began to notice that the flow of the Santa Cruz River started to change and meaning that it decreased and that was because you had the city of Tucson growing.

You had non-O'odham farmers, you know, living close proximity, and even also you see that with ASARCO mine.

Same thing, they started to pump and take to the point where there was no longer an Ari Akimel, which is what we call the Santa Cruz River.

Our livelihood as O'odham was taken away from us.

You know, we were farmers and we, for time memorial, were able to maintain the water source in the Santa Cruz River and then it was just gone.

♪ SYNTH MUSIC ENDS ♪ ♪ SOFT GUITAR MUSIC PLAYS The elders in San Xavier didn't want this to continue on like this.

We came together as a community and decided, "Okay, we need to have a plan here.

We need to figure something out."

And so from that plan, thus the creation of the co-op farm.

And of course, if you are going to have a farm, you need water.

So the second thing with that was to hold those accountable that depleted the water.

And so there was a lawsuit filed and it held City of Tucson, different agricultural businesses and so on, that used the water and depleted it and wanted to hold them accountable.

And that lawsuit took quite some time to come to a resolution.

And so from that came the Southern Arizona Water Rights Settlement Act, also known as SAWRSA, but it took 19 years from 1982 into the 2000s before we actually saw the water because then you had to build the pipeline.

You had to find a way for, you know, a route to be able to build all of that to then come to San Xavier.

This wasn't something that happened overnight, but you had individuals that were dedicated to making sure our [ O'ODHAM WORD ] ecological knowledge continued, making sure that farming was brought back again.

I'm very proud of the co-op farm because of what my community did, how they came together, restored the land, cared for it, brought it back to life to what you see here today.

It's a blessing to see water flowing again in the Santa Cruz.

It means a lot to us as O'odham, because we can now talk about water in a present tense versus before it was always talked about in the past.

♪ VIOLIN MUSIC FADES IN So Himdag translates to 'our way of life,' but if you break the word down, and you have the first part, 'him,' translates to your behavior, how you act, how you present yourself how you treat other people.

And then 'dag,' D-A-G, derives from 'ibadag,' which means your heart.

So your spirit, your love, your energy.

And so you put all that together and you're looking at how you fit into that world, how you fit into your community, your family, the decisions you're going to make are going to affect your family, your community.

And then also thinking bigger picture, cooperation, relationality, the connectedness, you know, the community, that all comes together and that's how we have survived.

(Tom) Xerocraft is a makerspace in Tucson full of all kinds of equipment and people who are ready to help creators from all walks of life.

Be they students, retired folks, mid-career artists, and they're willing to tackle any kind of project, high-tech, low-tech, artistic, even repair jobs.

♪ SERENE PIANO MUSIC (Steven) I had a project where I need to repair an item at my house, and I came and googled Tucson Makerspace and found Xerocraft.

(Pat) I know a lot of people have to give up their studios.

We have everything here that they would need.

They can downsize and still do their craft.

♪ AMBIENT SYNTH MUSIC (Terry) We are an enabling space.

We try to lower all the barriers we possibly can to help people be successful with their projects.

The term hackerspace is kind of an unfortunate choice.

It really means the old way of hacking.

When my grandfather would get a compliment on doing a project, he would say something like, "Oh, I just hacked it together."

(John) The whole idea behind Xerocraft is to give back.

So if I have a new person coming in and they don't know how to make anything on a lathe, I will go over into the wood shop and I will take them one-on-one and work with them.

And the same with the laser cutter, or the same with 3D printing.

♪ AMBIENT SYNTH MUSIC (Katherine) I took the tour here and I loved that it had all the tools and all the equipment and the gloves and the helmets, so I wouldn't need to buy anything before I decided that I liked it.

So, I joined for the welding and then I'm staying for the woodshop and for the glass shop and the metal shop This is a bedside table I'm making for myself.

I've already made one for my husband.

All of the metal is from Tucson Iron and Metal.

Everything's scrap.

(Adrian) I wanted to build a CNC router for my shop at home and I needed access to a 3D printer.

Came here and started using them, but they were always broken, so I had to learn how to fix them.

And then I did eventually build the CNC machine and got it working.

But after I joined the community here, it's just hard to leave.

(Steven) While I was here, I took a tour of the whole site and I found out there was an electronics shop that that's my background, I'm an electrical engineer, retired.

And it needed a lot of help.

I started clearing up the space, organizing it.

And then there were some classes being held back in 2019.

We start up the classes again too.

If you're interested in electronics, doing a project or fixing something or taking a class, we have this shop space here.

We have two benches here, which you can do soldering.

You can do working on your equipment.

We have oscilloscopes and meters and power supplies and signal generators, all the kind of electronic equipment you need to work on your project or to try to diagnose and fix something that you bring in.

We have all these different shops and all these different venues, uh, to work on your project.

That's all the hardware, but we have all the people and that's the skillset.

And everyone here wants to help everyone else.

- Okay, about 30 seconds.

- Oh, 30 seconds.

- It's about two minutes.

(Heather) For me as a woman, it's a really nice place to come in and play where traditionally women weren't really welcome into shops.

And here you're so welcome to just try whatever you want, you're invited to.

- Because it's sugar and red, that there's still more oxidation than it could have eaten up.

(Pat) I teach anything related to glass or jewelry.

♪ UPBEAT MUSIC This is glass, this is a glass bowl.

Many, many pieces.

Quite intricate.

Silver box that I made.

(Jacquie) This is made from what's called pattern bars.

I took an enameling workshop and I put it on my hiking hat.

(Heather) This piece is made out of fuse glass.

I set them as stones.

I learned 3D printing here and it inspired me to draw in 3D environment and then they're 3D printed and then casted.

(John) I make a lot of segmented bowls.

A segmented bowl is using different types of wood for design purposes.

(Heather) You get to hang out with a very diverse crowd and bounce ideas off of each other.

And you learn a little bit about getting along with lots of different people and enjoying diversity.

(Tom) Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated from just off Fourth Avenue.

I'm Tom McNamara, we'll see you next week.