The following is an original production of AZPM News.

(Tom) This week on Arizona Illustrated, see how a community is saving money and the environment at the same time.

(Hans) What I was hoping to do by living a little bit more in harmony with the delicate ecosystem that we share with native wildlife.

(Tom) How old is this iconic stone house?

Stay tuned to find out.

(Narrator) I can often pause here.

Stepping through the empty doorways and imagining the lives that once filled these rooms.

(Tom) Meet an MFA student unearthing urban and psychological landscapes with a sewing machine.

(Athena) They're generally like fabricated by me together, but so are all of us.

(Tom) And see why this story on Rani Olson recently won a prestigious Edward R. Murrow Award for excellence in video.

(Rani) What can we do as a people to start looking at the things that we're not really looking at?

Hello and welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara, and we're joining you from Studio A at our brand new home at the Baker Center for Public Media.

You know, you've heard it said that it takes a village to raise a child.

Well, our first story illustrates a different kind of cooperative effort in a community west of downtown Tucson.

Volunteers from an HOA are joining forces to help the natural environment and reduce cost at the same time.

♪ ACOUSTIC GUITAR PLAYS ♪ (Reporter) Residents in a housing development northwest of downtown Tucson are turning to nature and each other to improve their community.

Their efforts are increasing biological diversity, conserving resources and reducing costs.

(Shavon) Anytime there's work to do, I'm right on it, I adjust my schedule.

I love to help out and see returns in the neighborhood and how beautiful it is.

♪ GUITAR MUSIC CONTINUES ♪ (Mark) Not only a transformation, but the savings of our most precious resource, which is water.

And it's saved the community thousands of dollars in the last 10 years, which is pretty remarkable.

(Hans) Today we're going to be working on lowering the elevation of this area right over here.

(Reporter) These volunteers are part of the Agua Dulce HOA near Camino Oeste and Sweetwater Drive west of Pima Animal Care Center.

The community of about 400 homes is close to wide open spaces, such as Saguaro National Park and Pima County Sweetwater Preserve.

(Hans) It's part of just basically trying to live in harmony with the beautiful environment that we share with the desert native plants and animals here in the Tucson Mountain.

[ WATER SPLATTERS ] (Reporter) In 2016, with research and guidance from retired hydrologist Hans Huth and others, HOA volunteers moved away from widely used outdoor maintenance practices and implemented some changes.

Here are some of them.

Grass near the swimming pool was replaced with artificial turf.

Native drought tolerant species are being added to the landscape.

Swales are used to capture rainwater instead of having it flow down the streets.

And the trimming of trees and shrubs is only done when necessary.

No longer are plants reduced to small boxes, balls, or other shapes.

[ SAWING ] The community consulted with a couple of experts, including Angelo Romeo, a certified arborist with the International Society of Arbor Culture.

He cuts branches to provide pedestrian access to sidewalks, for example, but doesn't chop indiscriminately.

Certified arborists use science and education to determine their actions.

(Angelo) The inner crown of a tree starts to regrow when the inner crown unfortunately has been removed.

And if there's one misconception I want to set straight is that removing the inner crown or the inner portion or lower portion of a tree is extremely harmful.

It causes the tree to grow fast, long, and weak and ends up causing more storm damage.

(Reporter) The lower branches also protect trees from sunburn, which damages the trunks, something that many people may not realize.

When a tree gets sunburned, especially Palo Verde, because of that living bark, it'll start out brown and then eventually it'll kill an entire limb.

[ METAL SCRAPPING ] (Reporter) Also, the branch trimmings are ground up and saved for mulch.

This enriches the soil, helps the plants, and reduces evaporation.

(Hans) And I think that's what we're trying to do in this neighborhood, is demonstrate that, you know, there's value to creating an environment that looks more like Tohono Chul versus, say, a strip mall.

Strip malls, they require a lot of water, they require a lot of maintenance, they require a lot of money.

(Reporter) Huth has been conducting investigations and keeping records to track the HOA's progress.

This is a data logger built with open source hardware.

[ PLASTIC SNAPS ] What I can do is turn it off and download the data of this little SD card.

and this allows me to basically understand the impact of mulch on water retention in water harvesting basins.

(Reporter) In 2025, compared to a 2016's baseline, there was an almost 70% decrease in water use.

During that time period, more than 7 million gallons of water were conserved, or nearly $27,000.

Also, by separating the tree service from the general maintenance contract, the HOA has saved at least $28,000 over three years, according to Huth.

♪ LIGHT HEARTED MUSIC ♪ Other benefits are priceless, Huth points out.

His family has implemented various ecological measures in their own backyard, with very pleasant surprises.

(Hans) This is a cistern that was purchased with assistance from Tucson Water's Rainwater Harvesting Rebate Program.

And I installed this because I was losing a lot of water from this side of my house to the street.

A nice added benefit of having this tank is, about three years ago, I had a bobcat that decided to start raising kittens behind it, Avery.

And over the last three years, Avery's own kittens have now grown up, and they're raising their kittens behind this cistern.

So they come out for about a month every year, and feel this is a safe place, and cool, to raise their own kittens.

That was exactly what I was hoping to do by starting this whole approach of living a little bit more in harmony with the delicate ecosystem that we share with native wildlife here in the Tucson Mountains.

So it's a blessing, and it's a kind of confirmation of-of what I was trying to do from day one.

(Reporter) It's an ongoing transformation that requires conversations, cooperation, and compromise from multiple interests.

But volunteers say the work and sweat are sweet reminders of what can be accomplished when people join forces and dig in.

(Shavon) I consider this my community service.

It makes me It makes me good.

I get out in the outdoors, and it's such a beautiful community to meet new people.

And it's a great opportunity.

It clears my mind of everything going on.

And I love seeing the birds, the bobcats, the javelinas, coyote.

We have everything here.

People walking the paths, they're so thankful when they see us volunteers out here.

(Mark) Hans has really done a really good job of making this information available to citywide, to all the HOAs.

They come and talk to him on a regular basis.

He's in demand for his knowledge, and he's willing to share.

It's a great legacy for him.

(Hans) I remember when I bought that house, I had a close friend who worked for the Nature Conservancy, who was very disappointed with the fact that I was supporting development in the Tucson Mountains.

And that always kind of bothered me a little bit.

I thought, wow, you know, I am really lucky to live here.

I am making an impact on the local environment, and maybe there's something that I can do to offset that footprint.

♪ LIGHT HEARTED MUSIC FADES ♪ Out in the Tucson mountains along the Yetman Trail, hikers often stumble across a set of stone walls standing quietly in the desert.

Now, it looks like the ruins of something much older, but this was once a family home built back in the 1930s by a Tucson newspaper man.

♪ INTRIGUING MUSIC ♪ High in the foothills of the Tucson Mountains, along a quiet stretch of the Yetman Trail, hikers sometimes come upon something unexpected.

Stone walls.

Standing alone in the desert.

At first glance they look ancient.

Maybe the remains of an old mission, or the ruins of some forgotten frontier outpost.

But these weathered stones tell a different story.

One rooted in the hopes of a Tucson family nearly a century ago.

This is the Bowen Stone House.

♪ WESTERN MUSIC ♪ In the early 1930s, newspaperman Sherry Bowen and his wife Ruby set out to build a new life in the Sonoran Desert.

Bowen worked as a city editor for the Arizona Daily Star, but the couple dreamed of something far removed from life in downtown Tucson.

They found it here, in a quiet valley tucked into the rugged hills west of the city.

The Bowens began building a ranch house from the very landscape around them, stacking thick stone walls that could withstand the desert's fierce winds, blazing summers, and sudden storms.

Over time, their homestead expanded to nearly 2,000 acres of desert land.

From the wide picture windows of their home, the family would have looked out across a valley filled with saguaros, mesquite trees, and open grassland.

Deer and bighorn sheep wandered the hills, and wild horses sometimes passed through the valley below.

Life here was remote, especially during the difficult years of the Great Great Depression in World War II, but the Bowen family made the desert their home.

Their daughter, Gloria, was born here at the ranch, and would go on to become a celebrated ballerina, traveling far beyond the quiet valley where she first opened her eyes.

But over time, the homestead fell silent.

The family eventually left the ranch and the desert slowly began reclaiming the place they had built Roofs collapsed, windows disappeared, wooden beams weathered away under the relentless Arizona sun What remains today are the sturdy stone walls, the skeleton of a home that once stood proudly against the desert sky.

In 1983, the surrounding land became part of Tucson Mountain Park, preserving the site for future generations.

Today, hikers along the Yetman Trail often pause here, stepping through the empty doorways and imagining the lives that once filled these rooms.

It's easy to see how stories begin in places like this.

Some visitors speak of mystery, but the real story of the Stone House may be even more compelling.

It's a story about resilience, about a family who came west seeking health, opportunity, and a new beginning in the desert.

And it's a reminder that even when buildings fade and walls crumble, the stories they hold can still echo across the landscape.

Here in the Tucson Mountains, the Bowen Stone House stands as a quiet monument to a different era, one where carving out a life in the desert required determination, imagination, and a deep respect for the land.

And for those who pass by on the trail today, these weathered stones offer a glimpse into Tucson's past, one step, one story at a time.

♪ WESTERN MUSIC ♪ When you think about archeology, you probably picture someone with shovels and brushes working to unearth history.

But a University of Arizona Master of Fine Arts student is using drawing materials and a sewing machine to excavate urban and psychological landscapes.

♪ SOFT GUITAR ♪ (Athena) We're fabricated by, like our parents, and the things that we want for ourselves, and then like how we act within society, but then the fact is that whether it's hardwired or softwired, it can all actually organically change if we need it to.

I am a graduate student at the University of Arizona, working towards my MFA in studio art.

My work consists of methods or techniques like drawing, sewing, painting sometimes.

I'm often working on like 20 to sometimes even 30 or 40 pieces at the same time.

I'll have other works pinned up on the wall and I look over and I think, oh, that line, that little moment, that rock pile or that, like, well space or the place of winnowing kind of needs to go into this space over here.

And then I'll do like a blind contour drawing, so it's a much more gestural moment or just like a trace.

(Clarissa) Me and Athena have had a great working relationship, bouncing ideas off of each other because we do work so differently materially, but our subject matter is actually very similar.

♪ SOFT GUITAR ♪ Whenever we're stuck, we can kind of feed off ideas and just be inspired by the work that we're making and just pop into each other's studio.

[ PENCILS CLATTER ] (Athena) I like to say, I wanna know what all the rules are so that I know which ones I'm breaking.

I really see that attuned to things like other formats, like poetry or jazz.

When it comes to reading the work, like sometimes there's like symbols or moments of like a gestural style of drawing a home with a fence, or like an aerial view of archaeology that then you notice in one piece and you turn around and you see, oh, that's there in the other one, but it's established or composed differently.

(Clarissa) Her work just has a profound connection to the material and it really does breathe new life into the material.

And then it just, by doing that, kind of relates to her broader research of both the urban landscape and re-imprinting and giving these clothing and objects that have such a rich history a second chance to provide a new narrative for us.

(Athena) I do see my work, like, as a sort of psychological excavation where I'm like excavating the history of like my own psychology and my own past, along with, you know, excavating the materials themselves and their own history.

I do specifically use a machine because like, it does have this sound and this heaviness to the actual way of creating through the machine, you know, that I think also talks about the system of society.

And like, we know that there is like a machine that it's sort of this system that causes people to continue to behave in a certain way, even if they know it's not actually working.

(Clarissa) One thing that I also find in Athena's work is that the material tends to reach out towards the viewer.

Almost just bringing you in with these threads, whether it be through sewing machine or through dipped wax, I think these objects have an ability to bring you closer, whether or not you're doing it intentionally, they just kind of draw you in.

(Athena) I am working with like social landscapes and people's psychological relationships within the social landscape in order to create a place or a space.

Sometimes I'm working in sculpture, so I'm creating these installations where people would then be able to reflect within a landscape alongside of each other.

We're really complex beings, so like all of our history that we have in our lives, like we take with us where we go.

And I think it's important to like acknowledge that if you and I are only sharing like a half hour together, that there's a whole lot more to you than that little exchange that we had.

That's something that like I'm trying to bring within the title and then also like the materials and how the materials are constructed in my work.

So they're generally like fabricated by me together, but so are all of us.

If our life isn't working for us, if the way that we're behaving around others or for ourself is not working for us, then we can go through sometimes a very long process, but we can go through the process of affecting change in order to become better.

♪ SOFT MUSIC ♪ (Tom) That story was produced by recent University of Arizona School of Journalism graduate, Summer Williams, who took photos, produced videos and social media posts during her time as a student worker at AZPM.

So thanks, Summer.

You'll do great at anything you put your mind to.

Each year, the Radio Television Digital News Association recognizes excellence in broadcast journalism with Edward R. Murrow Awards.

And this year, AZPM won eight regional Murrows.

This program won six, including one for this story about artist Rani Olson for excellence in video.

Congrats to producer Özlem Özgür and recently retired videographer Robert Lindberg and colorist Emmanuel Joubeaud for making this story pop and to everyone else involved in putting the story together.

♪ CALM PIANO MUSIC ♪ None of this would exist.

None of the plants, us, none of the organic material in life would happen without the existence of these rocks.

This is a rock planet and these are the stories of these rocks.

Maybe all of life is just about rocks wanting to have a different kind of experience.

And we are made up of these rocks and these chemicals and that process is inside of us.

Those memories are inside of us and then we go back into the Earth.

I've been making art my whole life.

I attribute that to my mom.

Growing up, the things that I was most interested in was math and art.

I really love making sense of structures.

I got into the process of understanding human connection with rocks.

From the vantage point of rocks, how does the world look?

I kept wanting to suspend rocks.

And I finally did it.

That was such a physically aggressive thing.

And so I left the rock part.

I brought harvested clay back in and started creating shapes that looked like rocks that were made from harvested clay.

Well, what if I just allowed the clay to just be clay?

Behind me is kind of where that ended up.

(Dian) I've had the really fortunate experience of watching Rani put this together.

The lighting was a part of the art and creates not just a sense of mood but actually changes the shapes of the items in the gallery.

It adds to what you're reading.

♪ ORCHESTRAL MUSIC ♪ ♪ ORCHESTRAL MUSIC ♪ (Tom) We both have a space here in Subspace.

We're both practicing artists that share studio spaces in the basement of the Steinfeld warehouse.

- I wonder if it's in the last six months that like stuff is so uneasy right now?

(Tom) People have all different types of like working hours, but Rani and I seem to be the ones that are always here in the morning.

So we spent a lot of time talking about art and the things that influence our art.

There is a big connection between like process.

Rani is definitely like a process oriented artist who takes a lot of care.

I've been like kind of blown away as she's talked about all of the different processes that she's used throughout her practice.

♪ ATMOSPHERIC MUSIC ♪ (Rani) It's the process of me going down these rabbit holes and finding these little mirrors in them.

And I'm not intending to.

This story that I'm understanding about a particular material.

I'm really relating to that in my own experience of the concept of permanence or the concept of change or the concept of coming back to oneself.

Art is a mechanism to alchemize human experiences.

The fall of my sophomore year of college, my sister died suddenly, and she was like my best friend and my family.

We had kind of been through everything together.

The grief was debilitating.

It's one thing to process it, and it's another thing to kind of move it into something else.

Art was really the saving grace for me.

It's just been this kind of like side thing that I've done to keep myself excited and interested and sane.

♪ CALM PIANO MUSIC ♪ (Clare) Rani has engaged with people who struggle with addiction.

A piece of that exhibit has to do with recovery Her exhibit really asks you what is being recovered?

Is it the inner child?

Is it you know, relationships with ourselves or others?

There are so many answers.

(Rani) Plaster has this memory when it's introduced with water.

It heats itself up and then it hardens It just immediately transforms back into what its previous self was chemically.

There's something about that that just feels so incredibly poetic to me.

There's some memory that we know it like immediately goes back into our core.

Even if it's lost again, when we're reintroduced with that again it is completely accepted.

The cycle just keeps repeating.

(Jay) She's channeling something, whether it's subconscious or from the cosmic or whatever, that is really what her art is about and using the materials and the process that she goes through.

I'll see her doing something totally new or different, and it's something I've never seen before.

(Rani) The sweeping video and projection, as well as the broom, started with my exploration into my ancestry.

And what is the story of grass?

The broom that's hanging is an Appalachian-style broom that I made.

Grass grows up from soil and rocks, and then we're flipping it upside down, and we're using it to move rocks and move dust and move soil with you forward, and that it's also like touching back on the earth.

The irony of that, like, what are we moving forward?

What can we do as a people to start looking at the things that we're not really looking at?

A lot of the work that I engage in is, I think, just being at peace with what is, like learning how to be with discomfort and grief and becoming new again, right?

Learning different ways of being in the world, and it's an exploration, and I think of it like rocks, you know, like they're constantly moving around and shape-shifting and doing all of these things, like isn't that true with everything always?

(Tom) To see a full list of Arizona Illustrated's six Edward R. Murrow winning segments, just go to azpm.org/Murrow Like what you're seeing on Arizona Illustrated?

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Like, follow and subscribe to Arizona Illustrated on Facebook, Instagram and X. Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We'll be back next week.