(pensive music) - Coming up next on this special edition of "Arizona Horizon," a new book calls for stronger democratic institutions to deal with hotter climates.

Also tonight, teaching democracy through budgeting decisions.

And we'll take a trip to Camp O'Connor, where young people learn the importance of civics.

Those stories and more next on this special edition of "Arizona Horizon."

- [Announcer] "Arizona Horizon" is made possible by contributions from the Friends of Arizona PBS, members of your public television station.

- Good evening, and welcome to this special edition of "Arizona Horizon."

I'm Ted Simons.

"Democracy in a Hotter Time" is the title of a recent book that calls for stronger democratic institutions in order to prepare against rising temperatures and avoiding climate chaos.

We recently spoke to the book's editor, David Orr, a professor of practice at ASU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Thank you so much for joining us, what a fascinating book.

Let's start with the title.

"Democracy in a Hotter Time."

The subtitle is "Climate Change and Democratic Transformation."

What are we getting at here?

- Well, Ted, first of all, thanks for having me on the program.

The problem with climate change is really a problem of democracy, and we knew enough a long time ago to do a lot better than we've done on climate issues.

The first warning to a U.S. president was given in 1965 to Lyndon Johnson, and since then, a series of warnings and the science has gotten more and more definitive, to the point where there really is no debate much about is warming occurring.

And you see that in wildfires and so forth.

But had we acted decades ago when we first knew we had a problem, we wouldn't be in as big a hole as we're in.

- Where is the intersection with that problem, the rising temperatures, climate change, and democracy?

The past, you just explained.

What about now?

What about the future?

- Ted, I think the issue really comes down to improving democracy.

I don't think we can solve climate change without first solving the way we do the public business democratically.

And I think the issue is so big that it penetrates down to the street level all the way up to the global level.

The issue is so big that we have to engage the public in the solutions of this.

Driving different kind of cars, building different houses, voting for different kind of representatives, and so forth.

But it comes down to it's an all-level issue.

It's an everywhere, everyone kind of issue.

- Is climate change, though, in and of itself in some way eroding democracy?

- Yes, absolutely.

Your previous guess, I think, was describing part of that, the slide toward authoritarianism that we now see in this country and around other countries that have been democracies.

So yes, and the problem here is the protection of fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels is a $3 trillion global business.

And so, you know, if you follow the money, the old attorney's rule of thumb, you follow the money, money has corrupted the way we do the public business.

- And we've heard about that for a long time here.

And obviously the money, money involved in politics is something we've discussed on this program many times.

But transitioning to a post-fossil-fuel world, what kind of new political order, what do you see?

The people in the book, everyone's kinda got a different idea here, but they all say something has to change.

What needs to change?

- Well, you know, the short list starts with money, getting money out of politics and ending the corruption.

If you run for office now, you gotta spend a lot of your time raising unbelievable amounts of money.

And so you go to the money people, and a lot of that's fossil fuel money, people who have a vested interest in fossil fuel, so that's number one.

Number two, I think, is beginning to organize the government so the left hand and the right hand know what the other is doing.

A systems approach to governance.

And that came through the book in a number of the essays.

So on one hand you don't grow the economy and on the other hand try to repair environmental problems, but you do both together.

You begin to integrate environment through the way we do virtually everything, it's not rocket science.

But I think a third thing I'd mentioned is I think that we have to rethink representation.

The constitution refers to posterity only once, and that was in the preamble.

A good bit of what we're doing casts a long shadow on our grandchildren and their grandchildren and so forth, but they have no rights by the constitution.

I think they have to rethink the whole subject of rights to a habitable planet.

- Interesting.

I noticed some of the ideas proposed in the book include participatory urban design.

Where does that fit in in this conversation?

- Well, that was one of the last essays in the book, and it's an intriguing idea.

And that comes out of Arizona State University and Duke Reiter's work in particular.

I think the idea of getting people involved in the land use decisions and building decisions around them, for the most part, people are excluded from that.

So in an otherwise democratic society, we build communities without engaging the people who will live in those communities and be affected by them.

And so, this is one of the exciting things I think we can do.

This is not all doom and gloom.

I think we know what we need to do, we know how to do it, and the question is getting out of the way and beginning to make the transition.

- Well, that is the question, but how do you do that?

And obviously constitutional reform and these sorts of things.

And I know that civic education or renewal of civic trust, that's mentioned in the book as well.

But how do you get out of your own way?

- Well, I think it boils down to an awful lot of decisions about fundamentals.

What do you drive?

When you flip the switch on your house for heat, where does the heat come from?

And begin to make the transition, which we're doing actually very rapidly, to renewable energy, efficiency, and better design.

We know all of these things, and they hit at all different levels.

Last week, I spoke at a conference in Portland of architects.

And if you ask architects to design solar-powered buildings, they know how to do that, and they can make them very efficient and very beautiful.

You're not sacrificing anything.

If you say to transportation engineers, "Design communities so you don't need a car to go everywhere," you're including things that you need on a daily basis for shopping and so forth and schools.

You build it so that you've got proximity so you don't have to get in a two-ton car to get your groceries.

But I think we know how to do these things, the question now comes down to in large major politics, and I think in the previous four years, we made a good bit of progress on that.

I worry a lot about the undoing of climate policies and the financing and the things that were helping us make the transition.

- Yeah, and we're running outta time.

There's so many things to ask, because the essays, there's a collection of essays in here, and they're fascinating to read, there's a very forward-thinking aspect.

As you mentioned, it's not all doom and gloom here.

But I think someone mentioned that we're in a singular moment in human history here.

What if democracy does not survive that moment?

- Well, that is the question, isn't it?

And t's a question for all of us.

One of the things that I think is happening at ASU that's been a brilliant success is building Earth system science into the curriculum.

You can't run a smart country with people who are ecologically illiterate.

A lot of this comes down to how you vote, who you vote for, and what you know.

So, one of the things I hope happens throughout all of universities and colleges is students graduate knowing what planet they're on and how it works and why that's important for their lives and careers, and also, on the other hand, understands why democracy is important.

And then the question is, how do these come together?

I hope you're not gonna press me to answer your question (Ted chuckles) because it gets off into some gloomy things.

But I think time is short.

The bad news is time is short, this is a global issue.

The good news is we know what to do.

And we've started doing that globally.

And I think the last thing that is good, if you put this to poll data and you ask citizens, "Do you want a hotter climate, more chaos and dirty water and foul air?"

The answer overwhelmingly is no.

So the public, if you get the questions right in the polls, (chuckles) the public is with us.

The question then is, can the political system step up?

And that means, going back to my first point, I think that means getting a lot of that dark money out of our political life.

- Yeah.

- So when you run for office, you don't have to sell your soul to hold office.

- The book is "Democracy in a Hotter Time," David Orr, a fascinating collection of essays that you've edited here, and it's really good stuff.

And thanks for joining us and sharing, we really appreciate it.

- Ted, thank you.

Nice to be here.

(warm music) (lively music) (lively music continues) (tense music) (tense music continues) (tense music continues) - A new book looks at the idea of using budgeting decisions to teach civics and the fundamentals of democracy.

The book is titled "Educating Democracy: The Case for Participatory Budgeting in Schools."

We recently spoke to the book's co-editors, Tara Bartlett, co-director of the Arizona Civics Coalition, she's with ASU's Mary Lou Fulton College of Teaching, and Daniel Schugurensky, the director of the Participatory Governance Initiative at ASU.

Good to have you all here, thanks for joining us.

Terry, we'll start with you.

The book focuses and takes a lot of ideas on civic education, but it takes it from a different angle, talk to us about this.

- Definitely.

So, school participatory budgeting is very similar to a project-based learning approach or action civics approach.

where students are really the steer leaders of this community, of their school community, and making the budgetary decisions.

everything from idea collection to the kind of development of ideas and proposals, presenting to their governing board members, and then actually facilitating a vote day with their peers and their school campus.

- Yeah, allocating funds, collecting funds, figuring out what you wanna do with it.

And again, this deals with their schools, so it's the real world here.

- Yes, unlike other programs for civic education, this is not a simulation, this is for real, this is authentic, and it involves the entire school community.

- And I guess the kids learn what, there are trade-offs, you have to do a little horse-trading here, true?

- (chuckles) Not really.

(Ted laughs) But they learn, they learn that there are limits to how much they can spend on the things they want to improve their schools, so they need to learn about trade-offs, they need to learn about making agreements, they learn to collaborate, they learn teamwork.

Many things that are useful later on in life for the workplace, for college, and for life in democratic societies.

- Isn't there a little bit of horse-trading going on?

(Tara and Daniel laugh) Not at all?

- Not really.

Not really, all right.

- Yeah.

- Well, 'cause I guess conflict resolution and teamwork, all that stuff- - Absolutely.

- Negates horse-trading.

- Yeah.

(laughs) - And talk to us some more.

Give us, like, an example of what, there's so many things in that book.

It's very deep, and it goes into it really strong.

- Yeah.

- Give us an example.

- Yeah, so we actually wrote the introduction of this book together and then collaborated with, you know, 12 different authors across different countries of the globe.

What we bring to the table in terms of our experience is here on the ground in Arizona.

So, I was an educator before and actually did this process in my classroom with students.

And I would have to say my favorite process was actually an inclusive model.

We partnered with the Arizona Developmental Disabilities Council, and they had kinda this mandate of this inclusion of students with disabilities.

The process was a learning experience for everyone to ensure that this school participatory budgeting process is accessible for all students, and the winning project was a school therapy dog.

- Oh my goodness, that's great!

That's great, and again, through the process, the students learn all sorts of things, don't they?

- Yes, they learn collaboration, they learn teamwork, they learn how to prepare a budget, financial literacy, but they also learn about communication skills.

They learn many things, as I said before, they're useful in life.

- Yes.

And now, the book is designed to do what, to get folks that are interested in maybe getting involved with this?

Talk to me.

- Yes, well, this is the first book on school participatory budgeting.

There are many books on participatory budgeting which is used at the municipal level in more than 10,000 municipalities around the world.

But this is the first book about school participatory budgeting.

And we have 14 chapters with different countries, chapters from different countries.

And the idea is to disseminate these ideas for any schools around the world who are interested in doing this.

- Yeah, this is best practice kinda thing, isn't it?

- It is, and it really marries the research finding side, which Danielle and I lead that in partnership with the Center for the Future of Arizona here on the ground, throughout the state.

And so it really brings forth, you know, if you're a school and you're looking to improve your school climate, if you're looking to embed student voice, there are research best proven practices through this approach that we can offer.

- Did this, did I read this got started at the Bioscience High School in Phoenix?

- It did.

- Right here in town, huh?

- Yes.

- And how long ago was that?

Do we know?

- It was in 2013.

It was Quintin Boyce, he was the principal, and he started with $2,000.

Five minutes from here.

- Yes.

- He told the students, "Do something good for the school, don't embarrass me."

- Yeah.

(laughs) - Started very simple.

And the kids came up with very educational projects, like cameras for the microscopes, ink for the 3D printers, and a outdoor pavilion, educational pavilion.

But most of the proposals, there were 18 proposals on the ballot, they were educational.

And because of that experience, it expanded to now we have more than 70 schools doing school PB in result.

- Wow, that's fantastic.

And again, for those who are still a little confused where democracy, the concept of civics and democracy fits in, talk me about that.

- Yes.

- So through our evaluation framework, we have a framework that's the CASP.

So it's essentially the civic knowledge, attitudes, skills, and practices.

So knowledge around how decisions are made within your school community, how public budgets work, so kind of all those democratic institutional type of knowledge pieces.

And then attitudes, really working with, you know, empathy and being able to critically think around some of the different projects and bringing not just your own project to the table, but thinking about what is gonna benefit or impact the greater school community, right?

A lot of the skills, critical thinking, communication, public speaking, and then the practices is thinking about how are you going to continue being, you know, a, quote, unquote, citizen within your school community.

You know, picking up trash or making new friends with students that you didn't know before.

So really this ecosystem that we wanna see out in democratic life.

- [Ted] Well, yeah, please.

- Yeah, democracy's how we make decisions together in society.

- Yes.

- And they learn how to make decisions together.

- They do, they do, and the budgeting probably, you get money involved, and people perk up, don't they?

They figure it out right quick.

(Tara chuckles) Congratulations on the book, and congratulations on all this.

It's really interesting.

It reminds me like in business classes where they tell you, "Take a stock."

"Take a stock and see how far you go with it," and that kinda thing.

It's participatory, keeps people interested and keeps 'em involved.

Thank you so much for sharing, we appreciate it.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

(solemn music) (lighthearted music) (horn honks) - [Ted] In Northwest Arizona just off State Route 95 stands a peculiar monument to the town of Oatman.

Oddly, the marker is 15 miles from the town it honors.

Wedged into the black mountains, the mining town of Oatman was established at the turn of the century.

By the 1930s, nearly 2 million ounces of gold had been extracted from the surrounding mines.

The price of gold and World War II forced the closure of the mines in the 40s.

The town was delivered another blow when in 1952 a stretch of Interstate 40 opened, siphoning off Oatman's lifeblood: Route 66 traffic.

It quickly became a ghost town.

(guns banging) - [Spectator] Oh!

- [Ted] Route 66 is again its lifeblood.

Nostalgia for the Mother Road and the Old West draw tourists from all over the world.

They walk the boardwalks, hang with the local gun fighters, and are followed around by Oatman's most famous residents, the burros, descendants of those set free by miners years ago.

Being closer to Nevada than the town itself, Oatman's misplaced monument is long forgotten, but the town is remembered daily.

(bright music) - Thanks to viewers like you, we've been able to tell America's stories on this PBS station.

Help us continue to tell these stories now and for future generations by including this station in your charitable plans.

- [Announcer] Supporting this PBS station through a gift of stock is easy.

To find out more, call the number on your screen or visit this website.

Thank you.

- Recent data shows that fewer than half of Americans can name the three branches of government, and only 25% could identify a right guaranteed by the First Amendment.

Producer Shana Fisher and photographer Ron Bruce introduce us to a summer camp that teaches the ABCs of government.

- [Shana] This is not your typical summer camp.

- [Campers] E-A-G-L-E!

Eagles flying free!

- [Shana] Instead of creating crafts, campers are creating campaigns.

And instead of learning TikTok dances, they're learning about democracy.

- [Campers] E-A-G-L-E!

Eagles fly to victory!

Whoo!

- [Shana] Welcome to Camp O'Connor.

The program is put on by the Sandra Day O'Connor Institute for Democracy.

It was conceived by the late Supreme Court Justice during a lunch with the institute's interns.

- Over the course of that lunch, she asked them, "If you had something to do over again when you were in school, what might it be?"

They all almost universally said, "We wish we would've had more civics, but more than that, we wish we could have experienced civics."

- [Shana] Now in its sixth year, the merit-based camp is open to middle schoolers from all over the country.

Sarah Suggs, who leads the institute, says research shows early civics education can lead to lifelong community engagement and more.

- There are studies that suggest that a higher voter registration in a given area, it bodes well for a lower crime rate.

We think civics education in general can make a difference.

- [Shana] Eighth grader Ryland Angle says he signed up because he has an interest in politics and making a difference for others.

- I think that it's important for people to learn civics and to understand how our government works, because without it, you're really lost.

If you're educated, though, you can realize that the government works for you, not against you.

- [Shana] Vivian Murray came from California, where she says her school doesn't teach much about civics at all.

- I wanted to learn more about the government at state and federal levels because I have an interest in getting involved in our society and making a difference.

- [Shana] As it turns out, Vivian's story is a common one.

In 2001, the No Child Left Behind Act designed to close the achievement gap among students required social studies or civic standards be taught in classrooms but was vague on how schools must achieve that.

According to research, only seven states require a full year of civics in order to graduate high school.

31 states, including Arizona, require a single semester.

And 13 states don't have any requirement at all.

The week-long camp is structured around the three branches of government.

Mornings are for field trips, which include a tour of the state supreme court and a visit to the state capitol to meet with legislators and understand how laws are passed.

- We weren't just talking about these concepts in abstract, we were actually going there and, you know, seeing where the decisions were made, seeing where the government happened.

- [Shana] There's even a private meeting with Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, a highlight for Vivian.

- For me as a young woman to see women in top offices like that, it's just really incredible, because I've never seen that for myself.

Like, I've heard about it, I've read about it in books.

- [Shana] The final field trip is part of Citizenship Day.

The campers head to the Maricopa County Election Center to learn about elections and voting.

- We're gonna have you do a few exercises that are gonna give you a sense of exactly how to vote.

- [Shana] They fill out pretend ballots and collect I Voted stickers, and then it's off for a tour with County Recorder Stephen Richer to see how ballots are secured, counted, and verified.

- It's a very cool experience to be able to see how these people, you know, operate our government and make sure everyone has a right to vote.

- [Shana] The camp culminates in a mock presidential convention.

On their first day, the campers are split into four groups.

- They each nominate someone akin to a primary.

And then on Friday, they build up to the convention and the nomination for the Stars and Stripes Party candidate for the presidency.

- [Shana] The campers spend afternoons working on candidate speeches and posters.

Both Vivian and Ryland are the candidates for their groups and say the experience of running for office opened their eyes to how politics can be civil.

- I was just not expecting it to be such a welcoming, open place, where I felt like I could share my values with people and they would share theirs.

- I feel as if, you know, a lot of people just demonize the other side and don't provide a lot of understanding and respect towards one another.

And if you get into civics early enough, you can foster a respect for one another and for civil debate.

- [Shana] In the end, Vivian won the candidacy, But both campers say the real victory is about something much more important.

- The thing that Camp O'Connor has really taught me about the government is that no matter how young you are, even if you don't have 20+ years of experience in our government or law or politics, you can make a difference.

- To me, to be a citizen of this country and to be involved in my community means the world, 'cause we're all involved in something incredible.

I think that it's really awesome to be a citizen of the United States, and I'm really proud of it.

(campers clapping) - And to learn more about Camp O'Connor, you can visit the O'Connor Institute's website and click on the Civics Education tab.

That's it for now.

I'm Ted Simons.

Thank you so much for joining us.

You have a great evening.

(pensive music)