This week on Arizona Illustrated working to eradicate Arundo.

It's not as difficult as I thought it would be to remove.

You just have to watch for the scratches and if it falls on your head.

Agrovoltaics, growing food in the shade of solar panels.

I want my kids to be able to ask me.

You knew that the world was changing in negative ways.

What did you do about it?

The science behind the grieving brain.

It's really the flexibility of being able to sort of go in and out of these waves of grief.

That's a sign of mental health.

And a former Tucson poet laureate reads from her poem Birth Witness.

It is a language too civil for writing Welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara, and we're wandering the trails here at Hornet chool.

It's been deemed one of the world's ten best botanical gardens by Travel and Leisure magazine, set on 49 acres of lush desert.

Its gardens and exhibits transport a visitor to the crossroads of nature, art and culture.

Tohono Chul utilizes native and adapted plants.

But there's another classification of plant that's most unwelcome here or anywhere in the Southwest.

Invasive species.

According to the USDA, invasive species are alien plants that do or are likely to cause economic or environmental harm or harm to humans.

Now, this next story is our first installment in a series about invasive species, their effects and what's being done to eradicate them.

This is invasive species, Arundo.

There's going to be one area that's straight out here.

So today we've got our group of UA alternative spring breakers here helping us remove arundo from Tanque Verde Wash.

This plant is not native, it's originally from the Mediterranean.

It tends to choke the flood channel and has no value to the indigenous wildlife.

And, you know, it can't carry fire during the fire season, so really there's a lot of strikes against it.

And you know, I've seen a mature mesquite die essentially by the competitive nature of arundo.

Ultimately, we're looking to restore the health of the Tanque Verde Creek, and we have identified arundo as one of the major threats.

So we were able to get some grant funds to do a two year project to remove this invasive species.

Arundo also spreads really quickly.

And so we really want to contain this and eradicate it, actually totally get rid of it, so it doesn't continue to move down into the Rillito River and into the Santa Cruz River .

If we can really remove it here higher up in the watershed, that's going to benefit the rest of our creeks and rivers as well.

[Background] Try to keep control of them.

It's really cool to learn about other invasive species, because a lot of Tucson, I think, mainly knows about buffel grass.

So this was, we're really shocked to see that there is another invasive grass that looks completely different from buffel grass, it's really tall.

I can get the back end.

We see something somewhere else, and we say, oh, that would look good against my back fence or, you know, as a hedge or something.

And someone probably brought in as a landscaping plant.

And over time, you know, flood waters might, you know, grab it from our back fence and carry it downstream.

And it just propagates away.

And all of that, you know, at one point, it started as a single stalk somewhere upstream.

I think that stack right there is roots that are already dried out.

Watershed Management Group is a nonprofit based here in Tucson, and we're really focused on connecting people to their local environment.

We've been leading workshops every week, occasionally twice a week, starting in the fall, and it goes through April.

So in the cooler seasons, we're looking to engage just anyone interested in coming out to the creek, learning more about it and participating in the project.

I live on the Tanque Verde Creek.

This is essentially our backyard, and we are absolutely fortunate to have this jewel of a riparian area.

And so I probably work about once a week or so, depending on my schedule.

[plants dragging] All of our efforts have been driven by local volunteers.

Today we have a group of students, but this past weekend I was working with a wide range of group from seniors to young adults, and it's really this volunteer labor which is so critical in getting the upper hand on these stands.

So we're standing in what you could call upper Tanque Verde Creek.

Tanque Verde Falls is behind me towards the Rincon Mountains and the creek flows from the mountains down towards the Santa Cruz River.

This particular section looks dry on the surface, but the water is flowing underneath us as we speak.

And then right past Wentworth Road, there's some geology underneath the ground that pushes the groundwater up to the surface.

[creek flowing] It's one of the very few creeks in town that has flowing water most of the year, and it's very worthy of any restoration work and all the protections that we can give it.

[horses trotting through water] Right now, there's very little protections in this area.

We often have motor vehicles coming through.

This place is worthy of Tucson's attention and its efforts.

I'm Tucson born and raised, so I've never really been up in this part of Tucson, so it's really beautiful to see how much bigger our community is than we think it is.

It's not as difficult as I thought it would be to remove.

You just have to watch for the scratches and if it falls on your head.

Oh did it get you?

No you're good.

Ah, so scary Invasive species work is can be super challenging, but we see this as a doable project.

Jim Washburne, the project manager, has done a similar effort along Sabino Creek and successfully eradicated arundo from Sabino.

It is a multiyear effort and it takes follow up, but it definitely can be done.

All of these new people will have this opportunity to know about arundo and then hopefully to their social groups say, Hey, let's go get some Arundo, Buffel grass, whatever it is.

And it creates really beautiful domino effect of activism and volunteering in our community.

You know, this effort to restore our creeks and rivers is attainable, and it's an effort that we as a community, if we all work together can definitely make this happen for our community.

So, there's hope.

And we've seen real progress just here in the last five to ten years on this issue.

Ever notice how many of your plants grow better in the shade than they do in direct sunlight?

Well, it's true, especially in hot places.

Like Arizona.

And researchers at the University of Arizona and Biosphere 2 are working on technology to harness this effect.

It's called Agrovoltaics, and it involves growing plants in the shade of solar panels.

Pretty simple process with promising results for farmers and energy producers.

Here and around the world.

So here we are at Biosphere 2.

It's the world's largest enclosed earth system laboratory inside the glass of Biosphere 2.

We study all these different ecosystems around the world, rainforests and oceans and deserts and savanahs and then outside the glass.

It's one of the three places where we're doing this agrivoltaics work, where we're growing food in the shade of solar overhead.

So we first had this idea of growing crops in the shade of solar panels, people said, you're crazy that'll never work.

And that's part of where I took that inspiration from our natural savannahs, looking at those plants growing out in the wild, in shade of other trees, we thought, could the solar panels provide that canopy like a mesquite tree, but without competing for water So we thought when we came up with this idea, we need a phrase for it, and we came up with the idea of Agrivoltaics.

and it's simply the first part of the word agriculture.

And the second part of the word photovoltaics, which is that renewable energy that's stacked overhead.

Hey Kai, how's it going?

It's going well.

Ready to plant some bok choy.

Nice.

Let's do it.

Little brown seeds, and we're going to do, uh, we'll do a couple per hole quarter inch deep and we'll do one line today and then one more line each month for the rest of the year.

So part of the reason we're so excited about this idea of agrivoltaics is it solves several of the major climate pressures, and it also helps us meet what the United Nations call Several Sustainable Development Goals.

So in terms of environmental pressures, it helps us deal with those heat waves and those really stressful temperatures that are becoming more pronounced because the plants are in the shade of a solar panel.

So it's like they've got a little umbrella over them during the hot part of the day.

It helps us deal with water stress because anybody knows if you spill your water in the shade versus the sun, where does it stay wet longer?

We've shown you can produce equal amounts of food with half as much water.

From the energy sector, most people don't realize that solar panels actually overheat.

You know, anytime you're above about 75 degrees Fahrenheit and it's sunny, your panels are underperforming because they just get too hot.

So if we can cool them down, you can make them more efficient.

So the crops underneath and the transpirational water loss from those crops is actually cooling down those solar panels.

So it's really kind of sounds like a kind of a complicated system, but each one of those principles individually is really simple, and I think that's what's helping us talk about this work to farmers and politicians.

So we know that there are some kind of larger environmental or structural factors that will shape how solar developers make decisions or how farmers make decisions.

So for sure, water is number one.

I mean, we see what's happening with shortage on the Colorado River and we can see the impacts, especially in central Arizona, to the farming community.

So we see a lot of potential with agrivoltaics to kind of help lead to greater economic well-being, provide enhanced resilience for farmers in terms of food production, hopefully lead to more renewable energy production, less water.

So as a kind of transition here for us in our community, it has great potential and what we want to understand are the the human elements and how people make decisions to adopt technologies like agrivoltaics.

That's part of why we're building out a national portfolio of agrivoltaic projects.

To understand by region, by climate space.

What do you get and what do you give up and just inform the people who are making those decisions.

And all of these different aspects of science, we've been talking about how we're building on really simple principles, and we like to stress this with the kids that we work with We're basically doing grown up versions of science fair projects.

The kids are doing the same science that we were doing at their schools.

They're learning the same lessons.

They're making the same kinds of observations.

Are there any ideas that anybody would like to share?

In the Agrivoltaics Garden, I like to tell the kids, we are all scientists here, I like to tell the kids, we are all scientists here, and so we're learning how to be scientists, so that includes using rulers to measure plants.

We've talked about what differences do you see between the plans in the shade or the plans in the Sun?

And we talk about, OK, what kind of difference are the solar panels making?

That's a beautiful broccoli.

You should be so proud of that.

Today, we did a phrenology class So looking at what lifecycle the plants are in.

I never noticed that.

Look at it.

Every day, there's something new to see, there's something that's growing that wasn't there before, I'm just really glad that the kids have this opportunity, like I would have loved to have a garden like this.

So just, I think just having a garden like this influences them in more ways than we could ever know.

And that's the magic of working with kids, they're inherently curious, they're inherently good problem solvers.

They're going to be the ones that are facing these biggest challenges in terms of energy production and water security and food security.

So let's get them started early in terms of trying to solve those problems.

Ok, looks like, are we all finished?

When people ask, you know, how does this scale up?

How does this grow?

I don't expect to see every farm in the country covered with solar panels.

We're only talking about converting a small percentage of current farms to an agrivoltaic system to have, you know, entire impacts across our country.

I want my kids to be able to ask me, you know, you knew that the world was changing in negative ways, what did you do about it?

I can say that I devoted most of my career towards trying to figure out a more resilient food system.

Agrivoltaics is like, you know, ground zero for thinking about ways that we can think about and understand trade offs between food, energy and water, and so, you know, intellectually in terms of how we manage resources, it's just really fertile ground and exciting to think about this new technology and this new innovation in in this kind of more integrated holistic way.

What does it mean to grieve?

Is it strictly emotional or is there more to grief than just feelings?

University of Arizona neuroscientist and psychologist Mary-Frances O'Connor explores the science behind devastating loss and shares the effects of grief on the brain.

(Mary-Frances) I feel really comfortable with grief.

I think that's largely because my mother was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer when I was 13 and lived another 13 years before she died when I was 26.

And it meant that grief was around our house.

And I always wanted to figure out how I could help her more with the grief she was experiencing.

[door closes] Before I did the very first neuroimaging study of grief.

I think it was a bit mysterious when I told people This is what I wanted to do.

The way that I thought about it was, if we can have someone who is lying in a neuroimaging scanner and they're having that wave of grief, we'll get a better sense of what that requires in the brain.

Here at the University of Arizona, I direct the Grief, Loss and Social Stress lab, which we call the GLASS Lab .

And I have a number of graduate students and undergraduates who help me in research looking at the consequences of grief for the brain and the body.

People with complicated grief spend more dwell time in one of the networks that they're in.

(Da'Mere) I'm a graduate researcher, so I collaborate with Mary Frances on research projects, helping to collect data, helping to formulate questions.

And this helps me with in my clinical work.

So I'm also trained as a therapist and so I see clients and I'm able to give them insight to a process that feels very like emotional, but it's actually a very concrete thing happening in the brain.

(Mary-Frances) If you think about it, the brain is a prediction machine.

The heart is there to pump blood around the body.

The brain is there really to try and predict what's going to happen next for us and maybe help us prepare for it a little bit.

And it gets those predictions from thousands and thousands of days of experience.

And so when a loved one dies, if you think about it this way, if you wake up one morning and your your wife isn't next to you, they're in bed.

It's actually not a very good prediction to think that she's died.

Right.

And many bereaved people will recognize the experience of waking up and thinking for a few minutes that their loved one is still alive and then the wave of the reality hits them.

And I think that comes from the attachment bond, which is a different kind of information that the brain can rely on when we bond with our one and only when we fall in love with our partner or our child.

That bonding includes the belief that you will be there for me and I will be there for you, and that will always be true.

And so the solution that the brain has for if my loved one isn't present, then the answer is to go get them, to go find them, or to create enough fuss that they will come and find you.

And so that solution, of course, doesn't work in the case of the death of a loved one.

And so it takes a long time for the brain to sort of reconcile these mutually exclusive pieces of information.

There's a newer model that we use in current grief research called the dual process model.

And this model really helps us to understand that there are two different kinds of stressors that bereaved people have to cope with.

On the one hand, there are the loss stressors and this is what we think of usually as grief.

But there are these other set of stressors called restoration stressors, and this is really about restoring a meaningful life.

What is it that I do now that I find meaningful?

So the advantage of thinking about both kinds of stressors means that for mental health, we try to find ways to cope with both.

And people can get stuck in only one or only the other.

It really is more about being able to do both aspects to fondly reflect on the time that you spent together.

Maybe even experience that bittersweetness that comes with it.

And also to be able to engage in how things are now.

Many grieving people will recognize what I like to call this should have would have could have.

Some very elegant research studies have shown us that this kind of rumination can actually be thought of as a form of avoidance.

These are those thoughts that just keep running around in your head of if only they could have known that the train was going to be late, or if only the doctor would have run another test or often about themselves if I would have gotten them to the hospital sooner.

The difficulty with the would have, could have, should have is if you think about it.

Each of those stories ends in.

And then my loved one didn't die.

But of course they did die.

And so getting stuck in that kind of rumination doesn't really help us to adapt to the current situation, the painful reality that we have to deal with that is they are gone.

I think it can be really helpful to make a distinction between grief and grieving.

And grief is just that.

It's that feeling that overwhelms you like a wave.

Grieving, on the other hand, is the way that that feeling changes over time without ever really going away.

So the reason I think it's most helpful to distinguish between them is that if people believe there will come a time when they don't feel grief, they're going to be disappointed.

You know, if I open a drawer, I open a book and I see a birthday card my mom sent.

Right.

I'm going to be totally overwhelmed with grief in that moment, you know, seeing her handwriting.

And that's totally normal, even though it's been years and years and years and years.

And the intensity, the frequency of those waves of grief will change over time.

But it doesn't mean that it's ever over in some sense.

So there's a huge range in the way that people express the grief that they're experiencing.

And almost all of it is normal.

Things I tell people that can be helpful are if there are moments of your day when you can feel positive things that you can, you know, be distracted by a puppy loping in the park, or you can have a funny moment with your grandkid where you're where you're laughing about something, even if there are other parts of the day where you feel just bereft.

It's really the flexibility of being able to sort of go in and out of these waves of grief.

That's a sign of mental health.

We do think about a small proportion of people, maybe five or 10% of people who experience the loss of a loved one, who have a more prolonged and severe type of grief.

We don't even begin to start looking at that as a possibility until at least a year after the death has happened.

At that point, we're really able to look for those individuals who are not functioning very well.

And so the opportunity exists then to intervene and get them back on a typical trajectory of grief and not actually take their grief away, but help them to find that flexibility in their life.

My father died about six years ago, and I think as with most grief experiences, we never know what it's going to be like until it hits us.

Even someone who studied grief as much as I have can be surprised by what comes along with it.

But I knew that the feelings would change over time, and it was easier for me to just let those waves come over me and then also recede.

So life experience taught me a lot.

And having talked to so many grieving people, taught me a lot as well.

A few weeks ago, we introduced you to Dr. Ofelia Zepeda, who has spent most of her life working to preserve the Tohono O'odham language.

She's also the former poet laureate of Tucson and the author of several poetry books.

She reads now from one of her poems about the sacredness of her language.

Birth witness.

My mother gave birth to me in an old wooden row house in the cotton fields.

She remembers it was windy around one in the afternoon.

She also used to say, I was baptized standing up.

It doesn't count, the woman behind the glass window tells me.

If you're not baptized the same year you were born.

The baptismal certificate cannot be used to verify your birth.

I don't bother to explain.

My parents are illiterate in the English language.

What I really want to tell her is they speak a language much too civil for writing.

It is a language useful for pulling memory from the depths of the earth.

It is useful for praying with the earth and sky.

It is useful for singing songs that pull down the clouds.

It is useful for calling rain.

It is useful for speeches and incantations that pull sickness from the minds and bodies of believers.

It is a language to civil for writing.

It is too civil for writing minor things like my birth.

This is what I really want to tell her.

But I don't.

Instead, I take the form she hands me.

I begin to account for myself.

Before we go, here's a sneak peek at a story we're working on So it's been, you know, almost 110 years to the date that we've seen Dace happily swimming in the river downtown.

So that in and of itself is a is something to celebrate, to bring bring a species back after an entire century of being gone.

[music, indistinct talking, fades out] Thanks for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We'll see you next week.