Four University of Arkansas students are gaining experience in the civic process. Sophomore Kevin Durden, along with juniors Wyatt Rice, Sydney Stewart and Muskan Taori, have drafted a ballot measure titled the Amendment to Keep Arkansas Natural. It's based on an amendment to the Montana State Constitution, which protects residents’ right to a clean and healthy environment.
Currently, the team is working with Bentonville-based attorney Jennifer Waymack Standerfer to navigate the submission process with the Arkansas attorney general. As of publication, the measure has been rejected twice, but the authors are not letting that deter them. The group is currently working on a third draft.
Durden and Rice joined Ozarks at Large’s Jack Travis at the Carver Center for Public Radio last month to discuss the measure and how they're engaging with the state's government. The two are from Arkansas, Little Rock and Bentonville, respectively, and Rice says they knew each other before joining forces on this measure and took part in programs that prepared them for this situation.
Rice: We both did congressional debate in high school, which is kind of where we know each other from. Obviously, I'm a year older, so Kevin was here right after me. And then we're also both involved in student government at University of Arkansas. So we were both in Senate last year.
Durden: And the other two people working with us are also student government people. For this particular project, I kind of first got the idea back in February when we were all snowed in. I was just scrolling the news, and I try to stay up to date with environmental news, and an article from the Associated Press about how after a long series of appeals and litigation, the Montana State Supreme Court ruled in favor of a group of plaintiffs that yes, the state does have to regulate fossil fuels in their state, and that by not doing it, it violates their right to a clean and healthy environment.
And so that was enshrined in the Montana State Constitution in 1908. And I was like, oh, number one, it's really cool to see high school students advocating for climate policy in such a meaningful way. But number two, I didn't realize a state could have a right to a clean environment. So I did more research, and I found out that only a few other states have this right: Hawaii, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New York. But I found it really surprising that Arkansas didn't. We're the natural state. We take a lot of pride in our natural resources and our environment. So I thought this could be a really interesting thing to do.
Arkansas is also one of 15 states that allows wide access to direct democracy, including submitting citizen-led ballot initiatives for constitutional amendments. And I kind of thought that would be a really interesting way to go about adding this right to our Constitution.
Travis: All right. So what happened next?
Rice: Yeah. So Kevin approached me pretty soon after that. It was the end of last year, sometime in the spring, sometime after all that snow. And he just approached me with the idea. It was obviously pretty ambitious. If anybody was going to be able to organize that and pull it off, it was probably Kevin, who knows more about state politics than anybody else I know. But I was also just really excited about the idea. He obviously knew that I was interested in sustainability and environment stuff and policy in general. And so those conversations started towards the end of last year.
We worked on it a bit over the summer, got together with Sydney and Muskan, who are also working on this with us, and the process really got kind of kicked into gear at the beginning of this semester in the fall, when we were able to submit our first draft and work with Jen on that language.
Travis: Tell me about that language and your first draft. What considerations were you keeping in mind? And tell me generally about the measure too.
Durden: So from the start, when I first came up with this idea, I wanted to match the language in Montana pretty closely. Their provision is really interesting. It guarantees a right to a clean and healthful environment for current and future generations. So not only is your environment clean, but it has to maintain your health, and it has to be around for future generations.
At the time, that provision in their constitution was framed around ensuring Montana's abundant oil fields were able to continue to be used for future generations. But that's a really interesting way, in my opinion, to frame the climate issue, where we hear a lot in the news about climate change and how it's worsening storms and all that stuff. And there's a lot of effects that kind of seem abstract when you look at them from afar. But the public health impact really is the most important one, and I think it's the one that resonates with most people. If our air isn't clean, asthma rates increase. If our water isn't clean, we're not able to be healthy.
And so I wanted to make sure that that language was in the Arkansas provision. I also wanted to make sure, though, that we weren't limiting the use of Arkansas's resources. Part of what makes Arkansas such an incredible state is our abundant and varied resources, and it's really helped our tourism recently. So when we wrote the initial provision, we wanted to make sure that yes, we are guaranteeing a right to a healthy environment. Yes, we're guaranteeing that the environment is protected from unnatural depletion. But we also wanted to make sure that we had allowances for adequate and efficient use so that hunting could continue, so that our state parks were being maintained and people could still interact with those.
And that's kind of the crux of this amendment, is balance. We're still going to be mining coal. We still want to be able to use the lithium deposits we've just found. Those are great resources for Arkansas. But we need to be using them in a way that balances the health of the state and the people in the state, and also makes sure that we're using them in a responsible way that allows us to have benefit from them in the future.
Rice: So that was the first draft. It was very closely matched to that Montana language. We worked with Jen to update a few of those words in there just to match the Arkansas Constitution more closely, how that is written, to match some of the legal jargon. And then we submitted our first draft to the attorney general's Opinions Office and were able to, the next week, I think, go down and meet with them to just understand the process a little bit more.
That was something we asked when we submitted it with Jennifer, just to get a better understanding of the process. Also, just an interesting learning experience for us. And so we went down the next week, met with them in person. Tim Griffin came by, talked with us for probably 20 minutes about the process, what would happen next. And that's when they were able to walk us through our first rejection, understand what they had concerns about and move on from there.
The big reason that the attorney general's office goes through this process is because if our measure reaches the ballot and someone sues to try to keep it off, it's their office who has to defend the decision to put it on the ballot. So they want to make sure they've covered all their bases and they feel justified in allowing it to move forward.
Durden: And with that rejection, we got some really good feedback that we hadn't considered. The original provision matching the Montana language said all people are required to uphold this right. And there were some interesting questions raised. Does that apply to tourists? Does that apply to minors? How would that be enforced in certain niche cases that we hadn't considered?
And so that first rejection gave us a chance to rework the amendment. In our second draft, we addressed a lot of their concerns. We did still receive a rejection. Two to three rejections is pretty normal for this process. And we're currently working on addressing their last few concerns they expressed in the second rejection to hopefully be approved on the third round.
Travis: Before you met with Tim Griffin, what were your expectations?
Durden: I, having followed the initiative process, was expecting definitely rejection on the first round, and then depending on how that went, the potential of approval on the second round. But usually it takes about three rounds. And a lot of that is just it takes multiple attempts and lots of feedback to write good pieces of policy.
But we definitely weren't disappointed by that first rejection. And we were super happy that the attorney general took the time to meet with us. Second rejection, a little more disappointing, because we thought we had covered everything. But the concerns they raised were valid. And we're glad that we have another opportunity to address those and submit again.
Rice: I definitely wasn't expecting him to meet with us in person. We knew we were going down to the office, which we were excited about, just to hopefully get some feedback in person. Obviously, they released an opinion that has some feedback for what they want us to change. But being able to talk through it with them in person definitely gave us some clarity while we were writing that second draft.
Durden: It was a little bit of a surprise. We were told we'd be meeting with the head of opinions who drafted the decision. But over the course of that hour-long meeting, we got to have a good conversation with the attorney general, a really good conversation with the chief deputy attorney general, as well as the head of opinions and two other lawyers in the Opinions Division. We really got a good sense of what was happening in the office, and that definitely made the filing process and the revisions process a little more human. It wasn't just, oh, we're emailing a file to a black box office. No, there's people there. And it was good to put faces to the names we're seeing on the emails.
Travis: What's keeping you determined? You're pushing forward, you're working on a third draft. What's keeping that flame stoked?
Durden: For me, especially, I've grown up with climate concerns my whole life, and in my opinion, and it's shared by a lot of people my age, the climate crisis is the number one issue of concern. It's the one that especially we're going to be alive a lot longer. We're going to deal with the consequences a lot longer. But we're also even now seeing some detrimental outcomes with worsened weather, extended hurricane season.
But because it's such a global issue, it's very easy to get trapped in an anxiety cycle where these bad things are happening, but they're so big I can't do anything about it. But rather than letting the anxiety get to me and going into a state of not doing anything, I found that having this to work on, being able to focus on, okay, we can't fix it everywhere, but we can at least try to fix it in Arkansas, has allowed me to channel that anxiety into something productive that has been really rewarding. I'm not letting the anxiety control me. I'm turning that anxiety and doing something productive with it. And that's really helped me persevere, not get deterred by these rejections. And hopefully, also, it would be really cool to see it on the ballot. The notion that that's still possible is really driving.
Rice: One thing I've been really happy with is because the process of submitting these is open to the public, they're transparent about it, and they publish those online. As soon as we got that first rejection, seeing the amount of interest in what we were doing has definitely kept me going, knowing that we've had quite a few news organizations reach out to us for interviews, but also people I know, people I don't know, reaching out, being interested, wanting to know how they can help.
That energy on the ground has been what has really kept me going through these two rejections. That second one was a little more disappointing, because we were so excited about being able to start collecting signatures and get the ball rolling, and I think that excitement is still there.
Travis: So how do you see yourselves now? Activists, policy entrepreneurs? Just students trying something?
Durden: Honestly, we're just Arkansans. I feel like I'm just trying to make Arkansas better. I don't really want to put a label on it.
Rice: Activist is an interesting word. I don't know about policy entrepreneur. That seems very loaded. But I think Arkansans is good.
That's what's been rewarding about being able to talk to people. When we went down, we got to have more conversations with people involved in state politics. Being so young and being able to be a part of that world has been really interesting. Getting to talk to people who are excited to see young people in this space, in the state political space, has been really interesting. I'm happy with where it's been so far.
Travis: How has this affected your view of civic engagement within Arkansas?
Durden: I've always felt that civic engagement was really important. Arkansas's low voter turnout is very disappointing to me, especially because voting is so important in a state with as great direct democracy laws as we have. We have a lot of power, and it is disappointing to see people not wield that power.
But by doing this, I know I'm doing my part, and hopefully we'll inspire some other people to volunteer with other campaigns or volunteer with initiatives or even start their own in the future.
Rice: Politics feels very national and very big. But it's been really rewarding to be able to participate on a state and local level, to do something that I think can really have an impact on the people's lives who are around me.
Getting back to a politics that's more local and more connected to your community has been really rewarding.
Durden: I've grown up in Arkansas my whole life, and I spent a ton of time at our state parks and at our national parks and going on hikes and hammocking up on Mount Petit Jean. These are things that are really important to me, and getting to work on a project that is directly related to that, and that as we work on it, we get feedback saying yes, we have those same experiences, these places also mean a lot to me, that's just really rewarding. It feels good. It's hard to put to words.
Travis: Let's say it never makes it to the ballot. Do you still think it would be worth it?
Rice: Absolutely. That's something we've thought about a lot. Obviously, this is a long process that we're going to have ahead of us. It's a very daunting process, especially with some of the newer regulations around this process, specifically around the ballot initiative process. We have to collect 90,000 signatures meeting a certain threshold in 50 counties right now. So we might not be able to collect all the signatures.
I think it will absolutely still have been worth it. On a personal level, for sure. This is the most rewarding thing I've ever done. But I think that on a level of being able to show people that young people aren't disengaged and disaffected with politics, one of the biggest things I'm excited about once we can start collecting signatures is to reach out to as many youth organizations, as many high schools and colleges around the state as possible, because there is an energy among young people in this state and across the country to see something different and to be a part of that something different. Connecting with that will absolutely have been worth it regardless of what happens.
Durden: Even if we don't get the 91,000 signatures to get on the ballot, or even if we get on the ballot and it doesn't get the votes, it's still causing conversations like this to happen. And there's something really powerful about conversations. That's one of the biggest takeaways I got from my time doing debate. And I'm sure Wyatt would agree with me, even if what we were debating didn't have any real-world effects on real-world politics, the fact that we were even talking about it and thinking about it in different ways over time leads to change.
And so even if we can't amend the state constitution with this, we're still getting people thinking and talking about environmentalism and sustainability at the Arkansas level. And that's super important.
Travis: What's next? What's on your agenda in the coming weeks?
Rice: We are finalizing getting our actual ballot question committee paperwork in. We'll be able to start both fundraising, and then as soon as our language is approved, hopefully on this next submission, but as soon as that language is approved, we can start collecting signatures. So that is going to be a lot of printing and then a lot of canvassing and getting people to volunteer.
That's what we're the most excited about, reaching out to these groups, reaching out especially to the groups already collecting signatures across the state for separate ballot initiatives. They have been extremely helpful so far in the conversations we've had, giving us a little bit of guidance. A lot of them have done this quite a few times before, so they have that experience that we just don't. And that's what's next.
Durden: I think the biggest part of that is going to be finding our supporters, both financial — that's definitely important to help cover the cost of printing — but also volunteers are going to be essential. It takes five minutes to sign a petition, but people can't sign the petition if we don't have volunteers all around the state helping.
So we're definitely looking for those allies and those coalitions that want to help us collect signatures. And I think those will probably be the most rewarding partnerships of this process.
That was Kevin Durden and Wyatt Rice speaking with Ozarks at Large’s Jack Travis. A disclaimer: the drafters are operating outside of their roles as students and submitted this measure independently.
