Permaculture, implemented on a grand scale, restores degraded land and transforms countless lives, as my guest this week, permaculture educator and designer Andrew Millison, knows all too well. Andrew joins me to share his experience visiting permaculture projects all over the globe, like Africa’s Great Green Wall.
Andrew is a documentary filmmaker based in the Pacific Northwest and an instructor and education director in the horticulture department at Oregon State University, where he founded OSU Permaculture Design, an online permaculture certificate program. His YouTube channel has 655,000 subscribers and his videos on water management and permaculture have many millions of views.
Andrew Millison is a permaculture educator and advocate, and he makes documentaries on some of the world’s largest and most successful permaculture projects. Photo Courtesy of Andrew Millison
Before proceeding with my conversation with Andrew, I want to pause a moment to let you know I am offering my Fall Gardening Masterclass on Wednesday, July 30th at noon Eastern. I’ll walk you through how I plan my own fall garden — what to plant, when to plant it and the simple steps that really move the needle. It’s $20 to join, and that includes a downloadable workbook and a full hour of teaching and an additional live Q&A after that. Can’t make it live? The replay will be available for 30 days.
Meet Andrew Millison
Andrew grew up in Philadelphia, where as a teenager in the 1990s he became aware of ecological and societal issues. “We are headed in the wrong direction,” he recalls thinking.
“I realized as a city kid that I had no idea how to actually live or survive or anything like that,” he says. “So I ended up traveling around and kind of leaving society a bit. And I ended up coming back to Prescott College in Arizona.”
He had taken a permaculture design course through Prescott College in 1996, and that sparked his interest in plants and gardening. Plants are one of the healing tools in the world, he learned. “Once I took that permaculture class, I realized that’s what I wanted to do for the rest of my life,” he said.
Andrew had a background in art, specifically graffiti, and spent a lot of time making graphic presentations and eventually architectural renderings. “From the very beginning, I was using my graphic skills to represent what this new world could look like,” he said.
He started a landscape business around the same time Arizona changed its graywater laws. “So my business turned into a graywater installation business, and then I got the mega project of all projects I could imagine, building a vineyard for Maynard Keenan, who’s the lead singer of Tool. And so I spent two and a half years building his vineyard and orchard over in Jerome, Arizona.”
Andrew gained hands-on experience and eventually began working in a landscape architecture office with one of his mentors from college. He also began teaching permaculture at Prescott on the side.
“Then at a certain point, I got a little bit of, you might say, like, desert fever,” Andrew recalls. “I’d been in the desert for 14 years, and my wife was pregnant with our son. I’d already had another child, and I realized that we needed to get out of the desert.”
He was on the mayor’s water conservation committee, so he had intimate knowledge of how water was being managed in Prescott. “They were working off of a fossil aquifer, which is a non-renewable water source,” he notes. The effects of climate change on the Colorado River Basin were becoming evident.
He says he had an epiphany that they needed to move somewhere with water and food. They moved to Corvallis, Oregon, in 2009, and he started working at Oregon State University.
“I came here, and there was student demand,” he says. There was already a permaculture club, and after he gave a talk on permaculture, students wanted Oregon State University to establish a permaculture class — something not often found at major universities.
Students lobbied the horticulture department to start a permaculture class. That first class in 2009 went great, and the university loved Andrew. However, they didn’t have money for him to continue — unless he raised the funds himself.
The university was beginning to get involved in online education and encouraged him to start a course. He began an online permaculture course in 2011 with a grant from the state. When COVID hit, online education became even more popular.
“We became the largest non-credit online program in the entire university, and I would say the most successful online permaculture education program in the world,” Andrew says.
He works with 15 permaculture masters from all over the world to teach the courses.
Andrew also discovered a passion for creating media presentations and videos for the public — free education for anybody who wants to see it.
“I want to make it entertaining and capture people into this world of regenerative living, regenerative design that I know is so powerful, that changed my life so much,” he says. “And so many people that come into this permaculture world, their entire lives transform because they start to make the world around them, into paradise, into a place that is wholesome for themselves, healthy for their children, and the whole community, all the creatures around them.”
The success of his presentations have led to invitations to speak internationally and he travels to some of the greatest land restoration projects in the world. He’s also now working with the United Nations World Food Program.
“I started in 2017 by going to the International Permaculture Conference in India,” he says. Going to India was a lifelong dream, and he and his wife decided to stay there as long as they could. So Andrew found work he could do there in addition to going to the conference. He planned on spending two months documenting land restoration projects.
“My mind was just completely blown by what I saw in India, the scale and the breadth of the projects,” he says.
But when he posted his video series, he received negative comments about the color correction and blown-out backgrounds. He admits he was “terrible at video stuff.” He decided to learn videography, and he got grants from the university for equipment. He went back to India between 2019 and 2020 and filmed his India’s Water Revolution series.
That series gave him his start on YouTube, hitting a million views with some videos and hearing from people all over the planet that he had inspired them.
He returned to India in 2023 and 2024, visited Mexico and Egypt, and was invited to Africa by the U.N. World Food Program. This past winter he visited the Phillipines, Taiwan and Thailand.
The more good content he has produced, the more invitations he has received to visit some of the world’s top tier land restoration projects.
Andrew Millison encourages replacing lawn with food-bearing plants. Photo Courtesy of Andrew Millison
Land Restoration on a Massive Scale
Land restoration projects are carried out where the landscape has been degraded. This could be due to desertification, deforestation and/or soil erosion.
“For the most part, I’m looking at places that were wastelands where people then came and did some intervention with water harvesting, with revegetation with trees, grasses, rotational grazing, and came in and actually transformed a degraded landscape in a fairly short period of time into a thriving, productive, abundant food and natural system,” Andrew says.
His first videos, made in India, are about the Ponty Chadha Foundation, which runs a contest between villages to see which village can install the most water harvesting structures in 45 days.
“I call that the biggest land restoration project on the planet, where they’ve had about 16 million people whose lives have been transformed by this watershed-scale restoration of these villages,” he says.
These efforts transform villages from places where people are leaving for Mumbai because the wells are drying up, into places where new houses are being built and residents are sending their kids to universities and growing diverse organic crops.
“It’s a radical transformation and happens very quickly,” Andrew says.
The Great Green Wall
“The Sahara Desert has been expanding by about 1% every decade for the last 100 years,” Andrew says.
The Sahara is the size of the continental United States, and a 10 percent increase is the size of Texas. Imagine a Texas-sized chunk of land going from semi-arid grassland Savannah into deep sandy Sahara desert, Andrew says. “So you’re talking about a massive loss of livelihoods for millions and millions of people, and a destabilization of the whole cultural system, ecosystem, political system, everything — not to mention wildlife.”
To combat creeping desertification, 20 African countries came together to create the “Great Green Wall.”
“The idea of the Great Green Wall was to create an 8,000-kilometer wall of green and productive landscapes stretching across the width of Africa,” according to FarmSahel.org.
“It’s more like a mosaic of restoration sites that span the entire width of the continent of Africa from Senegal in the west to Djibouti on the east, spanning the whole Sahel,” Andrew says.
Andrew has visited the Great Green Wall in Senegal, Niger and Chad.
The work of the U.N. World Food Program, in collaboration with the participating governments, is mind blowingly vast, Andrew says. In Niger alone, 750,000 acres have been treated with water harvesting structures, trees and grasses. The ecosystem, the water table, the prosperity of the people and the microclimate are all affected, Andrew points out.
Volli Carucci, the World Food Program’s director of resilience and food systems, called broad-scale land restoration “an irreversible path to resilience.”
“Once the ecosystem starts to regenerate a certain level, nature kicks in and it starts to build on itself,” Andrew says. “And that’s what we see with these projects at scale.”
Half Moon Watering System
In the Sahel region of Africa, long periods of drought can be followed by tremendous flooding.
“They have about a three-month rainy season, and then a nine-month dry season,” Andrew says. “So it’s extraordinarily hot. You’re far from the ocean. You’re deep in the continent. You got the Sahara Desert to the north.”
He says that when you only have one three-month rainy season, it is a roll of the dice. “Some years the rains fail. They’re very scant. And if you have rain-fed agriculture and you have a crop failure, then you’re pushed into food insecurity very quickly.”
When he was there last year, the opposite problem was occurring. There was massive flooding.
“On the one hand you can have major drought. On the other hand, you can have major flooding,” he says. “But when the land does not have the capacity to hold the water and store it in vegetation, then you have the drought-flood cycle, where you have flooding — it’s erosion, it causes massive destruction, soils wash away — and then you have drought. Everything dries up.”
Water harvesting structures store that water in the soil and in vegetation, creating shock absorbers for the drought-flood cycle.
In permaculture, contoured land for water harvesting is called a swale. A half moon water harvester is a sculpted berm to catch rainwater in the bottom of the berm.
It usually takes one person one day to dig a half moon. In large-scale projects, there can be 10,000 half moons arranged in rows.
“You can have someone who doesn’t have a whole lot of training and skill be taught how to do this very well,” Andrew says.
With a half moon project, a small mistake will only lead to a small failure, unlike a contour swale that spans a whole landscape, where one breach will compromise the entire structure.
Half moon matrixes get water into the ground, where it restores water tables. The water can then be pumped out as needed.
“It’s your most economical storage of water, because you don’t have to build a big dam,” Andrew says. “You’re just getting it into that shallow water table you can then access.”
Wells are punched into the water tables and then solar powers are used to power pumps. The water is then used to grow vegetable crops during the dry season.
“The watershed is the basic unit of land management as given to us by Mother Nature in the shape of the land, and our human boundaries are super imposed over that watershed,” Andrew says. “And a lot of times our crisscross, square, rectangular land management boundaries, are very dysfunctional.”
How half moon water harvesters change the landscape. Photo Courtesy of Andrew Millison
Gaining Perspective
Having visited some of the most impoverished regions of the world, Andrew has gained a great deal of perspective.
He appreciates the abundance that the United States and other industrialized countries have just in terms of basic infrastructure. He also admires the perseverance of people in pre-industrial regions.
“I feel like it just kind of changed my perspective, on one hand just having a lot of gratitude for the comfort that I exist within, and also just understanding how strong the human spirit is when we really put our full efforts towards accomplishing a goal that is beneficial for the collective,” Andrew says.
“This is what humans can do when we are actually focused on the goodness, when we’re focused on the goodness, on restoring land, on bringing up the ecology and the community and the society. … Even people with very scarce resources can turn their lives around and turn the ecology around. We can do this if we just put our mind to it.”
He says his role is to show people what’s possible, what’s actually happening, and the choice that is available.
“We can go this way to destruction, or we can go this way to mutual creation,” he says.
Water capture and land restoration makes an unbelievable difference in landscapes and people’s lives. Photo Courtesy of Andrew Millison
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Andrew Millison on global permaculture and the Great Green Wall. If you haven’t listened yet, you can do so now by scrolling to the top of the page and clicking the Play icon in the green bar under the page title.
What is your favorite land restoration project? Share with us in the comments below.
Links & Resources
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Episode 201: Understanding Regenerative Agriculture and Permaculture, with Dr. Jake Mowrer
joegardener Fall Gardening Masterclass | Wednesday, July 30th at noon Eastern | I’ll walk you through how I plan my own fall garden — what to plant, when to plant it and the simple steps that really move the needle. It’s $20 to join, and that includes a downloadable workbook and a full hour of teaching and an additional live Q&A after that. Can’t make it live? The replay will be available for 30 days.
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“Introduction to Permaculture” by Andrew Millison | Oregon State University
“Permaculture Design Tools for Climate Resilience” by Andrew Millison | Oregon State University
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