Restoring Watersheds with Andrew Millison & John D. Liu

Hey, hello, hello, welcome everyone. I see lots of people entering already. Very happy to be here with everyone today. We have an amazing webinar with two of the most amazing also people working in the sustainable projects and the agriculture projects. So we are here in this April series webinar of large-scale and land restoration from the watershed perspective. This is our third webinar that we have today with Andrew Millenson and John D Liu. We're going to present, uh, soon our panelists and we're going to have a great time today. So as always, please share with us where are you joining from and we're going to start with some housekeeping first. So let's go ahead and start. First of all, I just wanna mention that this is part of the series from April, as I said before, and we have Webinar 1 and 2 already available for replay, both in our website and also in the YouTube channel, so that you can get to those. And then today's webinar is also going to be available for replay. We're gonna tell you in a little while when is that going to be ready for you. See lots of people coming from lots of different places. Welcome everyone for the ones that are joining now. And we have here some instructions for you. So first of all, you will be muted for the duration of the webinar. This is to ensure good audio quality for our panelists and presenters for today. We have a Q&A section in the Zoom. So please Add your questions there. We're gonna have a Q&A at the end of the presentation. So anything that you wanna know, we're gonna have that section there. But you also have the chat where you can converse with the other attendees of the webinar. And we're also gonna be interacting there with you. Remember, you can choose when you talk through the Zoom chat to talk to everyone, that's all the participants, or direct yourselves only to hosts and panelists in a more private chat. So you have those options as well. And finally, of course, enjoy this webinar today. We have lots of nice information to share. Good. So this is what we're going to be working on today. We have a presentation from Andrew Millenson, who is going to share about land restoration from the watershed perspective, and then we're going to be moving on to talk about, about our promotion that we have here in the Soulful Web School. And finally, we're gonna dedicate time to the Q&A with Andrew and John. So again, write down your questions in the Q&A section. So I am super honored today to be sharing some time with our panelists, Andrew and John. So I'm gonna ask you to present yourselves, tell us a little bit about who you are, what's your work, what do you do? And we're going to start with Andrew. So, hey, Andrew, welcome.

Hello. Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. I'm here in Corvallis, Oregon, which is the home of the Soil Food Web School. So I'm on home turf here, and I am an instructor at Oregon State University. And I teach in the horticulture department. I teach permaculture, and I've developed an online educational program over the last 13 years there, as well as being just a permaculture designer teaching on campus. And in the last 7 years or so, I've really gotten into storytelling with media. And taking trips and visiting some of the most largest, epic, transformative landscape-scale restoration projects on the planet and publishing them on my YouTube channel to the general public. So I've gotten the— I've had the great fortune of being able to travel around the world and really study and see a lot of the details of some of the most impactful projects that are really working. And so that's what really excites me these days, aside from taking care of my garden and my beehives here at home. And I'm really happy to talk to you here in this webinar. And thank you so much, Soil Food Web, for inviting me. I appreciate it.

Thank you, Andrew. I'm very excited to hear from you today. And we also have D Liu. So welcome.

Well, thank you so much. And, uh, it's great to see Andrew. I just was with him in Spain looking at, uh, the first ecosystem restoration community. If you don't know who I am, I've been a journalist and a filmmaker and an ecologist. Uh, and I'm now 72 years old, so I'm feeling quite a bit older than I used to. But, um, I've seen the movement of ecological restoration grow from basically nothing to something which is now all over the world, and it's exciting to see, and I'm so grateful to the Soil Food Web School and also to the ecosystem restoration communities and to the Common Land Foundation and the Mustard Seed Trust, whose support helps to let me continue to do this work. So thanks so much. And I'm here today to help answer questions after Andrew's fascinating presentation.

Thank you, John, and thank you for being here with us, sharing your, your knowledge and experience. And finally, I am Denise. I am your host for today. I work in the Soil Food Web School as a CTP mentor, and I am from Costa Rica. I am a biologist, uh, that's also in love with agriculture and science communication. So thanks everybody for, for being here, and we're going to start today now with Andrew, Andrew's presentation. So Andrew, you can go ahead and share screen.

Well, we are going to talk about, uh, design as a tool for large-scale land restoration and from the watershed perspective. So, like I said, I've had the great fortune of visiting a lot of different places in the world and really honing in on some of the patterns that are working and, and how people are actually being successful in this day and age here with large-scale land restoration. So, here we go. I want to start by discussing what I think of as the fundamental flaw of civilization, right? So basically the land is divided into watershed basins, the natural patterns of water flow, soil distribution, right? And this, this very organic pattern where watersheds are divided by mountains, by ridges, right?, right? And so, you know, this right here, this image from Google Earth, this is actually the confluence of the Mary's River and Muddy Creek right near where I live. And so you can see this water flow pattern here. You can just kind of see these different green strands that represent how water flows across the landscape. But I've outlined in red here, These are the property boundaries, right? And where we see roads, we see fence lines, and we see a division of land management, right? So we have this grid of property divisions, property management, property ownership that is superimposed on top of this very organic, non-gridded landscape. Water flow pattern, right? So I feel like when we took the grid and we placed it on top of the watershed and we made these arbitrary divisions of land management, right? These arbitrary units where things are true, where the land is treated differently within these little boxes, we created a schism, basically. And that's one of the main schisms that most places in the world, we're doing restoration, when we're doing permaculture design, regenerative agriculture, we are, we are working under this fundamental flaw. And I'm going to give you some examples of that. This here is Lake Tenochtitlan, which is this genius hydrologic design that was taken up by the ancient Aztecs here. This is in Mexico, and they started building their capital city on this island in the middle of Lake Tenochtitlan, and they built these dikes and dams to have this very complex water management system that kept salty waters away from fresh waters, and they created the chinampas, right, which were Basically, they took this shallow lake and they took the mud from some canals. You know, they created canals and built up and created raised farmlands and created what some people think of as the most productive agricultural system in history. I actually made a whole mini documentary here. That's the thumbnail, most productive agriculture ever, right? That's where we find the axolotl salamander, axolotl salamander. And so This was a brilliant system that basically was self-fertile. All of the fertile lake mud in the waters, all the different aquatic plants that grew on the surface of the water were piled on continually to these constructed peninsulas, which, you know, just replenish the fertility basically in perpetuity. And then modern Mexico City was built. Now, it's interesting, John was saying that we were just in Spain together. I was just doing some filming there. The Ecosystem Restoration Camp Altiplano was one of the sites we visited there. And it was really interesting because I was like, wow, it looks just like Mexico here, you know, because the Spanish colonial grid was basically superimposed over this really functional— in this case, the chinampas, this functional organic landscape here. And now you have a city of 22 million people built on a lake bed, right? So obviously there's some problems there. There's a lot of settling and the earthquake, you know, capacity for earthquake damage is really off the charts because everything's just built on pretty much on silt and mud, right? And this just represents what I'm talking about, where this grid of development where, you know, that follows colonization has gone and just commodified the landscape and broken the fundamental pattern that really is very functional. Another great example here is— this is San Francisco. So here we see the grid of the city placed over this very hilly landscape. And in this case, what happens in modern cities is when you place this grid over, The streets now become the new drainage ways, right? So the roadways, the stormwater is piped into a storm system, a sewer system that goes under the roadways, and now water is as quickly evacuated from the system as possible in these straight lines that no longer have any correlation to what the natural flow of water was doing.

Right?

So when we're doing design, when we're doing regenerative design in any of these sort of urban landscapes or landscapes that have the grid superimposed, really we're spending most of our time just retrofitting and trying to make little fixes and little changes by ultimately what is the base of all this is this fundamental flaw of putting the grid over this landscape in the first place.

Right?

So in permaculture design, in regenerative design, we're really looking at the watershed perspective. And the watershed perspective does not typically correspond with political boundaries. Right? So this is the, these are, this is India right here. And these are the watershed basins of India. If you look at the political boundaries, the states are actually divided on language types. But we really want to start with a zoom-out perspective and think about the watersheds of where we live. What's the larger watershed that we live in? How can that break down into smaller and smaller watershed basins? And finally, we get to what is our smallest viable land management unit, right? How does the place that you are managing sit within the greater watershed basin? So that's the watershed perspective. And from my design school and from permaculture design and keyline design, The first thing we're looking at is water flow, and water flow is the foundation that we build all of the other design layers on. So let's talk about India for a minute here. I've done a number of videos, maybe some of you have seen some of them, on the work of the Paani Foundation in Maharashtra, India. And the Paani Foundation is, I called it the largest biggest land repair project on the planet. You can, you know, challenge me on that if you've got one bigger. I've run some of the numbers here. And basically, the Paani Foundation created a thing called the Water Cup Competition, where villages competed with each other over a 45-day period to install the most amount of rainwater harvesting features in their landscape, right? And it was founded by Bollywood star Aamir Khan, who is this mega famous Bollywood star. And so there's a lot of resources behind this thing, and he got industry and various wealthy people to sponsor this. So there's like big cash prizes for these villages. I've visited a number of these villages and spent some time, um, really seeing the work, and it's incredible. What you see here is you see a thing called shramadan. Shramadan is volunteerism where everybody from the village comes out and they're hand digging these, what they're calling continuous contour trenches on the slope here. And there's different types of landscape of water harvesting structures and features they put on the different slopes and in different situations. And so over the 4 years that they ran just the water cup competition, you had about 8,000 villages participate, right? And so the villages— this is like an example of what some of these structures look like after an intensive monsoon rain, where you can see water in a lot of these different structures, right? So through stormwater management, literally they fixed the dropping water tables of these villages because the way that the rains come in India you have a long dry season, usually about, you know, 8, 9 months, and then you have this really intense monsoon season. This is the same for any other monsoonal climates in the world here. And so if you put in all these water harvesting structures and you can have one monsoon season and all your structures fill up, all this rain is then infiltrated into the ground and you literally regenerate your water table in one rainy season. That's what they're doing. Because they're doing a watershed-scale treatment for each village. And just as a little bit of impact, so if you say the average village has about 2,000 residents, so 8,000 villages times 2,000 residents, you're talking about 16 million people who have restored their water tables, or at least to some capacity through this project. So it's really massive. But the— what, from, from my travels here, the advantage that India really has is that the village boundaries are the watershed boundaries, right? So we just looked at, say, in the U.S., I showed you San Francisco, or I showed you, uh, this rural land in Oregon where the grid, the boundaries of property ownership was this grid placed over. But here, these villages have been in these sites for so long, right, for thousands of years in some cases, that they have a real logic to the village boundaries. It's the water, it's the ridges and the hilltops that encompass the watershed. That's where the boundaries are. So when the whole village says we're going to restore our village land, they are restoring the whole watershed. And so that is a real That's like when I say the fundamental flaw of Western civilization, it's amazing to go somewhere and actually witness somewhere where that is not the case and how easy it is for a group of people to decide to restore their watershed when the political boundary is the same as the watershed boundary. And this is one of the villages. This is a village of Pimphri Jalsum there. And this is right in the center of the village. And they had a mural of their watershed, and they had their design drawn out on this mural right in the center of town. Old people, young people, uh, middle-aged people, men, women, every caste, everybody was walking past this every day. And so it's like they taught their entire village through the process of doing the work, and then by having this picture here in the middle of the village, they taught every one of them how to be a watershed designer, you know, water shed, a watershed restoration specialist, right? So probably the average, you know, 9 or 10-year-old in this village knows more about watershed restoration than the average human on Earth, right? So integrate, ah, geez, my bees are swarming. Haha, great. That's— I have to deal with that after the webinar. So integrated watershed management, right? How do we get it done in a fragmented world? Because if you're living in the United States or any country that has this grid, in a sense, you're living in a fragmented reality here, right? So how do we get that done? Well, I've got some examples that I want to show you where— of how we can still do this watershed restoration work. We can do the soil improvement work, even in the context of the grid. So this here is Village Homes in Davis, California. I'm sure that some of the people in this webinar have been to Village Homes right here. And just looking at this housing development, you can already see some simple things kind of pop out. One thing is that all of the homes are oriented on east-to-west axis, axis facing south. Okay, so these are all solar-oriented structures, which when you orient your home or any building in the, you know, northern or southern hemisphere farther away from the equator, if you need heating in the wintertime, if you orient it towards that sun, then you're going to use about half the energy. So that's just a little aside, aside from any kind of watershed aspects. But the development itself, right, it in a lot of ways mimics a typical United States housing development. You've got cul-de-sacs, you've got single-family residences, but all of the streets are oriented, like I said, so everybody has east East-West elongated housing, solar access. And then there's a cul-de-sac. And then on the other side between the houses, you have a green strip, which is a water harvesting basin where all the water from the roadways and the homes is infiltrated into a water harvesting basin. You can see that here on the lower right. Right. So you've got these pedestrian pathways going between the houses, and then you have this water management where all the water is infiltrated. And what this has created is a situation where the place is incredibly drought-proof because they're constantly infiltrating the runoff. I'm gonna go back to this other slide for a second. They're constantly infiltrating the runoff from all of the hardscape areas, the roadways, and the roof surfaces into these green strips that run between the rows of houses that have the pedestrian pathways. So they're building a subsurface water table over this whole area here, which makes them resilient to drought. And they're also creating all of these structures that makes them resilient to flood because there is floodwater mitigation here. And then the place is planted so densely in fruit trees, edible plants, flowers. It's like you can basically close your eyes and open your mouth and just walk down these pathways and food just falls in your face, right? It's incredible. And the Central Valley, California, of course, you can grow so many different things there. It's really incredible, right? And there's also urban community agriculture. Now we think of water retention, right? We think of water absorption. I mean, of course, this is the Soil Food Web. I don't have to tell you about soil organic matter content. Anytime that we have these rich pockets of agricultural area, you know, lots of organic matter, well-mulched soils, lots of vegetation all around, we don't even have runoff for the most part. We have massive water infiltration, right? So, so the concept of agrihoods, right? The concept of— so even if you're in this box, in the square that is not corresponding to the watershed shape, taking these different segments and little squares and turning them into water-absorptive, food-producing little paradise Areas is, is a way that we can work within this fragmented grid and still really be a benefit to the watershed. Okay, I'll give you one more example of a cool development that we see in— this is a desert model here, and this is Milagro Co-Housing. This is in the Sonoran Desert. This is just on the outskirts of Tucson, Arizona. So this is a 40-acre property that they bought the property, but instead of placing all of the houses like you would in a normal U.S. subdivision, spread out, each one has their own driveway, each one has their own garage. And, you know, all the space between them, they clustered the housing like you see in a lot of co-housing communities and they They created the stormwater situation. So when, when it rains, when you get the monsoon rains here, you get the winter rains in Tucson, all of the water is concentrated into the center of the community, right? Let me go back here for a second. So you see here, there's a perimeter. All these houses make a perimeter, and the water's going into the center of the community. And then they excavated this series of basins that overflow one to the next. So normally Tucson, Arizona gets 12 inches of rainfall a year. Well, if you take all of the water from the roof surfaces and all of the water from the hardscape, the pathways, and you focus it in on the center of the community, these basins, you might say that these basins get closer to 40 inches a year because of all the water that's concentrated in them. And then they planted these basins with vegetation. So this picture is from when it was first— when the project was first done. This is from Brad Lancaster. He's one of my permaculture teachers, and he was one of the consultants on this project here. And so here's an overhead Google Earth image, and you can see in blue I outlined the area of water concentration, right? So you can see off to the right, you see the parking is clustered outside of the community, so there's no cars whizzing past the houses. And then all of the buildings are oriented. Each individual building is oriented so it's facing the south, right, facing the sun, although the entire structure itself is like a southeast-facing complex if you put all the houses together. And then the wastewater is run through a constructed wetland system and is then recycled back around and is then used for irrigation. So they're pumping water from the well for fresh water, but then that water is being recycled. So they're storing rainwater, they're recycling wastewater. And so they're creating this water battery, in a sense, the soil moisture that's built up underneath this community here. Underneath, you can see the tall trees now, and supplemented by wastewater. And it's really turned into this incredible shady paradise, right, where there's lots of places to sit, incredibly fruitful. And if you think about the pattern that they've created, right, by putting all of these—

the—

but just by the orientation of the structures and the orientation of the water flow, it's like they have created the conditions of a sheltered canyon oasis, because that in the desert is the ideal place that you'd like to be to stay cool, right? Where you have the highest biodiversity and all sorts of life, right? So that's where, again, these people are working within a 40-acre parcel that is not corresponding with the watershed, but within that property, they were able to do a pattern that is going to be water absorptive and also keep most of the surrounding area as natural, right? Now let's talk about Africa. I recently published a couple videos from my trip to Senegal, and, you know, when we think about design, and we think about really designing for these large-scale patterns, right? The greatest design project, the greatest scale of a single design project that I am aware of in the world is the Great Green Wall. Okay, now the Great Green Wall is basically a band of trees, right? Or at this point, it's a mosaic of restored ecosystems that is placed there in a way to stop the southern expansion of the Sahara Desert. The Sahara Desert has expanded, uh, 10% in the last 100 years, and this is a massive desert. So 10% expansion is, is a really dramatic— and that's a lot of that is from overgrazing from cutting of firewood, from overcropping, a lot of the same typical causes we have of desertification. And also, you know, we're simultaneously, we're in a warming planet. So vegetation has to work that much harder, you know, the evapotranspiration as it gets hotter, vegetation becomes more vulnerable in hotter temperatures. So, so the project is a collaboration between many countries. To create a band of trees to actually stop the Sahara from continuing to expand southward. So this isn't a watershed-scale project, this is a continental-scale project. Now, I had the fortune of going with the World Food Program and visiting one of their demonstration sites in Matam, Senegal. Now, we might have Sebastian Mueller, possibly he's even listening on this call, or he's going to listen to the— he's the one that, uh, uh, one of the people that showed me around here. And, um, Senegal is actually the country that is the farthest along in meeting their Great Green Wall goals. As anybody that followed— follows politics would know that there's been a lot of strife and a lot of turnover, political turmoil, and, and such in a lot of the countries here that are in the Great Green Wall area. And so, you know, if you don't have stable politics, it's also hard to have a stable ecological restoration system, basically. But Senegal is the farthest along in their goals. And the site that we visited in the video is a 30-hectare site. 74 acres, and it was placed in a highly degraded area that had not been farmed by the local people there for 40 years. It had literally been vacant for, you know, the entire— for, you know, over a generation because the soil is compacted, barren. And so it's an area with mixed trees and then highly barren, highly degraded areas. So the main strategy that they used were these half-moon water harvesting treatments. So you can see here that they lined out all of these structures and dug with a team of 150 people over a 2-year period, and they dug over 7,000 of these structures. Right. And these structures are now basically making it so water, instead of running off, will now infiltrate and soak down into the ground. Now, one thing that has come up for me a lot in, say, people's questions about this project since I published that video and just in the kind of in the permaculture community in general, is, you know, the idea of, you know, people saying, why didn't they just build, for example, contour swales going across the landscape, right? And the same thing, I don't know if you noticed, for anybody who is a permaculture water harvesting person, that when I showed you that picture from India as well, we didn't see the typical permaculture contour swales. We see something a little more modular. So in that case, it was the continuous contour trenches. In this case, it's the half moons. And this is one thing that I have noticed a lot in my travels that kind of runs contrary to some of the education that we get in, in permaculture, for instance. And what I've, what I've come to the conclusion of is that modular design is very resilient because when you have a more engineered water harvesting structure like a, like an on-contour swale, for example, there are many points of failure, right? If you have one berm that is stretching across a wide area of landscape, if you have one breach in that berm, then that's a place for water to exit if that berm is holding back water. But these modular designs mean that you can have errors, you can have small-scale failures, and the whole system still maintains itself. So that's just one thing I think is really interesting that I've, that I've, it's been very interesting to me when I visit these like larger-scale successful projects, right? So these, when I visited this project, there's a real variability between— there's grasses and some, some are planted for sorghum and some are barren because they're possibly weeded or seeded. Different, different families were taking care of different areas of Half Moons and either growing fodder for livestock or sorghum for grains. And, you know, it wasn't a— it was not the same condition did not exist for all of the half-moons on site. There's a real variability. And another interesting thing to note is that the half-moon sections are oriented to the slope. Right. So the moon part is catching water down here. As you can see, it's almost like if you were going to draw contour lines on this image here, the orientation of the half moons would follow the contour lines. Right. So this is, this is really labor intensive and it's a full ground treatment system. But remember, this is highly degraded land. The ground, if you saw the video, It was hard as cement, right? So this is how the World Food Program decided to fix that. The area is also fenced from livestock. Now, in this area here, the Sahel at the border with Sahara Desert, you can see a big herd of goats there on the left-hand side, and then you can see the project on the right-hand side there. This is an area that for As long as people can remember, there has been large animal migration herding down with the rains. As the rains come into the Sahara Desert, people go into the desert, they bring their livestock down, and then as the rains recede, those herds then come down through the Sahel, even all the way down to the savanna ecosystem. And so there's a really, um, You know, there's an intense conflict historically between agriculturalists and nomadic grazers. Right. So in this particular instance, they put up a fence to mitigate that, that problem. And they, and they had some actual, they had some conflicts where one herder group felt like they had not been invited to the project. And so they came and they cut the fence one night and animals came in. And that was sort of their way of saying, hey, invite us in the project. And so then that group was invited into the project and there wasn't any problems since then. But this is one of the challenges in doing these restoration projects in vulnerable areas like this is this thing, transhumance. Transhumance is the word that means like large-scale migration of people and animals over time. Now, I needed to add this in because this is a soil food web. So you can see this. Fellow here on the donkey and all these bags, they fertilize these with animal manure, right? And that here, and also in my visits to the projects in India, animal manure is the primary fertilizer, animal manure or animal slurries, especially in India where they do a lot of collection of the urine and the manure from the animals and stuff. And so that seems, in my experience, the basic ways that these projects are being fertilized is not terribly sophisticated, right? It's not like bubbling compost tea mixes and everything. It's like straight manure or a straight slurry that's collected from dairy barn or something. And then, you know, the real cream of the crop in this particular project was the syntropic agriculture experiment. Syntropic agriculture, for any of you that don't know, is an agroforestry system developed in Brazil. A guy named Ernst Gotsch is the founder of that system. And I'd never heard of syntropic agriculture before, and every— I keep going to these different projects around the world and they have syntropic agriculture going there. So it's like, it's like it's spreading. I first learned about it when I went to the chinampas in Mexico. The site that I visited there was doing syntropic agriculture. And now here I go to the border of Senegal and they're doing syntropic agriculture. So it's really fascinating. I got to learn a little bit about it. Basically, it's the, you know, combining a lot of biomass-producing and nitrogen-fixing perennial species in with agriculture and having rows of trees, you know, intermixed with cropping areas in order to have microclimate development for soil building, for diversity of yields. Here's a really cool shot there where you can see the half moon with the sorghum growing in it. And then on either side of the half moon, we have a biomass trench where they're growing species specifically for that biomass production, for that woody plant production there. And this is my drawing of one, of what one part of the system would look like when mature, where we have fruit trees and other useful in plants sort of planted in the guild in the half moons. Then we have annual cropping areas tucked within. At the lower part, we have another biomass-producing trench right here, again mixed in with fruit trees. And, you know, this— the resilience of this type of system where we're mixing in perennial infrastructure along with annual crops, right? So the perennial infrastructure is holding in the water in the soil. It's having wind protection. It's bringing the pollinators around. And it's really an ecosystem support system, an ecosystem support for the annual cropping that's more intensive. And, you know, the soils, you know, continually worked and everything. So I was really, really blown away by the work that I saw in Senegal. And I was also blown away by the response that the video that we made about that work had. Right now it's got like 10.5 million views or something, which has shown me in a sense that like a lot of people in the world, well, first off, they just are craving hope. You know, and they want to see things put together in a way that makes sense. So it's like, it's like, why did that video do so well? I'm like, well, because in my mind, it makes sense that the United Nations, the WFP is part of the United Nations, the United Nations would be focused on large-scale land restoration, right? That like, we think What should a world body of nations, of representatives from the nations, what should they be doing that makes sense? They should be doing large-scale land restoration. So I think that's why, because that's really what people innately know that this body should be doing. That probably has something to do with the popularity of this video. And so I've been invited now by the World Food Programme to visit their bigger projects actually in Niger and Chad. The project that I showed you in Senegal was only 300 hectares. And this, it's like, they were like, it's funny that this is getting all this attention because this is a tiny project compared to some of the ones that we have going. I've got a few pictures, you know, this is in Niger, but the WFP has 300,000 hectares under treatment, basically. Not all half-moons, of course, but, but that's how much land they have been working on. And a lot of that is in Niger. And, well, here again, you can see a little more of a mature system where the— they have trees that have become established using these, using the half-moons and also this, this more angular shape that you see in the foreground. These are compartment buns, or that's what they call them in India, at least. I'm not sure if the WFP has a different name for them, but taking, combining the half moons with compartment bunding and tree planting and perennial vegetation establishment. So I'm really, really excited to to go in late summer and visit some of these larger and more, what I would say, sophisticated systems in a sense that have really large-scale tree planting. Now, I am a Google Earth nerd, okay? And I can spend— one second, take a drink. I can spend a lot of time looking for things on Google Earth. And I— and so once I started talking to WFP about Chad and Niger, I started looking on Google Earth and being like, so if they have projects that are so much bigger than what I saw in Matam, I must be able to find them, right? And so this is a close-up here of one of the projects where they have the compartment buns and the half moons. That are, that are placed together here. And the largest single project— I don't know if we're going to visit this project or not. I haven't gotten the coordinates of the projects we're going to visit, but I just want to give you a sense of scale of what's actually happening there. This is the largest area that I could find, and I just sort of made a polygon outline around it on Google Earth. This is over 2 square miles. And this is a plateau. So they are working from the watershed perspective here. And this is— this whole plateau of 2 square miles is basically done in half-moons and compartment buns. The image isn't so updated that I could really see, like, if they have tree plantings in there. And there's an airstrip there. And then, you know, when I zoom out a little bit farther even, So in the upper left, that's the 2-square-mile area. I also found all these other areas that I highlighted in yellow that also are completely treated using the half-moons or the compartment buns. And this is just what I could see searching around Google Earth. I have— if you zoom out, I found a lot more stuff, but this is the area I found the greatest concentration. And so you can, you can see that they're really starting to fill in a lot of these puzzle pieces within this landscape. And this landscape really is that transitional zone. It's really the place where we see the Sahara Desert right at the edge and we see the first little green of kind of the Sahelian vegetation. So, you know, when I see this scale, I mean, I'm just like, okay, like this, it's happening.. And this is what needs to be amplified and accelerated here, this type of work. And of course, you know, John here, we're going to hear from him. Of course, he's documented incredible projects at vast scale, similar type of strategies. So, you know, let's restore the whole planet, right? I'm actually going to steal John D Liu's line in, you know, we need to restore all the degraded landscapes on the planet. Right. So I'm going to second that there and say if we can do it in these places that are completely just barren for, you know, half a century, those places can be restored. You know, everywhere can be restored, really. So just going to go over our takeaways here real quick. First off, The fundamental flaw of civilization is superimposing a grid of land management over the watershed pattern, right? That's just screwed us every which way. There's a huge advantage. There are huge advantages to working within intact watershed basins like we saw in India. If you can actually work a whole watershed, then you're so far ahead than fragmented design. However, there are strategies to working with fragmented watersheds, right? Agrihoods, for example. And a lot of massive-scale projects use small modular units to avoid large-scale failures and have flexibility within the watershed. One other thing I wanted to mention about the advantage of using small modular units is it doesn't take a lot of training for someone to become a master of digging a half moon or digging a continuous contour trench, right? The margin for— there's a— you can only go so wrong, right? And the damage from doing this wrong is not that big. So I think that's a real advantage on these large-scale systems. And yeah, I work at Oregon State University. I have a— we have a permaculture design certificate online that we've um, done since 2011. So we've been working on that for 13 years there. And you can also go to my YouTube channel, and I have lots and lots of different videos on many topics from all over. So if you like what you saw, you can, um, go down the deep rabbit hole of watching this type of content. And that's it. Thank you very much. I guess I'll stop sharing.

Thank you so much, Andrew, for this amazing presentation, for sharing these interesting examples from all over the world and such inspirational messages. So let's keep on going because we have more interesting things to talk about. I'm gonna share screen now. I'm gonna go back to sharing the screen. And before we continue into our conversation with the panelists, uh, we are going to watch a promotional video to remind everyone about our promotion for this month.

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So, um, thank you for watching the video. And just as a reminder, this is our ecosystem restoration bundle. Uh, it includes the foundational courses, the CLP, which is the Certified Lab Tech Program, the Introduction to Ecosystem Restoration, and one of our newest products, which is the Soil Food Web Essentials. This offer will end on April 19th at midnight PDT. So, um, just for everybody. To know. And now before we move into the Q&A section, I want to thank again Andrew D Liu for his presentation and ask John if he wanted to comment something also on John— on Andrew's presentation.

Sorry.

Yeah.

Well, I really think it's soon we should listen to the audience and answer their questions, but I would just, I would just say that was a great presentation, Andrew. Very happy to see it and hope to go and visit all of those places. And I think what, what we're really seeing too is that water management or restoration of, of watersheds is not done by itself. It's done with the other ecological systems. So the soil must be restored. The vegetation must be restored. And I think that there are some principles that we need to be thinking about. Often, especially when we talk about agriculture or even regenerative agriculture or any type of agri— agriculture or animal husbandry, we're really not talking about nature. We're talking about human, human alteration of natural systems. And we have to look very carefully at what that means. What's the difference between natural evolutionary succession and natural outcomes and, um, agricultural ones. So it's really quite different. And I think the other thing that's important to realize is that our economic system is incentivizing destruction of, of Earth systems, and we need actually to analyze why is that. Why is it that some people and some analysis can come to the conclusion that human beings are actually acting as parasites and that maybe the Earth would be better without human beings on it? And I mean, I've heard this, people tell me this, and I say no, no, no, human beings have choice. We can decide. And so the question is if we're doing things which are causing degradation to Earth systems, we could choose to do something positive, which Andrew's work has definitely shown. But what we— the, the main thing that would change this is to recognize the true value of ecological function. So when you analyze the economics that we have now, the GDP, is that we have to buy and sell things. It's transactional. And if you're not part of that system, look at all the indigenous people, all the people who lived it from their cultural understanding, their cosmologies. That's been superseded by domination, by colonization, by including genocide and slavery. As well as land expropriation. So these are pretty serious kind of things, but it doesn't have to be, and we need to look at that. And why is it possible for India to do the kind of work that it's doing, or Africa do the kind of work that it's doing? Because there's still some sense of the commons. There's still some kind of feeling like, well, the earth is here. If you're born on the earth, You have the right to life. It's a birthright. It's not like you have to pay, you have to buy your birthright. You're born. And, and also the fact is everyone is unique, and all, all living beings are unique, and we actually need everybody to focus their energy and understanding to to flow this energy, this chi, the life's energy, the Chinese qigong, you know, idea. And if we flow this energy toward everybody acting for the good of all, this is very easy. It's not that difficult to do the restoration aspects. But if we keep the materialism, which is kind of corrupting people's relationships with the Earth and relationships with each other, then we have a hard time to do what we need to do. So I'd also like to just mention that there's a couple of things that I think are really important. Reaching scale. So it's true that watersheds are really important. The maybe the only logical type of, of, of, uh, unit that we can talk about from ecology. We can't, we can't make a square or a rectangle or say a polygon and say this is, you know, ecologically logical. It's not. It's legally potentially there because I don't know, somebody made up a law, but the reality is that these systems exist naturally, and also they have to achieve the scale which can affect climate. So we want the systems to be renewed. Those systems came to us over 3.8 billion years of evolutionary succession and their high succession levels. If we're going back to removing all the vegetation, plowing the land, and planting perennial, uh, annual seeds, that's pretty much early succession type of, of plant life. And perennial polycultures, in my experience, are both more functional and more productive. So we need to, to look at that as a, as something that we could, but it requires a different type of harvesting. And we have to ask the questions, why do we harvest this way? We harvest this way because that's what the GDP economy says is more valuable. But what if that's not true? What if functional ecosystems are both more ecologically functional and more productive and they're more nutritious? So the highly nutritious and diverse diet that we have is more healthy than the kind of very processed diet that's being promoted by industrial agriculture. Anyway, those are the sorts of things, polycultures, and I would say achieving that scale could be something around 100 square kilometers. There's some evidence that if you reach 100 square kilometers that you're going to have an impact on condensation and precipitation, how to reach critical mass for condensation and precipitation. And anyway, Great, great presentation.

Thank you, John D Liu, for your comments. And definitely, as I read in one of the participants' comments, we can be the most positive species on Earth if we get to it and if we really connect to nature and to who we are. So I'm going to start sharing again because now we're going to move on to the Q&A section. So I'm going to read the question and both of you are welcome to participate in the answer. So this one is, I think I, yes, the first one is from Perma Diverso and it says, in a landscape that already has Spanish oak trees, what would be the best hydrological design taking into account that you will not be able to remove trees? Do you have any ideas?

I would say that first off, I'd have a lot of questions about like, what is the density of those trees? And then what is the condition of the land between those trees, right? I mean, you know, typically if you have a treed system, the trees are like the ultimate purpose of many water harvesting systems are actually to get trees established, right? And then trees get their roots in and they create drainage pathways for water. So depending on the density of the trees, if you already have, I mean, usually oaks are in somewhat of a savanna-like, you know, ecosystem. Some of the things I've seen people do that I think are not great is take a tree landscape like that and try to put an on-contour swale in a landscape like that that obviously has a lot of trees and things that you want to protect. I would be looking like really specifically at the patterning of the trees and the ground in between the trees where you could do some sorts of treatments and you're not disturbing the root zone of the trees. And again, depends on the slope, it depends on the rainfall. So, I mean, in permaculture, we say it depends as one of the main answers. So I'd say in this particular question, there's a lot of things, but overall, I would not remove the trees. And I would look to, like, what does the understory of these trees look like? Like, could you, if these are native oak trees, could you get, you know, native or other productive understory under the trees to, you know, further enhance the soil conditions of the trees? Now, I don't know if this is in Spain, but I found most that the Spanish landscape overall looked pretty devastated to me as far as erosion and as far as just soil conditions. So, um, yeah, I'd have to, you know, I'd have to get more in depth to give more of an answer than that. But, you know, overall, uh, trees are, um, you know, are sort of like one of the end goals of a lot of these structures that we put in the first place.

Well, if I could add something to that, I would, I would say that, uh, what the Chinese began to look at was principles of evolutionary succession, and what was shown in that exercise was that over evolutionary time, in a natural development, even with cosmic or geologic impacts, there was constant increases in biomass, constant increases in necromass as each generation of life died and gave up its body, and constant increases in biodiversity. And this led to a climax equilibrium. You hardly ever hear any ecologist talk about climax equilibrium anymore because they think it's in the past. We have to make sure that there's climax equilibrium in the future. Because if we're going in this direction, always more biomass, always more necromass, always more, uh, biodiversity. We're headed in the right direction. If we're constantly decreasing biodiversity, biomass, and accumulated organic matter, we're going to collapse the systems. And that systems include the hydrology, include the soil fertility, and of course, you've already lost the biodiversity by that point. So when we understand this, and what, what we see is if you have a system that has any, uh, control zones, any places, sacred groves, places that were protected because they were worshiped or, or somehow protected, natural, national parks or protected areas, or however you see that, but they're really ancient. So I mean, if the In California, you can find 4,000-year-old trees that are 400 feet tall. And, but there's only 3% of them left. 97% of that system was taken out since 1849. So you've got to look very carefully. And in Spain, I think those really, we did see some really battered soils without vegetation, exposed soils. We need to understand what that means because really we're talking about the lithosphere, almost not the pedosphere, not the living soils, but the geologic materials underneath. You've got to have organic matter. You've got to have bacteria, and you've got to have fungi in order to make those geologic materials bioavailable to plant life. We know this. This is not debated exactly in science anymore. You know, the older kind of soil type of thing would be that, you know, it takes thousands of years to make a tiny amount of soil. But what they're talking about is subsoils, weathering of soil types. And that, that's not what we're talking about now. We're talking about the living layer. And when we bring back the living layer, then you get massive increases in hydrology, massive increases in vegetation. And, and you can protect the biodiversity, and that needs to be our central intention. So I think this is, this is the interesting thing, is that we can do that, whether it's in Spain, or whether it's the sands in the desert in the Sinai, or wherever we're in, in North Africa, or the Sahel, the Great Green Wall, we can do this if we try. It's not going to be easy. But we destroyed it, so we can bring it back if we, if that's our intention. But if our intention is just to go shopping, then I don't think we can do anything about this. But as long as we, as long as we understand that this is the true value. And the other thing that you have to realize is not only is ecological function the true value, but eco-functional ecological systems are always more productive. It's just that we're trying to hoover things up with machines and not use people. And maybe we need another, another idea. And there's a lot of people with no land, a lot of people with no jobs. Why don't we use people? And when we use people, That's a better life than, you know, going to a cubicle to buy and sell plastic junk that's arriving in container ships. So, you know, let's do that. So specifically in Spain, that's in the Altiplano. It was certainly an oak savanna. And so it's not necessarily about trees as much as it is about returning the, the, the, the meadow type perennial landscape. And then the trees will come back. The pollinators will come back. The water will come back. But, you know, and what the Chinese have done is just massively increase all the biodiversity and interestingly, and also all the biomass. So they might have put in often really fast-growing plants, and then after a very short time, you see biodiversity because the legacy genome reemerges if you restore the soils and the canopy.

Thank you. So we will continue with our next question. This one's from Mildred. Do you have any advice for removing microplastics from the ecosystem, turning them back into their component molecules? I'm also interested in so-called forever chemicals, or PFAS, or PFOAs. Do you have any solutions for these contaminants?

That's a really hard question because, I mean, you know, the thoughtlessness of putting these things into the system. I mean, it was funny. This is kind of like maybe sort of an off comment to make, I mean, answer-wise, but I worked for a guy once who, uh, he had, he had done— I, I did landscaping on his house when I was a young man for a very long time. He'd done very well for himself, and he said, he said, Andy, he said, if you want to get rich, what you should do is buy a landfill, right? Because one day the nanotechnology is going to be advanced enough that you could basically send these nanobots in and mine your landfill for all these different materials that are so dispersed, you know. So I mean, it gets a little bit science fiction when I think of how do we actually remove microplastics from the environment, you know. I start thinking like, I don't know, maybe someone will create a nanobot to do that. But, um, I think that— I guess on the other side, it would be how do we put less microplastics into the environment and even recognize where they are, right? My wife is really, really into fiber and, and like not using basic, basically fibers that are ultimately made from plastic. No. So we have a graywater system here at my house and it's like Yeah, if you have a— you put a fleece garment into the washing machine, you're basically putting off microplastics, you know. You know, I wish I had an answer to these really persistent toxins. I do know that there's a lot of biological water treatment systems like the Living Machines, Eco Machines, where at least in treating of wastewater where a lot of these things can be bound up in a living system and filtered out before they enter into the environment. And I think that there's— that's probably, probably the most effective place that we can actually intervene would be saying, okay, how can I actually set up biological filtration systems to keep these, to keep more of this material from getting into the environment. And of course, stop using products or making products that fall apart, right? I mean, that's another thing, is, you know, not to get too, um, not to get depressing or anything like that, but the throwaway product development now, you know, like fast fashion for instance, where I mean literally people are wearing clothes, you know, some shirt or 5 times and then throwing it away. And then eventually, these super cheap clothes are given to Goodwill, and maybe they're shipped to, you know, Africa or something like that, where they then just basically become plastic garbage, you know. So I think that actually addressing— really, if you want to address the microplastics issue and persistent poisons issue like the PFAS, then we need to— it becomes a political issue to just get people to stop making this crap, you know. And I would say that healthy organic soil is, is a very potent, you know, biological interface. And there's a lot of things that healthy organic soil and healthy organic wetland systems, like that they really are very powerful filters. And so, you know, that would be— there's like the thing that you can do in your own home would be like increase soil organic matter. You know, they say the solution to pollution is dilution. Well, you know, dilute polluted soils with organic matter, basically. So there's that, and there's the user end, and then there's the political end of getting people to just stop making this stuff.

This definitely needs to, to be on political conversations. And there is something that really shocked me recently when I was researching about, um, microplastics, and that is that recent studies have shown that there is more presence of microplastics in agricultural soils than in the ocean. So right now the biggest reservoir of microplastics are agricultural soils, which is a very serious thing because it is present also in almost all types of agriculture. So it's not only on conventional agriculture, and actually sometimes organic agriculture uses even more plastic. And so it is a very complicated subject. I have seen some examples from farms, but at a low scale, that they are finding solutions to use other materials that are not plastic in their farms that are, that will usually be plastic in a conventional farm. But at the end of the day, this might be something that needs to, and not might be, it needs to be taken politically. It needs to be related to the laws and to basically forbid the use of certain stuff. Meanwhile, we find other solutions, but I think the solutions are probably already out there. So yes, John D Liu.

Well, I would, I would just add that it would be nice to have the concepts of ecosystem restoration communities that can come together and actually experiment at a scale of, say, 250 to 500 people. About keeping all of that stuff out, building entirely with natural materials, having no toxins, you know, and working on water, soil, vegetation, biodiversity, not only in the communities but outside, that the community allows this to become an ethic or a you know, it's something, a common, uh, intention and a common understanding. And so that, as that spreads, and we, we've seen now that there are more than 65 communities now all over the world in all continents. So it's interesting that we can do this. We don't need to ask permission. We need to do it.. And the more people and, and groups of people who come together and do this, the more it's going to influence the political thinking or other people to choose to live in a less contaminated way. So I think this is, this is a good idea, but it is a wicked problem. And having, having a lot of people put their energy and intelligence together and live in a way where we don't have that within smaller communities, and we're addressing the problem when we can. I know that fungus may be an answer. Paul Stamets' work is very interesting with decontamination in, in areas. So we need to, we need to study this and we need to try. Everything that we possibly can. I was very happy to hear that hexavalent— what is it? The— what is it? Hexavalent, whatever it is in California, that was the thing in the movie, what's her name? And now I'm getting an old senior moment. I can't remember Julia Roberts playing, uh, Erin Brockovich. So yes, this, this is, uh, hexavalent chlorine, I think, or is it hexavalent chlorine? Anyway, it's— it was in the water and people were getting cancer from it. Um, it's, it's really, uh It's going— it's being banned in California now, finally. So they're going to have to spend large amounts of money to get it out. We probably need to do that in everything.

You're right. Yes. So let's move on so we can get more questions in. This one's from Jay to Andrew Millenson. Do you tell any stories on your YouTube channel that are on partial failures or failures, then have a component to ask why it failed and discuss it with experts. Sometimes we can learn much from failures, even more than successes. At times, I believe it's critical to discuss the failures as well as the successes.

Yeah, um, I guess I do mostly, um, focus on things that are really working, partly because I feel like more people— I, you know, one of my One of my goals is to reach a lot of people, like to expose this world of ecological restoration, of permaculture to a wider body. And I mean, the truth is that I think that more people watch videos about successes than if you're like, you know, sort of marketing a video is like, watch some failures. However, I could be wrong with that. That would actually be a really interesting, like, top 5, you know, permaculture failures or something like that. People would probably watch that. It'd be very interesting. I watched a video this morning called Swale Fail or something like that. And it actually, when I was putting this presentation together, I was thinking of that because I saw that this this on-contour swale had so many points of failure that this person was identifying. They were, they were showing up during a heavy rainstorm. So the thing, oh, I guess, okay, another thing is oftentimes I'm visiting a particular organization and, you know, they are bringing, they are sort of letting me come and see their work because they want their successes to be shown. And so a lot of times I actually am intentionally not showing the failures because we're trying to highlight the achievements of a particular organization. So I do hear you, and I think that that is— I think it's very valid. I'm trying to think of some examples of where I do talk. Well, you know, I have a video called America's Big Mistake that basically highlights the whole— everything I was talking about, the fundamental flaw of civilization, why the, um, the states, uh, the United States, why the particular boundary divisions of the states, uh, when we had a chance to have them follow watersheds with John Wesley Powell back in the mid-1800s, and how that was actually refused, and the states became the dysfunctional political boundaries they are today. So, you know, I guess that's one video you could say that's about a mistake, but it's not about like a permaculture mistake, so, or a failure in a sense. So, but anyway, I think that's great advice to focus on failures, and I think that could be an interesting story to tell at some point. So thanks for that.

Great. And for the people who came in late and might not know, Andrew has a great YouTube channel, so you're all welcome to visit and watch his videos. Okay, one more. This one's from Didi. How much vegetation was on these moons to begin with? It looks like they cut into green areas from that aerial photo.

Yeah, the, the reason why that looks like on the aerial photo is the aerial photo is 2 years after the project was started, and I visited during the rainy season, so the landscape was as green as it gets, uh, when you saw that, that time. But, um, in— if you— if anybody is checking out the video I have the coordinates. I have a link to the Google Map coordinates that are in the description of that video, so you could click on it and it'll take you to Google Maps. And last I checked, the satellite image on Google Maps is right after the project was installed. And, and also during the video, you can see it during the time that they're digging those half moons. That's actually them— the place where they're digging the half moons, they're actually digging the site that the video is about. And you can see that it really is a barren landscape. The grasses actually filled in between the half moons in part because of the presence of the half moons, because the half moons are collecting water in themselves, but they're also just arresting the overall overland flow of water. So there's infiltration even in the spaces between the half moons. So, yeah, so really, like, like I said, this was 40 years barren land that they installed this project on. So, it was like very much hardscape, barren soil to begin with.

Okay, and I think this was actually the last question. We are on top of the hour, so the webinar is going to end, but before we go, I just want to remind you again, this is part of our April's webinar series. Today was our third webinar, and the replay is gonna be available within 24, 48 hours on our YouTube channel. You're also welcome to watch the previous ones, which were also really amazing. And finally, I want to thank, first of all, our amazing panelists from today, Andrew and John D Liu. Thank you for being here with us, sharing all of your experiences. And, Thanks to every participant that was here with us today. Your presence here is super valuable to us as well. And so, yeah, thank you very much and goodbye.

Thank you.