Tune in this week for a conversation with amazing permaculture educator, practitioner, gardener and travelling filmmaker Andrew Millison from the United States.
Andrew’s passion is travelling the world documenting epic permaculture projects to share inspiration of what’s possible. He’s filmed in places such as India, Egypt, Mexico, Cuba, and throughout the United States. When I spoke to him, he was about to jump on a plane to head off to Senegal!
In this episode, we chat about everything from student power at university & storytelling to permaculture projects around the world & the importance of water in our landscape.
Andrew also runs a podcast, Earth Repair Radio, and to find the films he mentioned in this podcast, visit his fantastic Youtube channel!
You can listen to this episode on any of your favourite podcast platforms.
Read the full transcript here:
Morag:
Thank you so much for joining me today Andrew. I’ve been in awe of the stories that you’ve been telling in the world of permaculture. I see you as a public professor of epic permaculture projects. It’s just wonderful to have a chance to chat with you because I was listening to a conversation that you had with Nate Hagens recently and were talking about things like water democracy, which I think is an absolutely fantastic concept to get our heads around. To talk about how we can scale up permaculture? How can we take the concepts that are in this permaculture world and apply them at the scale that we need in the world today?
One of the things that you’re doing is going around to many countries researching and documenting projects addressing these in your fantastic YouTube clips that you make and teaching it through many different forms. So welcome to the show! Thank you so much for taking the time. I know you’re about to head off to Senegal in just a few days to go and visit another epic project. So maybe we could just begin with how did permaculture call you?
Well, let’s just start there at the beginning and we’ll head to epic projects in a moment.
Andrew:
Yeah, somewhere around the early 1990s as a young man, I got the sense that things were not as I was told they were and that things were actually going awry. I started seeking other ways from what I was taught and I went into different counterculture groups and travelled around, looked around. My first exposure to regenerative design was travelling through northern New Mexico in the United States and running into the Earthships, the tyre houses built by Michael Reynolds in New Mexico.
There’s all these Earthships and I came across them and I was like all I need to do is learn how to build an Earthship and I can grow my food there, process my wastewater there, it’s heated by the sun, and I can have my energy pack, my solar panels on there. I was like, wow, I was naive – I just would just have my Earthship pod and whatever happens in the world, I can sit in my little pod and recycle my own waste and grow food and everything like that.
That turned me on to the concept of regeneration then I dropped out of college, and I travelled around, that’s when I was exposed to that. I ended up going back to college at a place called Prescott College in Arizona, which is a liberal arts environmental school. At the time in the early 1990s, they had a permaculture class taught by the Sonoran permaculture guild, Tim Murphy, Barbara Rose, Brad Lancaster, who became very well known.
I took the permaculture class as part of my college education because I was interested more in architecture, eco design, but everybody said ‘you have to take permaculture.’ And suddenly I was exposed to plants. Like I had never had an interest in plants before, I grew up in the city, in Philadelphia, the urban East Coast megalopolis. And that was it. That was 1994 when I took my permaculture design course in Tucson, Arizona and I always just felt like this is my life. So that’s been almost 30 years, but that was I mean, that was my introduction right there.
Morag:
Gosh, fantastic. I am curious about this idea that permaculture seems to be embedded more in colleges in the States than it is here in Australia. I wonder how that’s happened and I know you’re involved in that as well. Most of the permaculture education that happens here in Australia that I’ve come across, in any substantial continuous way, is outside of the formal education systems, even though there are attempts to have it in different ways. It’s in schools, but not in universities, which is where it really needs to be. I think it really needs to be a foundational course that people from all different faculties attend.
Andrew:
Well, I’m an anomaly right? My university is a Land Grant State University. I mean, it is an agricultural university. If you look at the makeup of the university, there’s great diversity. There’s people doing GMO research and nuclear research and the whole thing, I’m not at some radical institution by any means. But there was student demand. So it all started from a group on campus who formed a permaculture group and some students had taken a permaculture design course, and they started a club. I moved to town around that time, and I gave a talk. Some of the members of this permaculture club came to my public talk and they were like, ‘wow, we like this guy.’ They’re like, ‘Hey, will you come and talk to our club?’
So I gave a talk to their club and there was this one woman, Sarah Rock, who I credit and she basically said, ‘Oregon State University is going to have a permaculture class, and you’re going to teach it.’ She went and lobbied the administration. She went to the Horticulture Department, she got signatures from students saying ‘yes, we would take this class’ and she said, ‘We want a permaculture class and we want this guy to teach it.’ I had already taught permaculture at Prescott college, my liberal arts, kind of fringe environmental school in Arizona. So I’d already taught at the college level of permaculture, even though I was a young man.
So they tried me out, we did a class, it went very well. They’re like, ‘Well, okay, we can pay for one class, but you have to start to figure out how to get paid, we can’t pay you. You have to figure out how to make your own money within the university.’ So I got some sponsorship from a student group for another year. Then Toby Hemenway, who you might know, hooked me up with this contract with the state of Oregon to create an online course, and a conference for the state agency that builds low income housing throughout the state.
So I got funded, and I did this whole programme and then I started developing my online programme. This is 2011. I did summer workshops, I still did other jobs, and it just built steadily, so 2009 to now – where I have this pretty large programme. It’s a programme with a lowercase p meaning it’s not like a recognised programme, but I have a series of classes, and it’s primarily online. I teach on campus in the fall, which is coming up soon, then I have this online programme I’ve been developing since 2011. So 12 years, and we’re actually the largest non credit online programme at the university. By far. So people that want to take an online PDC basically, that’s our people.
Morag:
Anyone who’s listening who’s a student at a university wanting to get some stuff happening, it is about getting active, getting engaged in lobbying and getting it there. That’s a wonderful story.
Andrew:
The students are the clients. They’re the customers of the university, and students have a disproportionate voice at universities even if they don’t realise it. When students band together to approach administration with something, they have to listen.
Morag:
That is a really good form of climate activism, isn’t it? To campaign to get a permaculture course at university? That’s a fantastic form of practivism. So let’s talk about water, because this seems to be a core thread that runs through so much of your work in terms of what you’re exploring with your epic projects and what you’re documenting. Maybe we could talk a little bit about the Apanu Foundation, because that is an extraordinary story of change and transformation. And I think what I find really interesting about it, it’s not just about the techniques and the strategies, but how it went to get the engagement of all of those villages, there’s 1000s of villages. That process of really amplifying really common sense strategies.
Andrew:
Yeah, yeah. So I had the fortune of connecting with the Paani Foundation. I went there for the first time back in 2019/2020, just before COVID and I visited a couple villages with the Paani foundation. I made a couple of videos. Just recently, I was back in India this last winter, and I visited four villages with the Paani Foundation and I’ve put out two of I’ve got two more videos that are imminently coming out right now.
The Paani Foundation is in my mind, and my experience of seeing a lot of different things around the world, is having the largest, most rapid scale impact of any project that I’ve seen. Now, the engagement. Part of it is that it was founded by a very well known Bollywood star. There’s a famous movie star, Aamir Khan is like, in the US, you might say, Tom Cruise or something – a leading man who’s been in many movies, and is known by everybody .
So there’s that, but they tapped into the basic human nature of competition and flipped it into a positive! So they created a competition between villages, and so which village can install the most amount of water harvesting structures in a 45 day period. They hyped it up and they got sponsorship and Aamir Khan himself apparently has put in a large part of his fortune that he’s amassed into this so I mean, like much respect for him I hope to meet Aamir Khan someday who knows. Just to tell him like thank you, but he’s heard it from everywhere.
They had large cash prizes for the villages, they weren’t insignificant at all. They brought representatives of the villages and they brought them to a training centre. Now let me pause for a minute and recognise that there were some villages that cracked the code in Maharashtra that fixed their water systems, their water supplies and did all this work back in the 80s. This last time I was in India, after our day of filming Dr. Pol was like ‘okay now we’re gonna go visit Hiware Bazar, a very famous village in India. They fixed their water systems, fixed their watershed, did reforestation back in the 80s and flipped their whole village. They literally have their own village tourism with tourists coming from all over India to visit the magical village that turned everything around and is super prosperous today.
So we went to Hiware Bazar and it’s very amazing. It was sunset, so I didn’t film. I had to go back and spend days there. But Aamir Khan was made aware of Hiware Bazar and some other villages that had completely fixed their water problems. So he was like him and Satyajit Bhaktal, who’s the director of the Paani foundation who was a childhood friend. They said, ‘hey, if Hiware Bazar can do it, everywhere can do it in Maharashtra.’
So they devised the contest and they brought people to Hiware Bazar and other villages that had done similar work, and they trained them and sent them back to the villages so they could compete in 45 days and volunteerism is a huge part of it. So I mean, they got points so they were great. It was a very scientific, detailed competition. It’s a fair competition and they have a very intricate grading system and volunteerism is a big part of that. So not only did they fix their watersheds, but they also crossed political parties. I mean, political divisions in India are as brutal as they are everywhere else, the different warring parties, but everybody was able to come out. They had about 8000 villages participate in the competition between 2016/2017/2018/2019.
They haven’t had the water cup competition since 2019. They’ve transitioned now. I just want to take us out and say, what is the village, right? We’re talking about, like, maybe an average of 2000 people. Maybe about 1000 hectares. I would say, from my experience, that’s about the average, 2000 people, 1000 hectares of land. So this is we’re talking millions of people now – a 1000 of these villages – they said, ‘Okay, you have utterly fixed your water problems. And now you are qualified to participate in two versions.’
The first one was called the Prosperous Village Competition, where they had a whole bunch of different criteria then COVID hit, and they had to sort of reorganise and so then they came out of that with the Prosperous Farmer Competition. They said, ‘Okay, these 1000 villages, now, they have all the water they need. They have water stored in the ground for years, all the reservoirs are full, they can survive two to three years of devastating drought, and they’d still have water.’
So, they got the leading scientists, the leading agronomists from Maharashtra, and they did an online training during COVID of these farmers groups and they said, ‘Okay, you have to form a group of minimum 25 farmers.’ So people got together, so no one’s now working in their individual farms. They got together in a collective. Then they took these online trainings, and they were given SOPs, standard operating operating practices, to follow the best practices for organic production. I visited four of these amazing villages, I visited a bunch of these amazing groups and then none of the villages I visited even won! So I saw this amazing work and like they weren’t even the winners.
This was the first time they held the Farmers Cup competition. People went really, really far with this, people’s lives were changed. There were women’s groups, there were men’s groups, they collectively bought seeds together, they learned how to do germination tests, they learned how to make and apply bio fertilisers, bio pesticides – it’s extraordinary abundance. You’ll see in my videos, the fourth video is the village that you’re like, these people have just, you forget when you’re there that you’re even touring villages that were devastated five years ago. You’re like, ‘Oh, I thought I was touring a prosperous Indian village, just because the turnaround has been so dramatic.’
These people literally are rich now. I mean, they’re facing the problems of affluence. I guess the rapid pace of this transformation is quite extraordinary when we’re thinking about what we’re facing globally, with ecological devastation, biodiversity loss and desertification. When you look at this, what can happen, but there’s certain things that make it happen.
Morag:
Well, isn’t there and I wonder how we can translate ideas like this at this epic scale to say, your country and my country? We don’t sort of have those cultural practices of that collective of the village.
Andrew:
Yeah, you’re talking about the watershed democracy thing. They’re really lucky there, because the village boundaries are the watershed boundaries. So their decision making body is also a watershed decision making body where the criss-cross arbitrary grid of property boundaries here and I imagine Australia, give us a real deficit, because of the colonial grid that divided everything up into equal rectangles and squares in order to commoditize the land. Every private property, you have some random square rectangle, then you’re like, how does this fit within the watershed? We’re at this real disadvantage from a village that is already managing the whole watershed.
Morag:
Yeah, it’s interesting. If you look back in Australian history, before it was Australia, there were hundreds of indigenous countries. If you look at the map of the bioregions of Australia, and then you look at the map of indigenous countries, it’s pretty much the same, perfectly. Rethinking how we govern and layering those by regional concepts back into our governance system, I think is a huge part of it. That may not necessarily be through a formal government system, but there’s this informal layer of collectives of people, and that sense of being able to understand what is possible when you do buy a regional project and unlock the possibilities in the imagination in other places is one of those key things of what you’re doing through this storytelling. You’re potentially telling the story of what’s possible if we shift our perception and shift our perspective on the issues.
Andrew:
Yeah, I feel like when I teach permaculture my main thing is teaching watershed awareness and so much comes from that. People say, ‘wow, it’s like a whole different perspective in the world.’ When you look at the natural divisions of landscape, so many things make sense and then so many things don’t make sense. Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, the informal collectivism around that is our best shot, because changing the way that property is divided, legally divided is like, Ooo that’s a collapse kind of thing. Not really something we can do right now.
Morag:
What possibilities are you seeing so far? I mean, as well as the permaculture education and the understanding of watersheds, are you seeing movements towards regional collectives happening? I know there was a big push back in the 1980s, a whole lot of talk about bioregions and then it just kind of filtered away a bit. I’m starting to feel like there’s a sense of it reemerging. What’s your sense?
Andrew:
Well, I want to say a couple of things. I mean, one thing is kind of going back to the Paani Foundation for a minute. I’ve had people recently contact me from both Mexico and Bolivia, who are organising their own Water Cup Competitions. So that has a sort of leverage point, people thinking ‘I don’t know, why don’t we have a competition like that?’ That is a sticky idea. So that’s exciting and I hope that that’s happening in even more places that I don’t know about.
It’s tricky though. Like, there’s some really tricky things with bio regionalism in a way because of the global transportation system – there’s so many people and there’s such high populations in places that cannot support those populations, so it’s very tricky. Of course, we want to restore our watersheds, we want to have a productive bio region here in the Pacific Northwest. But we can’t draw a line. I live in a pretty agriculturally productive area, my bioregion is agriculturally productive. It’s the Pacific northwest of the US. But you cross over the mountains and you’re in the high desert and you keep going and the American West is a vast desert. You’ll get to places like Las Vegas and Phoenix and places where there’s just too many people on very marginal lands.
I can’t say ‘oh, we should be an enclosed bioregion and the good people of Las Vegas, that’s just their problem.’ We’re so we’re kind of far gone in that sense. I’m visiting Senegal and leaving on Tuesday, today’s Thursday. So I’ve been doing a lot of research just to kind of wrap my mind around things. Senegal imports 70% of their food. I’m looking on Google Earth. I’m looking at cities of 4 million people. There’s maybe 16 million people in Senegal. I’m looking around. I’m like, where are all the farms? Like, where are the big agricultural areas? It’s very spotty. Like ‘that looks like a farm, that looks like a village.’ Then when I found out they inputs 70% of their food, I was like that all of a sudden that made sense.
And they import it from Europe.
Morag:
I was just going to say, are they importing it from the Russia and Ukraine area?
Andrew:
It didn’t say, it listed like Poland but it didn’t list Russia and Ukraine. However, I did notice that the President of Senegal went to the Africa summit in Moscow. So I was like, well, they must – Russia has their hold on a lot of the world’s grain supply at this point. I have to look exactly where but I spent time in Egypt, where 100 million people live in the Nile River Valley, but they are the world’s largest importer of grain. It’s coming into Egypt, and then they’re dispersing it to Sudan and Somalia. To think that we can sort of retreat to our cosy bioregions, those of us who live in productive places, it’s like the world’s a little bit beyond that.
Morag:
We absolutely can’t retreat. I think this is a little bit of that sense of when you were talking about before with the Earthship. When we first come across people who say, ‘Oh, this is something we can do for ourselves or if we restore our bioregion, well, we can stay in our bioregion.’ But I think in a way, like the piece of land, where we are, whether we own it or not, we have a responsibility to be take care of the bioregion that we’re from, to be restoring it, repairing it, not necessarily to have closed borders, but just to be thinking in that sense to restore the waterways to restore the biodiversity corridors and all those sorts of things.
Having that sense of that scale, beyond our backyards, beyond even just a village or a town into a bioregional scale, I think gives us that possibility of seeing our work somewhere else. This idea of scale to me strikes me in your work. You’re going to Senegal and you’re looking at the whole site, you’re not just looking at one in your research, you’re going ‘okay, well, what’s happening in all of Senegal?’ And when you’re going to Senegal, what’s your interaction there? Are you advising? Are you documenting?
Andrew:
Yeah, I’m documenting. Yeah, so I was invited initially, by an organisation in Germany, called Planet Wild, who, like us, pay them money and they vet different projects, they fund actions in those different projects. They hooked up with an organisation that works in Senegal and other places. It’s a US based organisation called Trees for the Future, who have planted 300 million trees since their inception. Their goal is a billion trees by 2030. So they’re really trying to ramp up.
Basically this organisation wanted to bring me to, we’re both kind of doing video documentation work, but to be their expert that’s going to vet the project because the Trees for the Future actually does like farm based, permaculture type plantings, multistoried, multispecies, plantings, hedgerows, so they’re kind of like, ‘oh, well, here, we want to come and document their funding the planting of 40,000 trees there while we’re there.’
So we’re gonna go and see this, but then I was talking to Natalie Topa, who now works for the World Food Programme. That whole thing is like five days, I was like, I’m not going to Senegal for five days, I’m going across the planet, like, what else is going on here that I can see. So I contacted Natalie and she hooked me up with the World Food Programme. That’s the United Nations. They were generous enough with their time to say that they would take me to document some of their projects.
I think their projects are more monoculture tree plantations. I mean, I’ll see what it is. But they are doing some large scale plantings as part of the Great Green Wall. The Great Green Wall of Africa is the row of the band of trees being planted through 22 countries across the width of Africa to arrest the southern migration of the Sahara Desert. It’s interesting, like I said, like when I’m going somewhere, I’m looking at Google Earth. I’m kind of a Google Earth nerd.
One of the places that I’m going with the WFP is the northern border of Senegal, there’s a river there. That river divides Senegal from Mauritania. There’s a lot of vegetation around the river but then if you go north of there, you see the lateral sand dunes just stop there at the border. You can really see this river system, this is literally the boundary, because that’s where the dunes stop. So you realise, if this river system was deforested, or maybe it has been deforested, I’m not sure about the natural history. Actually I’m sure it’s been deforested. But this is like the frontier here, the first line of defence against those sand dunes.
I spent time in the western desert of Egypt in a place called Dhaka Oasis, where it hadn’t rained in 13 years. The pattern of the dunes, the marching of the dunes, they said, like, ‘oh, it could change overnight, it’s powerful forces with that wind and sand.’ And trees are the remedy. Basically, that’s the wall, the Great Green Wall of Africa.
Morag:
You taking your family?
Andrew:
Yeah, I’m taking my wife, my wife’s kind of like, you don’t go anywhere without me.
Morag:
Good!
Andrew:
Yeah. So my wife is coming. It’s the first two weeks of school for my son. He’s a little bit like, ‘Okay, another country all right, I just want to hang out with my friends.’ He’s a teenager now. So, he’s going to stay here and we’ll be gone for 19 days total, which still is not that long. I was just in India for 66 days or something. I like to go that much if I’m gonna go somewhere I want to go and really sink in. So this 19 days is about as long as we could logistically do it to go to Senegal, and on short notice.
Morag:
Oh, gosh, I can’t wait to see what you find there. That sounds amazing. I was gonna say the work of Trees for the Future. Sounds like right up our permaculture alley. Yeah, that sounds fantastic. You also documented the chinampas in Mexico, what are some of the chinampas there? What are some of the other epic projects that you’ve visited?
Andrew:
The other one that we did, it’s a wonderful video, but it hasn’t gotten the kind of views that other ones have, it’s about the indigenous Hawaiians. It’s our longest video we did, almost a 328 minute mini documentary with a group called the Nation of Hawaii, which is a indigenous sovereignty group that has the only land in all the islands of Hawaii that’s actually deeded to native people. I mean, imagine that everything else is private property. They only got this land because they literally took over a beach for a year and a half. They built a whole village there. This is after a whole legacy of protests and finally, the government was like, ‘okay,
if we give you this piece of land here, will you leave?’ and they were like, okay. So they were given this piece of land.
Now they manage the piece of land they’re on, they manage a lot of land behind it. It’s a very large project and they’re restoring their traditional watershed scale design, basically. So that’s a great project. That’s a great video, even just stuff in the US. Another great video that we put out recently is about a project in the city of Oakland, California, called Planting Justice, which hires formerly incarcerated people. It’s a plant nursery is a permaculture plant nursery. They inherited the genetic collection of a very well known nursery that was closing its doors in Northern California. So now they’re in the city. They’re in one of the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods in the entire city of Oakland. So it’s a rough place.
I mean, it’s dilapidated, there’s a lot of garbage and graffiti and all that stuff. They have a permaculture nursery with an incredible selection and a good portion of the people working there are formerly incarcerated – when you come out of prison, it’s extremely difficult to find work, nobody wants to hire you. So that’s a great project that we filmed recently. I also just go to a lot of individual permaculture homestead places and show cool systems that people are doing.
Actually, I just published a video today from New York City. I was just on the East Coast, visiting my family in Philadelphia. I visited a site where a community of guerrilla gardeners took over this abandoned rail yard that’s basically like a toxic industrial toxic zone with heavy metals. They grew a garden that nobody noticed for about a year and a half because they kept the edges all full of rubble, garbage and everything but inside, they were bringing in compost, bringing in food scraps and they built this incredible oasis. Now it’s been 12 years. You gotta watch, I mean, it’s the coolest site.
It’s like, right in Queens in this totally nasty industrial zone, huge train yard, and they built this beautiful permaculture paradise garden. So I just went and released that video today, I got another one I filmed when I was over on the east coast. We visited the oldest non-native American food forest in the United States. It was an agroforestry experiment that was planted in 1917, by Hershey, a guy named John Hershey, who’s part of the whole Hershey Pennsylvania chocolate and all that. So it’s like a over 100 year old planting of this whole selection of all the different nuts and fruits. It’s 70 acres and it’s a lot of trees, but now has housing developments built up within part of it, it’s like the city has kind of grown up around it.
So we’re just sort of documenting heirloom fruit trees, and what does a 100 year old paw-paw tree look like? How productive is it? What about chestnuts and heart nuts and walnuts and hickories and everything like that?
Morag:
Well, it’s obviously permaculture, it’s diverse. There’s so much. I do see a lot of your water concepts and it holds. Particularly in places like Australia, I mean, water is a very central part of any of the conversations that we begin to talk about permaculture.
Andrew:
I’m also like a real student of the scales of landscape permanence. I mean, if you get your water design, you have a good water design, then all the other layers of design build on top of that. So I figure educating people that water is the most important thing, because then they can have a good basis for all the other parts of the permaculture flower.
Morag:
Yeah, I wanted to ask you just like in a very practical sense, do you do all your editing? Or do you have people helping you do that? And how do you find all these great film sites to go and visit?
Andrew:
I have edited most of my videos. After I visited India for the first time in 2017/2018, I was like, I want to go back. I want to actually learn how to do videography and I want to get some good equipment. So through the guidance and counsel of the people that do the media stuff at the university, I was able to really choose what equipment to buy and try out a lot of different things.
That’s one of the good things about being connected with the university is there’s a lot of infrastructure, so I have people that I could learn from, because they’ve been working with me developing online courses all this time. Then I started learning editing. But in recent times, between working with the university collaboratively on some of these videos like the chinampas one was the first that was the one video I’ve done that I did none of the filming and editing for, which is awesome, but mostly I’m doing filming.
Okay, so recently, I have a great guy who I work with who’s a permaculture guy, a young man who lives not far away and is really into this. So we’ve been doing a lot of filming together. He edited the one I did from Oakland. Then this great woman from the university, she edited a couple of my videos, and then she left the university. So I would say,
of all my videos, maybe six have been edited by somebody else. I primarily do the editing. But recently, when I go somewhere, I really tried to get a second camera person so I can be in it, and I can have someone else capturing so it’s not like all on me.
I just find really good people and I’ve been funding this through my programme through my online classes. Especially with COVID, we had a huge skyrocket in enrollment. I funded a lot of the video work there. But now I’m actually getting to the point where my vision has outstripped my program’s ability to support it. I’m actually, for the first time, I’ve been bootstrapping since 2009, doing this all by myself for the first time. I’m thinking about reaching out to some other people and seeing if there’s some support for someone who wants to help us take this to the next level, basically.
I think of it as like the free education project. We have paid courses and we have a lot of intensive instructor involvement in our permaculture design courses and all that but my heart is in creating high quality free content that doesn’t sit behind a paywall – to democratise education. We’re too far down this road here to not let people have this information.
Morag:
Yeah, that’s right. To be able to just switch people on to the possibilities and show those very strategic examples and snippets of ideas that gets sticky. That’s the stuff that we need. I hope that works. Because that would be an amazing thing to be constantly going out. So do people come and tap you on the shoulder and say, Hey, you should go and film that? Or is your radar out there and you just notice things out there?
Andrew:
I would say it’s a little of both. But recently, the Hawaii thing, for instance, someone said, ‘hey, ‘you should come film this project!’ inviting me in. Basically, the Senegal thing is someone, literally saying, ‘we’ll pay for you to come like we’ll bring you here.’ That’s what I like, I’m not going to spill the beans, but I’m in conversations with other people who are like, ‘hey, maybe you come here, why don’t you come here?’ Like the India stuff.
I just love India. It’s such a wonderful place. From going to the international permaculture conference there in 2017, that set off this cascade of connections and events. Now, I’ve got so many different invitations there. I’ve got places I like to see, I’d love to go back to India. But really, it comes down to me going, where is the most crucial story? Where’s it happening? Like the chinampas thing that was me.
I was like, man, we got to do it. We got to create a really solid educational piece on the chinampas that’s really detailed because people need to know about it. I’ll look up something I’m like, man, the chinampas are so epic, but there’s nothing out there that really articulates the system will. I want to tell a story in a way that’s exciting and artistic, but that gives you enough practical information that you can get something actionable from it.
Morag:
Yeah I think that’s so great. I think a lot of the documentation of chinampas until then, it’s really been this was something that happened in the past as opposed to it being a current practice that can be myceliated. I think that is absolutely brilliant.
Andrew:
Actually I want to say I want to say it was YouTube, because I saw Lucio Usibiaga who’s the main guy that shot that video. I saw him on a YouTube video about food in the chinampas so I started watching it. I’m like ‘dude, I’m like wait, what is he doing?’ The same with the Paani foundation, I saw one of their subtitles videos in Hindi. I’m like, ‘Oh, nobody knows about this. This is incredible.’ So I reached out to them, I just cold call people if I’m super inspired to film their thing.
Morag:
I’m hoping to get a film team together to go to East Africa. I do a lot of work with the refugee communities there. And there’s myceliation of permaculture projects throughout those camps, and to actually go and do documentation of how permaculture has been applied – not from an agency perspective, but from a refugee-led, community-led, often youth and young women-led programme. That’s something that I’m trying to get together at the moment, but it takes a lot of organisation to get into refugee camps.
Andrew:
These things are massive logistical endeavours between the equipment, the skills, the equipment, the organisation of files, making sure you have backups and then the filming part. There’s also the travel part, where you’re going to stay, then finding someone who can really speak good English for the most part, and then coming back and organising the story. I mean, it’s a major task.
Morag:
I want to ask you about those story parts, or do you write or plan your story before you go? Or do you just have a broad structure and then come back and, and weave the story together? How do you come up with the threads?
Andrew:
I’m very in-the-moment, If I’m working with someone else, they might want to storyboard something out and we’ll talk it through. Usually, it just, it just sort of unfolds. My work is in finding the person and the place. If you find the person in the place, you just follow. You don’t have to really do anything. You just follow your curiosity.
Morag:
I’m glad you just said that. Because my films are quite like that. It’s when you show up and you start being in conversation with a landscape and with the people there the questions unfold just naturally through the conversation and give us a shape.
Andrew:
Yeah. However, I must say that the research beforehand, like just the story I told you about how the sand dunes stop at the border between Mauritania and Senegal, was just from Google Earth and me looking around. A lot of my study of a place is from looking at Google Earth, and just interpreting the landscape, what’s happening. I feel like that actually informed the story, things like, where’s all the farms? I’m like, click, what percentage of food is produced in Senegal? Oh, 30% import, so the research brings in these pieces. When I’m on the ground, that’s going to surface when I’m talking to someone, or just in the whole perspective of how could you incorporate food into these agroforestry systems? Because you obviously need to grow a lot more food here? Being prepared is always always the best way.
Morag:
One really technical question, too. I’ve always wondered how you do those drawings on your board? What’s that, like this magic world that you enter into when you do that?
Andrew:
It’s AI.
Morag:
Ah, okay!
Andrew:
I’m just joking. I’m joking. It’s not. It’s just human intelligence. Now, I’ve always been a graphic artist for a long time, since I was a kid, I’ve been drawing. We’re basically flipping the image so I’m not writing backwards or anything like that. That was a tool that was purchased by the university for me, back in 2016, when we created the first intro to permaculture, a massive open online course, so they bought that and I started. If you look at my old drawings, they’re a little more rudimentary. I just started, like when you start to get comfortable with a tool and I just started really understanding the potential of that.
Just recently, it’s not a secret, but we figured out a new thing. It used to be that I’m looking at my paper and I’m just having to completely translate my paper onto the whiteboard and so I have to work out the dimensions when I’m doing the drawing. The hardest part of the drawing is like working out the dimensions, drawing while looking at my paper, I’m measuring things and all that stuff.
The guys at the university who have been doing the tech for me for all this time, they’re like, ‘hey, I think we could actually project your drawing up onto a monitor.’ So I can look at the monitor, and I can make a dot and I don’t have to recreate the proportion with the proportions all there. I’m not tracing it because I’m looking to monitor. But I can almost trace my drawing. At least I can get all the proportions correct.
I was always doing things like pen and paper, then I started using an iPad. With the iPad, I can really work my proportions and my layering well. I can plan it more advanced and then I can put it up on the lightboard in a more advanced way. If you look at the stuff I’ve done, basically, I’d say in the last year and the lightboard I’ve been able to get much more technical, because I don’t have to spend all my time figuring out the scale while I’m drawing basically.
Morag:
Yeah, it’s so effective. It’s such a fantastic tool, and it just brings to life as you’re speaking. It’s wonderful.
Andrew:
Yeah, it’s really exciting. I just want to captivate people, I want people to actually watch the videos who don’t even care about the content. I want them to watch the videos just because it’s interesting to watch.
Morag:
It’s evolving, as you’re speaking, as you’re describing. Even if you can understand English, you can kind of get a sense for what’s going on as well, which is just brilliant. This whole kind of concept of permaculture education, to really bring it into this common space feels to me like something that is so important and something that you just do so brilliantly, whether it be through video or through online, accessible courses. Where do you want to take this? What’s your big picture vision of, of sharing permaculture in the world, if you could unlock possibilities?
Andrew:
I mean, people ask me that sometimes and to some degree, I feel like I’m already living like what I was trying to do before. But at this point, I have actually reached some limitations where I want to, at least in the immediate sense. If I had unlimited resources, I would be travelling with a and doing very high production stories almost continually. I guess that that gets tiring after a while. But I would basically be doing what I’m doing now, but be doing much more of it.
We want to bring back the introduction to permaculture courses. I think that humans like that we really have the capacity to fix our problems. Education is one issue and inspiration is the other part. So I’m just trying to trigger those two different things. I almost don’t really have much of a grander vision other than what I’m just doing right now, I would like to just do more of that. That’s where, if there’s anybody listening that really likes my stuff and you want to help accelerate what I’m doing? If I had more financial resources, I could accelerate, I could just do more work, I could do it faster. That’s what I’m hoping right now is just to ramp up what I’m actually already doing.
Morag:
I think for me, one of the biggest things as well is supporting as many people as possible to become permaculture educators themselves, in whatever community and context they’re in and finding ways to accelerate that process. That to me is a really important part. Because if every community everywhere has people who can catalyse that action, maybe see something like what you’ve done and then ground it where they are, they can help to get it out. That seems like a really important part of the work as well.
Andrew:
Can I throw your question back at you though? Like, what’s your grand vision?
Morag:
Well, I think that for me, that’s where I’m telling the stories like what you were saying and creating the context in which people can become confident, amazing, permaculture educators with access to all this global knowledge and skills. Finding where that is, to be able to to ground that – whether you’re in a refugee settlement, whether you’re in the middle of New York, whether you’re in an indigenous community in Australia – where there are the resources and support to actually be able to find, gather and translate.
There is another sort of, I don’t know whether I should say that public, what I would like to do is to create like a shadow parliament and gather all of the people that I know around the world and in Australia, what I said to you before that I see you as a public professor of permaculture. Who are the people who are focusing on health, on water, on soil, on food, on clothing, on whatever it might be, that we can come together to articulate this alternative vision of some policy as it comes out. We have another way of expressing it and getting it into the public media in a way that can counter that and go, ‘Look, actually, there’s another way that we can be thinking about this.’ So this positive mycelium question of public professors of good works.
Andrew:
Yeah, and I thought of something else, which is the thing about how Natalie Topa has gotten me into the door of being able to visit with the United Nations World Food Programme. That’s actually a goal of mine, to get this information into the highest levels, where people are doing large scale land restoration, humanitarian work, refugee work, all this stuff. These people should know about permaculture. I mean, Natalie is a great example of someone who is in that system and is a permaculture person. I’ve met and heard of other people, but that’s at this point in my life, that’s the Holy Grail.
Morag:
I feel like this is the first little creaking in the door and I think it will fly open, there’s so many people in those systems that are really thinking about it. I would like to say to everyone, too, that permaculture was not a fringe, edgy thing is something that has been foregrounded everywhere. It’s actually what needs to be even foregrounded even more so as our way forward. So let’s shift the paradigm on that, and take it into the highest. I talk a lot to people about really speaking up as high as you possibly can to be like ambassadors for this, if you what’s the highest possible place that you can take it, what’s your capacity? To speak it up and to connect.
I really see that there is this possibility of this notion of myceliation so that rather than trying to fight a structure, it’s that all of these projects and people and expertise around the world are actually connecting up. Every now and then we’ll see these kinds of little mushrooms pop up where you see that action, we just keep feeding that with more compost. This strength of this network globally, is so powerful that it’s this unseen force, wherever you scratch, you’ll see it. I mean, we just scratch the soil in whatever community and you’ll find this way of thinking as a way of addressing the issues.
So it’s just continuously connecting up telling the stories, sharing the stories, speaking it up and taking it to those places. That’s why we need to support the languaging, the way of connecting in this. That’s my big picture, that’s why I do podcasts and masterclasses and films and education, and all of that.
Andrew:
Yeah, I think we are of like mind, you and I.
Morag:
You just make it work, don’t you? There’s no great pouring of funds onto this, you get a little bit of money from this and you make it work for that. You just keep it going.
Andrew:
I mean, the thing that is going to pull this all through is like inspiration. I really feel like we’re not going to fix the world with fear. It’s just not an effective motivator. It motivates people in all sorts of ways, but not constructive ways. It’s got to be that we have sparked people’s spirits. We have to spark their creativity, their interest, their passion. That’s also what keeps me most people in permaculture. They are passionate, they’re having a good life because they’re in their garden. They’re interacting, of course, on the flip side. The dread can be stronger because you understand a little bit more what’s happening. You understand the horrors of a clear cut or something like that. You feel things harder.
Morag:
It’s just more fuel in the belly to show up more and to and to invite more people into the space. I think what you’re saying there about catalysing that spark doesn’t matter whether you’re working at an international level or whether you work in your local community. I just got an email the other day from summer saying, ‘Oh, could you do a piece on community gardening? And why is it the people always disappearing? There’s only a couple of people left?’ Well, that kind of same approach I think is just as relevant there. How can you invite people into the space to make it that dynamic? So wherever you are, whether it be a neighbourhood, a school project, and regional project to really cultivate that sense, yeah.
Morag:
Well, thank you so much for joining me in conversation today. I wish you all the best in Senegal, and I’ll make sure that all the links for all the films and resources that you’ve talked about will be in the show notes. So anyone who’s listening can connect, what’s the best way for people to get in touch with you?
Andrew:
If you do want to get in touch with me? amillison@gmail.com? That’s a good way. You will get an automatic responder that says, ‘Sorry, I can’t answer all my emails’, but I do. I do read my emails. But if you’re that magic person that wants to endow a position at Oregon State University or something like that, then definitely get in touch. I’m happy to talk to you for sure! And also, I just want to say Morag, I’m really, really happy to get to meet you here, in person, or online. I’ve seen your work and your name for years and years. And I’m just very happy to be able to have a connection. So thank you very much.
Morag:
Likewise, I’m glad you’re able to slot in a small chat in between your visits around the world. So thank you for that. Wishing you all the best!
Andrew:
Yeah, thank you so much. Great to see you.
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