In this episode Andrew Millison shares some his knowledge and adventures. His extensive travels and teaching experience give him unique insights into the workings of water systems.

Opening music: Waterplant Waltz by Carmen Porter (https://carmenporter.com)

Linking up with Andrew Millison:

Andrew's website: https://www.andrewmillison.com/

Andrew's awesome YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgb_TbreMgfDdLKkr4yYJHw

Permaculture Water Summit: https://permaculturesummit.online/

Oregon State University Permaculture Design Course: https://workspace.oregonstate.edu/osu-permaculture-design

Welcome to Song and Plants.

My name is Carmen Porter.

In this episode, I was joined by Andrew Millison.

His extensive work as a videographer documenting innovative water systems

internationally and developing compelling content for Oregon

State University's Permaculture Design course have made his YouTube

channel invaluable to anyone seeking insights into the workings of water.

I hope you enjoy our conversation.

So welcome to Song and Plants.

Would you mind introducing yourself?

Sure.

My name's Andrew Millison and primarily I'm an instructor at Oregon State

University, where I teach permaculture.

I have been teaching permaculture for over 20 years, and I first studied

permaculture, over 25 years ago.

I've lived in a lot of different climate zones.

I grew up on the temperate East coast in Philadelphia.

I've lived in Arizona, spent 14 years there in the high desert.

It's kind of where I first learned about permaculture and

started studying water systems.

And then for the last 14 years I've been here in Corvallis, Oregon, which

is a maritime temperate area here in the Willamette Valley, in the Pacific

Northwest of the United States.

And in recent years, I've done a lot of traveling, documenting

different permaculture and water sites all over the world, including

in India and in Mexico and in Egypt.

I just got back from Hawaii documenting the Ahupua'a, Hawaii Indigenous

Watershed Scale agricultural system.

So I guess to some degree I'm a bit of a, of a storyteller now where a lot of

my work is kind of focusing on video.

And I'm really happy to talk to you.

Thank you so much for having me on the podcast.

Thank you.

What got you interested in water systems?

Well, You know, water is the foundation of design, of permaculture

design, regenerative land design.

Water is the basis of any specific design where, you know, it

comprises the bones of the system.

So you can't put the other layers of a design on until you have the

basis, the foundation of water.

So, from water, typically, then we put on pathways, then we put on

trees and other perennial plantings.

Then we create structures and land subdivisions and

all these kinds of things.

But, the natural boundaries of the landscape are the drainage

basins, and the ridges and hills that surround those drainage basins.

And so there's this logic, this innate logic in water.

And when you understand how water functions with the ecology, when you

understand how water moves through landscapes and determines different

soil types and determines what types of vegetation grow and all this

stuff, it's like water is, it's the thing that binds everything.

It's like the connecting tissue of the ecosystem.

And so I feel like all the other layers of permaculture design are really

important, but until you understand the role of water and how to properly

design for water, then you can't really do a good job designing whole systems.

So I kind of make it my focus, to teach mostly about water because

I feel like it's providing people with a good foundation in order to

construct different regenerative types of systems in all different contexts.

Hm.

So using that basis, I suppose that would even go across different climates

if you're using topography and sort of land shape to understand water.

But what innovative techniques have you seen in your travels where

people have climate challenges?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, obviously deserts and dry lands are the first place that, you know,

when we think of water and we think of really needing to have water design.

I'll give one example , I also do design work for clients and so I had

a design project, an eco village design in the western desert of Egypt.

And this is the Sahara Desert where like literally this area has not

had measurable rainfall in 13 years.

I mean, it's an extraordinarily dry climate where it's difficult to even

design for rainwater runoff because the dominant pattern in the landscape is

actually blowing sand and sand dunes, which obscures the water flow pattern.

And basically this whole area, it's an area of about 80,000 people in this

oasis, is all living off of like ancient groundwater that was deposited there,

in the ground during an era when the whole climate was much wetter in North

Africa, in the Sahara Desert area.

So, you know, seeing extremes like that, where you're not even designing

for rainfall necessarily, but you're designing for the efficient

use of a non-renewable resource.

I mean, that's kind of one extreme level.

But then, you know, on the other side of extremes are extremely wet areas, right?

And so I also had the fortune of visiting, I guess it was just earlier

this year, the chinampa system of Mexico City, which is the last vestiges of

the ancient Aztec agricultural system built in the basin of Mexico City.

It's called the Valley of Mexico, valle de Mexico, it's

like a giant crater basically.

So you've got all these mountains ringing this high elevation valley

and all the water for thousands and thousands and thousands of years

drained down and formed this big shallow lake in the bottom of this crater.

And that's where the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan was developed

there, which after the Spanish came and conquered the Aztecs that

became the basin of Mexico City.

And so, you know, this is an example where, like how do you take an aquatic

system, a system that's completely a wet area and turn it into something

that is both productive and beneficial for the ecosystem, as well as can

handle the level of pollution that you get in a really wet area at the

bottom of a system where everything filters down to that bottom area.

So, the water design, I mean, it's really like, it's really fascinatingly,

diverse in all of these different extreme types of environments.

And I was saying the introduction, I just returned, we are filming a video

in Hawaii with the nation of Hawaii.

It's the sovereign indigenous nation.

It's a group of native Hawaiians who got a piece of land through protest from

the government about 30 years ago and now they are actively restoring their

traditional watershed scale system.

The amazing thing that I learned there is, you know, in their system for the

farmer, this is a very wet area by the way, this is the wet side of Oahu.

So this is an area that is, you know, it's basically the wet tropics.

It barely has a dry season there.

It's incredibly lush, lots of flowing waters, waterfalls, right?

And traditionally they grew taro, and the farmer from this system, they

weren't worried about their water supply coming into their system, they were most

worried about what they were returning back into the system after bringing

the water in and flooding their taro patches and growing their crops there.

They were most concerned that they were returning a clean and adequate

amount of water back into the stream for downstream users to use.

So it was like a sacred responsibility to being a part of the total water cycle.

And so that was really, something that, I feel like we should all,

actually, that's a perspective I feel like we should all really be adopting.

Absolutely.

What methods were they using to purify the water?

I mean, ideally the water wasn't dirty from the start.

In the native system, they're bringing the water out of the stream and I mean,

the crop, the taro is a wetland crop, and so when you have a taro field that is

full, I mean I went to these, existing large taro fields over in Kauai and you

know, the whole basin is like one solid mass of taro with these huge leaves.

And so, I think the crop itself is doing a lot of filtration cuz it has

a really extensive root system that is like permeating the whole basin.

And so, part of it's like, making it, so, okay, when you're harvesting and

you're disturbing the soil, how are you going to keep silt laden water

for returning back into the stream?

Because in their system, if you return silt laden water back in the

stream, you're actually not being responsible to the water cycle.

And there will be negative effects throughout the system.

So there was a lot of just sort of vegetated ditches

with a variety of plants.

There was the taro patches themselves and then there was trees along.

So there's like, sort of like the water was moving through a

great diversity of plants before it returned back into the stream.

I'm a little bit curious though, in the growing of taro, do

they need to use pesticides or any other chemicals, or is it a fairly

resilient crop that doesn't need to have

Yeah.

sorts of

Yeah.

interventions?

Yeah.

Well, what I saw, I went to one area that was actually like a

larger taro growing area, which is actually very rare in Hawaii.

They say the most expensive food in Hawaii is like the native foods there, which

is, it's very sad actually because that's the food that native people, there's

bodies are most positively responsive to.

But, taro came over with the canoes, basically they called it canoe food.

So meaning that when the Polynesians basically arrived in Hawaii, taro was one

of the things that they brought there.

So, It's been grown there in that landscape for a long, long

time and it's very adapted there.

And so the place that I went was, was large scale.

I mean, when I say large scale, I don't mean like thousands of acres, large scale.

I mean like we went and saw, you know, in the neighborhood of like four to

five acres of taro being grown maybe bigger, which actually for Hawaii

is actually a fairly large amount.

They didn't use any pesticides.

It was, it was all organic.

There's a lot of bird life that is interacting there in the taro patches

because you're basically creating these wetlands and the wetlands are

full of the taro plant, but then all the perimeter around there, there's

lots of different plant species.

So there really seemed like there was a supportive ecology and like

lots of different birds landing in the different flooded fields.

There's enough of an intact ecosystem.

There's some like natural pest control there due to the

diversity and, and different, you know, micro climates created.

But the other example that would actually probably answer your question a

little better was back to Mexico City.

So the, the last vestiges of this Aztec flood based agriculture system

where they built up these artificial peninsulas and islands within the shallow

wetlands in order to grow crops on.

But here in 2022, this is at the bottom of the Mexico City Basin.

So, I mean, there's a lot of pollutants making their way down to this low

area, especially because the poverty is so great that many people have

been forced to basically squat on these kind of wetland areas that don't

have proper, like sanitation, right?

As far as toilets.

And so they created bio filters by building, you might say gabions,

which is a wire basket filled with rock, you know, so it's like a filter

that water in order to get into the canals where they actually pull their

irrigation water from they have to pass through these rock filled wire baskets

that are planted with aquatic plants.

And so the water has to pass through like this filter of rock and plant

roots in order to get into the sort of inner part of the canal

where water is being pulled from.

And so that's like some, more like contemporary examples where I'm seeing

water filtration integrated into traditional agricultural systems.

To give a little bit of context, when they're

building up those peninsulas, how do they keep them from eroding?

How do they keep them intact since they've been there for so long?

Yeah, the initial building process, and actually

like, if you watch the video, we made a little mini-documentary

it's on my YouTube channel.

It's called Chinampas of Mexico, most productive agricultural

system ever question mark.

And I have some pretty good diagrams on there where actually sort of illustrate

how these things are constructed.

But basically they take, these willow branches, right?

And they hammer them into the lake bed in the shape that

they want their field to be in.

And so these willow stakes are hammered down in, and then they weave other

branches around, just kinda like you'd weave like a willow basket, right?

In and out, in and out of these stakes.

And so they create this framework, it's like a giant basket that's

anchored into the lake bottom.

And then they fill the inside of that basket in with brush and soil and

lake mud and sort of like build up a big giant compost pile in there that

will degrade over time and they put bunch of good like lake mud on the

top they can plant directly into.

And then those willow stakes that they hammered in to the lake bed to

make the perimeter of this basket, they actually sprout, because

Willow can just grow from cuttings.

So they sprout and then they become like a living boundary.

And then they sprout branches.

They sprout roots, and then the roots tie together the

boundary of the planting area.

And so that's how it becomes anchored is by these, it's like a ahuejote willows is

a particular variety that they use there.

That's the same variety that's been used since even pre-Aztec times.

Yeah.

And the Biofilter is a newer addition to this system.

Yeah.

Are they particular about which plants they're putting into their

biofilter to remove majority organic matter, or is it all types of pollutants?

The main pollutants in this particular like location, well,

I'll step, step back for a second and say at this point the whole system is

actually fed by treated wastewater from a municipal wastewater treatment system.

Right?

So as far as the city's concerned, they're actually using this area as a way to

take treated wastewater from a municipal system, and then they flood it into the

whole chinampa area and then it recharges the groundwater and then they pull it out

again for use for their municipal supply.

So right now it's functioning like as a part of this larger scale water

filtration from the whole city.

Right?

Does that make sense?

Can you kind of picture that?

Yeah.

So they're not really concerned with the pollutants from there.

Although I would say that there's plenty of things that we would talk about, like,

I don't know, how are they filtering like birth control and anti-depressants,

you know, and that kind of thing that is difficult to actually filter out.

But that aside, cuz I didn't really get into that.

They basically consider that the water that's coming from the wastewater

treatment plant as clean water.

Right?

But it's the, the real problem is like fecal coliform is like all of these

squatters and just different housing that has grown up in the Chinampas

with the poverty and the land pressure.

So people are basically moving onto these chinampas in areas and then like they're

just either digging holes or whatever, like they don't have a sanitation

system, so they're basically like pooping in the water for the most part.

So that is the main pollutant that they are worried about with these bio

filters for removal of the pollutants.

And so, you know, as far as the plants that they're using, I had the fortune

when I used to live in Arizona, we had a permaculture course that I did with

the Ecosa Institute in Prescott, Arizona.

And we had Dr.

John Todd, who's the guy who invented the living machine, the

eco machines Ocean Arks Institute.

He's just like a total sort of legend and inventor and pioneer

for wastewater treatment systems.

And we had him come and do a few days of workshops with us in Arizona.

And one thing that he said, cuz you know, this is like a really,

really common question, right?

The really common question is like, what plants do you use, right?

So we said" John, like, what plants do we use?"

And he said "go to your local wetlands and the plants that you see in your

local wetlands are actually gonna be the best plants to use" because all

wetland plants have natural filtration qualities because where do wetlands sit

within the greater watershed pattern?

Right?

Wetlands sit at the bottom.

So naturally wetlands are getting animal carcasses and you know,

dead animals and dead vegetation.

I mean everything from the ecosystem that's like dying and rotting

finds its way down through the movement of water into wetlands.

So wetlands are just naturally, all wetland plants basically are naturally

like purifying because of the nature of where you find them within the ecosystem.

So he said "go and find your local species and as much of a diversity as you can,

and that's the best place to start".

So, You know, they had plants in these bio filters that looked

similar to a lot of the wetlands plants that we have around here.

You know, different types of reeds and sedges and cattails

and that kind of thing.

But you know, there was a lot of different types of plants that

I guess they've probably just stuck in whatever they could.

To some degree, it's a little bit less scientific than you'd think about

what plants to include as long as you go by the maximum diversity of what

will grow in your climate, per se.

And even like where we live in the wintertime, when plants die

back, okay, there's not as much biological activity, but a lot of the

filtration happens with the bacteria on plant roots and as the wastewater

moves through those plant roots.

So even when plants are dormant, there's still a lot of biological

activity happening in the water.

And so there is, you know, some degree of treatment happening even

in the winter time here, for example.

You touched on a couple things that I'd love

to delve into a little further.

One is you mentioned the eco machine.

Yeah.

Would you mind explaining that just a little bit?

Yeah.

Well, you know, John Todd basically came up with this concept of taking

the idea that wetland plants are natural filters and creating

artificial wetlands like in tanks.

In giant greenhouses, depending, like if the climate is really cold, you

could actually make an artificial environment where you have a big

greenhouse over a series of wetland tanks.

And so the idea is that the wastewater comes in and that you have the

different tanks that goes into, has like, as drastically different

conditions as you can make in a sense.

So it's like anaerobic, aerobic, right?

To try to have different types of organisms to break the bonds of

pollutants and where the water goes through like shockingly different

environments, like I said, from anaerobic to aerobic would be the best example.

And then it goes through this series of tanks that have subsequently like

cleaner water and by the time you get to the end you actually have clean water.

A lot of the systems that John Todd developed actually there's

actually species can actually migrate between the tanks.

So you can have like areas where the overflow pipe from one of the

tanks to the next could actually be a place where like snails and

fish could actually move through.

So, you know, you might have it where the system gets shocked by

some particular pollutant and the system might like retreat and sort

of die back in the earlier tanks.

Or you may have things like snails move to subsequently further tanks

that are further from the pollutants.

But then as that shock is mediated, bioremediated, then the organisms will

find their way back into tanks that are closer to the source of the pollutants.

So it's like creating this living system that has the ability to

self-organize, taking maximum advantage of the filtration properties

of wetland plants to filter water.

If you look at John Todd's stuff and Ocean Arks Institute and eco

machines and living machines, there's like all these crazy examples that

are pretty mind blowing actually of how this has been done at scale.

Wow.

And when you have, say, an anaerobic system are you

putting in the bacteria that, the anaerobic bacteria that you want?

Or are you just encouraging what's already present in the,

in the water that's coming in?

Yeah, that's a really good question.

And I don't specifically know the answer to that cuz I've never like

built the anaerobic part of the system.

It's kinda like a septic tank, like a septic tank basically digests solids

and it's an anaerobic environment.

And I think when you put a septic tank in, you don't

necessarily charge the septic tank.

But I would imagine that if you put in effective microorganisms, different

types to sort of get it going, then that might be like a really good way to do it.

So I don't really know the answer, but I could imagine that it would be beneficial

to sort of charge it with different types of effective microorganisms.

So for the aerobic and for the wetland, say when you're bringing

the plants in, are you dealing with the organisms that are coming in on the

plants, or are you going to be bringing in snails and bringing in fish species

... Andrew Millison: yeah, so we built

the class with John Todd, and we just went and like dug up clumps of

plants from a local wetland area.

And so, I mean, there's lots of organisms that are gonna come in there, and

especially if it's an outdoor system, then you're just naturally gonna have, like

species are gonna find their way in there.

Mm-hmm.

However, I could see also collecting specific

organisms and putting them in there.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah,

How many sort of basins are you dealing with

generally in those sorts of systems?

Well you figure it out by how many days of treatment do

you need for the type of pollution that the specific water sources

that you're putting in there are.

There's actually a video about this called Eco Machine, from when I was

a younger man there, back in Arizona.

You know, what we did was we actually did like a snail test where we took the

water that we were trying to clean up from this old, polluted well, that was

on my property and, um, we saw like, how long does it take to kill a snail?

It's not like a very nice experiment to the snails, but it shows you how

toxic is this water basically.

The water we were dealing with was not very dirty.

I mean, it was, it was not bad.

But basically, you know, what you would find out through testing is how many

days of treatment, how long does the water need to pass through your system

in order to be clean at the other end?

Whatever clean is, whatever metrics you're using, at the other end as far

as how you're gonna use that water.

And then what is the rate that water is flowing through your system?

So it's like if you're using say like 200 gallon totes or something like that as

your units, and you have 200 gallons of water coming into your system per day,

that it's going through one tote per day.

And so if it takes five days of treatment to clean your water, then

you would want five totes, which would total a thousand gallons of capacity.

So that's like the basic metrics of how you figure out how many different tanks

you're gonna move the water through.

And is this system used for gray water as well as black water?

I wouldn't necessarily be like putting black

water in, like open tanks per se.

I mean, Okay.

I've seen it done.

So when I was in India, and I have some of this documented on videos too,

but when I went to Auroville, which is sort of like a eco city located

on the coast of Tamil Nad u in Pondicherry, and it was founded

by Sri Aurobindo like 50 years ago.

It's a very well known place.

And they have like really, really excellent biological water treatment

systems, like living machines, like I'm talking about but they're not

like going through tanks per se.

It's more of like an aesthetic sort of garden.

It's not like what we think of just like, oh, one tank to

the next one tank to the next.

Cuz this is a warm climate, so they don't need any kind of greenhouse

or anything like that and it's like actually this beautiful water garden.

But they actually, you know, first they settle the solids

out in a regular septic tank.

So it's like basically a regular septic tank has anaerobic,

decomposition, anaerobic treatment.

And then they actually moved the water.

They pumped it into this like, crazy vortex machine.

Inside it's just this glass tower, like it's see through and then

they're making this crazy vortex.

It looks like a, like a tornado of water in this vortex.

So they're running it through there and then they're running it into these planted

big sort of water gardens and then they're pumping it up and running it through

flow forms, if you know flow forms?

That takes the water and moves it in this figure eight pattern, oxygenating it and

enlivening it, and then it's flowing back down into this different water garden.

And then at the end they're pumping it out and using it to water their landscape.

So it's not like they all look like tanks per se.

But that's where I saw black water and it didn't smell.

But you know, like in the US I would think , okay, I wouldn't just be putting

black water into this kind of situation.

However, John Todd has lots of examples where he does do black water.

He had the whole town of Harwich, Connecticut.

He had an eco machine, and I'm not sure what came of that.

This is from his historic archives of his projects, where I think they

were treating like 80,000 gallons of black water per day in this system.

So certainly gray water is safer to treat in this type of thing just

because it's less you know, black water's just a more toxic medium.

Certainly.

With the vortex part of that previous system, was that to aerate the water or

what was the purpose of that?

It was aeration, but it was deeper than that.

It was some sort of re patterning.

Oroville actually has a video where they explain their systems a little bit more.

But I gotta tell you, I never actually really understood the physics of

this Vortex machine and how it was actually cleaning the water.

I can't tell you what it was.

What I can tell you is, is that Oroville has been researching this

stuff for 50 years, and if they're using it as a essential part of

their system, then it must have some sort of powerful properties.

But I couldn't tell you exactly how that works.

Hm.

And in some of the later ponds, did they have fish?

Oh, yeah, definitely.

It didn't take long for the water to get where their wetland systems

were very vibrant and alive with lots of diversity of plants and

different organisms and insects and you know, I definitely saw fish.

And of course things like frogs just migrate all amongst the

different tanks and stuff.

Or I wouldn't even call them tanks.

They were more like water gardens.

It was very beautiful.

Are there any other examples of sort of constructed

wetlands that you have observed when you've been traveling around?

I mean, some of the most simple stuff are just reed beds.

And this is the most common thing that you'll see because it's way,

like, there's no moving parts.

You just have a sealed area, like a sealed sort of bed that's filled

with gravel and rock and such that's planted with aquatic plants.

And then the water is moved through that system through the roots of the plants.

But because it's filled with gravel, the water is not exposed to the surface.

And so it just passively moves through this planted reed bed basically

and comes out the other side clean.

It seems way like lower risk to me than some of this other stuff because the

water's not exposed to the surface at all.

Everything's happening subsurface.

And that's more common and more bombproof than some of these more complicated

things that I'm explaining to you.

Hmm.

Another quick question about your travels.

Are there other innovative or inspirational water management

projects that you've witnessed abroad?

Yeah, big time.

A lot of it has to do with harvesting water in the landscape.

Basically rebuilding water tables.

So, I've seen a lot of things in different places, but you know,

India, like what you see in India, the scale of some of the water

harvesting and water table regeneration projects is truly mind blowing.

Your video series on that is fantastic.

I highly recommend checking out that video series.

Thank you.

Yeah.

It's called India's Water Revolution, and the first two

videos are with the Paani Foundation.

I'm actually going back to India, on December 21st.

I'm gonna stay for two months and I'm going back with the Paani Foundation.

I'm gonna spend four days traveling.

We're gonna go to four different villages there.

The Paani Foundation, basically, it was founded by this Bollywood star, Aamir

Khan, who's like super famous, right?

He's like in America, you'd think of him as like Will Smith or Tom Cruise,

or someone who's just like a superstar who's been in tons and tons of movies.

So this guy's really, really famous, really, really great guy.

Really concerned about social welfare and ecology and everything.

And so, um, they founded this contest between villages where the villages

compete to see who could install the most amount of water harvesting

structures in a 45 day period.

And so from 2016 is when they started this contest, they've had

something like 8,000 villages compete.

And so, I mean, these villages get super into it, and they throw everything

they have, everybody they have into digging contour trenches and infiltration

basins and all these different types of structures throughout their watershed.

Now, you know, the cool thing about villages in India is they're

old, they're ancient villages.

So the village boundaries, the boundaries of their land correspond

to watershed boundaries typically.

So if a village is like, Okay, we're gonna restore our land, they're

actually restoring the watershed basin because naturally they divided

the landscape, management units, village units on the ridges and the

hilltops and everything like that.

Because that's just the sort of common sense way to do it.

So you get these villages of say 2000 people and they throw everything they

have, mostly by hand, although some of 'em also were able to get like

heavy equipment like excavators out there, building retention basins,

contour trenches, ponds, check dams, gabion structures, soakage

pits, you know, like this whole network all throughout the watershed.

45 days.

And then the monsoons come, okay?

And all this rain pours down, it fills up all of their water harvesting

structures and then that very season, the water table regenerates.

Wow.

all the work in 45 days.

And because of the climate there, because in India you have this very long

extended, very dry season, but then you have a short and very wet monsoon season,

literally they built their water tables in one season, their wells came back.

And then wait another year and another year, another year, you know, five

years down the line, there's just like springs popping up everywhere.

The farmers are growing multiple crops in a year instead of one.

People are like building new houses and like fixing the village up.

The prosperity that happens from just this level of

effort is pretty unbelievable.

And when I go back in December, they actually have another

phase to the competition.

Because they had so many villages, they had like at least a thousand villages

that completely fixed their water problem, that basically went from like being water

depleted to being water rich forever, because they changed the very nature of

the hydrology in their watershed basin.

So they've permanently built up their water table that every time it rains,

it just recharges again and again.

And so now it's called the farmer's Cup, where they're seeing which

farmer's group, they formed all these farmer's groups, can actually

do the best organic food production.

And that's what they're competing now.

So it's really like when you look at that scale, you're like, that's the scale we

need in order to fix this planet here.

And can some of these models also apply to city context?

You're not gonna be working the land the same way, but there are water

issues in the cities in a huge way.

yeah, totally.

And you know, cities, I mean, cities are very water shedding

structures, meaning there's like all these roads and impermeable

surfaces, driveways and buildings.

Typically the engineering of a city is that the water is just shunted

from where it falls into whatever the drainage ditch or river bed,

whatever, as quickly as possible.

And so, you know, in a city strategy, you're talking about

many, many, many, many small scale water infiltration structures.

One great example is the work of Brad Lancaster down in Tucson, Arizona doing

streetside water harvesting basins.

So every time it rains, the water from the roads go and pool up in

these basins that are then planted with native food producing trees.

The trees grow up and they provide habitat and shade and helped with the

heat island effect and food as well.

And then the water infiltrates.

I've toured that very extensively with Brad as well at a certain

point all of these small structures added up together, right?

Create this whole matrix of small scale water harvesting structures

in the same way like that the India stuff, you know, all these

little structures added together.

So in cities you can actually restore the subsurface water table

and help to grow , habitat and food producing trees in cities as well.

There's a project I'd like to visit, when I go back to India this

next time in Bangalore where they have these infiltration wells, right?

They call 'em dry wells.

I did do a video about this in Chennai, but not at the scale

that's happening in Bangalore.

But apparently there's this one person or organization that's put in like tens

of thousands of these soakage wells, which are basically like you dig a shaft

down into the ground, you fill it with rock, and you divert runoff into it.

So every time it rains, instead of the runoff shunting away, like I

said, into like dry river beds and such, it soaks into the ground to help

build that subsurface water table.

And we see that also in Portland, Oregon with the Green Streets, they have

all these streetside water harvesting basins there as well all over the

city that are helping to keep the water from just running right into the

Columbia River and the Willamette River.

It cleans the water so the pollution gets filtered through plants or through soil

before it ends up in the water courses.

So yeah, there's lots and lots of examples like that.

And so you've mentioned a couple, but what are

some of the other wetland or water catchment or water filtration projects

that you'd really love to visit?

Yeah.

Let's see.

I've mentioned definitely like some of my favorites for sure.

Uh, okay, well I'll tell you where I'm going when I go to India,

I'm going to actually the things that I really wanna visit, right?

One of them is the work of Dr.

Rajendra Singh in Rajasthan where his organization worked

with villagers to restore their traditional water catchment ponds,

crescent shaped ponds called johads.

And they began to restore these johads in order to bring just

local water supply back for animal husbandry and agriculture.

And they started restoring these, restoring these, building

these johads one after another.

Suddenly, after, I think it was eight years, I need to look back at my notes.

It was five years, eight years, something like that.

The Arvari River actually started flowing again.

After all of these ponds had been put into place, it built up, it slowed

the water moving through the system so much, because previously they were on

like this sort of drought flood cycle where the monsoons would come, gully,

washers, everything, floods the water course, and then boom, all that water

moves through and it's drought again.

But here they slowed the flow, they moderated the flow of the water

through the system, through all these traditional catchment ponds that

were kind of like leaky ponds, right?

And they actually brought back this river to a perennially flowing river

. It had been like dead for at least 50 years, had only been a monsoon,

gushing river and then a drought river.

So that's one that's really an amazing project I'm gonna go visit.

Another project that I'm gonna visit is in a even drier part of

Rajasthan in the area of Jodhpur.

Jodhpur is, It's analogous to like Phoenix, Arizona, but hotter, hotter

and drier for a longer period of time.

But when they do get the monsoons, they can actually get more rainfall.

So it's like 10 months out of the year, it's like scorching dry, incredibly hot.

This is the Thar Desert.

It's the most densely inhabited desert on the planet.

25 million people live in this desert and basically practice subsistence

agriculture there and there's an organization that's been working since

the early eighties called Gravis, Jodhpur.

And I visited this organization back in early 2018, and I'm

going back again this time.

And they have built water harvesting structures.

Really interesting types of structures that sort of merge the traditional

practices there with like more contemporary water harvesting.

So, I don't wanna get too far into the details.

I'll just tell you one example is they have these rock hills around there,

and then people are farming down in the lowland areas, kind of surrounded by

like these rocky outcroppings and stuff.

And so when you get a big monsoon rain on these rocky outcroppings, you get tons

of water rushing off these rocks down into the farm fields, and then it's gone.

So, they built these rock walls at the base of these rocky structures

that are simultaneously creating the boundaries of their farms.

So it's kind of like what we think of as a fence, but they don't really

have like fencing material there.

So they build walls around their farms.

So they build these rock walls, but the rock walls are perpendicular to the slope.

So when the water comes rushing off these rocks, the force is broken by these rock

walls and then it goes, spills through the rock walls, releasing some of its

force, and then they channel it into like contour swales, trenches and stuff where

it's able to infiltrate into the ground.

And then all of their field boundaries as well are like built up berms.

So every field is a water harvesting basin itself.

This is traditional, but this organization came back and kind of

revived these practices and repaired and fixed and sort of came through

with this like design concept of how to treat the total watershed.

And so this is like a super dry area, if you go on Google Earth and you go to

Jodhpur India, which is J O D H P U R, and you look to the west, you can see

this sort of like green haze on the land.

And if you zoom in, all of that, the green that you see

is basically irrigated fields.

There are some ditches coming through there where there's water

being diverted from far off places, so it's not all water harvesting, all

the green you see, but a lot of it is all from water harvesting structure.

My point is these are projects that you can see from space, like that's the scale.

When I was there in 2018, they were saying that their water harvesting projects

included about 1.3 million people, were benefiting from their projects there.

And so this is like small scale projects cumulatively over decades,

over large areas that cumulatively are like building water tables

in whole regions and basically stabilizing the economy, the culture,

the agricultural productivity there.

What I'm curious about though is these projects that are

dramatically changing the land, the water availability, where the water is

when, how is that changing the ecology?

Are they seeing a lot more aquatic animals and amphibians and birds?

Yeah, absolutely.

That was one of the things like when I went around with, Dr.

Avinash Pol of the Panni Foundation, and I have this in the videos there.

He took me to this one place and he was just like, Okay, just be quiet.

And we just listened and there's all these bird noises, you know, and

you see these flocks, these different waterfowl and these cranes and flocks

of birds going by and you can hear like the buzzing of frogs and all this stuff.

And there's little things flopping around in the water.

You can see little insects and things like that.

And he's like, none of this was here.

He's like two years ago, three years ago, this wasn't here.

He's like, this is actually bringing back the ecology.

I mean, think about the ecosystem benefits of having a river that

previously would just run during the monsoons and be like a sort of wash out

for the monsoon rains and then go dry versus having perennial water there.

I mean the ecosystem effects are dramatic and you're not even planning for that.

That's just the sort of like side effects.

Those are the side effects of rehydrating a watershed.

Even if you're just doing it for your own, like agricultural food security.

So are they seeing species that they hadn't seen in

a very long time in these areas?

I mean, I didn't get that like sort of

documentation level of detail.

I didn't really hear any stories of like, Oh, this particular

species showed back up.

It's more he was just like, The birds are back, you know?

It's like,

Although I guess in the Mexican project they are

monitoring the biodiversity in the.

Yeah.

Did you watch that video?

Yeah, I did.

Yeah.

Right.

So the axolotl salamander, right?

Basically the axolotl salamander is a endangered species.

The axolotl salamander is a world renowned amphibian.

I think it's the most widely distributed salamander in the world

or something like that, that people grow in tanks, in like aquariums.

Because it has this incredible regenerating power.

Like you can cut off its limbs, like it grows back, Like it'll grow back, like

its brain, like parts of its brain, right?

In America, people pronounce it axellotle.

So when I was saying axolotl, people don't know what I'm talking about,

but in Mexico, the X is actually pronounce as a s h so like the place

where the axolotl or the axolotl are living is a place called Xochimilco,

but it's spelled x o, like, Xochimilco.

So anyway, that's just a little aside for people that don't know what I'm

talking about when I say axolotl.

But the axolotl salamander, this is its native environment and it's

basically because of the introduction of exotic tilapia and carp for an

attempt by the government at aquaculture food production, the species is

like super threatened down there.

And then also the pollution, like I was saying from the slums that

are moving in on the chinampas.

And so that's where the bio filters are meant to actually create these

little like refuge, where the axolotl salamanders can breed, and survive

protected from their exotic predator fish and the pollutants of the area.

Actually, there's one more.

One more just example that's popping in my head.

I think when you find these indicator species, right?

So the axolotl is an indicator of the success of the chinampas project.

It's an indicator of the ecosystem health.

The same thing, I can't remember what the fish is called, but they

were talking about it in Hawaii.

In the Pacific Northwest we have the salmon and the salmon basically

live their life in the ocean.

They're born on land up in, you know, the mountains.

They swim down the stream, they swim out to the ocean, they live out in the

ocean, they grow and then they swim back up to lay their eggs up, you know, in

these little mountain streams inland.

And they basically sort of like bring this oceanic nutrients back up the ladder.

And then they die up in the mountains and they lay their eggs there.

Well, there's these fish in Hawaii that were traditionally part of their

system that had the opposite, where they would go out to the ocean to

like lay their eggs and breed and then they would come back up and live their

lives in the streams and the lowy patches, like of the Ahupua'a system.

And so like when you find an indicator species like that, these species

are an indicator of an intact system because they have to get all the

way from the ocean all the way up to the taro patches located up there.

And if you find them up there, then you know that there is enough

of a vein of health going on that that system is unbroken.

Just like if you have salmon up in a creek, you're like, Wow,

there's something intact here.

The salmon were able to get all the way to their traditional spawning

location, you know, from the ocean.

So you know, when you can find some sort of indicator species that indicates

the health, it sort of becomes the totem of that particular system.

And it's like this connection, you're like, wow, if we can

bring back this animal here, this creature, then that represents the

health of our whole world really.

So I think that's kind of one way to bring it all together.

Mm-hmm.

I just wanna mention that your videos are incredibly informative and the equipment,

the way that you explain things, the visualization, it's impeccable.

It's really quite fantastic.

How can people find you?

Well, you could certainly see all my videos if you

go on YouTube and Andrew Millison, a n d r e w m i l l i s o n.

My website, is andrewmillison.com has links to all the different things I do.

Also, you know, like I have this whole online course program

through Oregon State University.

We teach permaculture design courses.

We've been doing that since 2011.

So we've basically been developing online courses in permaculture for over a decade.

And so we've gotten fairly sophisticated with it and a lot of the content

I produce is essentially, I'm producing content for my Oregon

State University online courses.

But I put my best stuff out to the public in the vein of just free education cuz

I feel like that's really important.

And you know, if anything we're upping the game right now as

far as I finally have some other people I'm working with now.

I did like everything myself for the longest time.

Now I have some other people helping me with filming and helping me with editing

and of course, Ben Missimer of Pearl River Eco Design, doing the digital

animation of like watershed stuff.

We're kind of pulling out all the stops on this Hawaii video that we're gonna do.

So, I'm hoping to just like actually keep making stuff better because

people, like you're saying, wow, so impactful having the information in

an entertaining and detailed way, can really shift people's potential

to make changes in the real world when they have the right information.

So that's pretty much my mission right now, is to give people high quality

information and storytelling in a sense, in order that they can most effectively

activate themselves to do the work.

Mm.

That's fantastic.

Thank you.

Is there anything else that you'd like to add?

The Permaculture Water Summit is gonna be in a week,

which is October 13th through 15th.

But I imagine that, that this won't come out before then.

We basically did about 22 interviews with some of the greatest permaculture

water thinkers on the planet.

We've got some of the people I mentioned here, like Satyajit Bal,

the head of the Paani Foundation, Dr.

Rajendra Singh The Water Man of India, Geoff Lawton, who's one

of the most famous, you know, permaculture guys in the planet.

Rhamis Kent, Natalie Topa, Warren Brush the list goes on this like total

superstars about water and permaculture.

And so even though we're gonna have the summit, coming up, and you're

probably gonna miss it if you're just listening to this now, you will be

able to go and see all the recordings.

We're gonna keep them up for free and perpetuity and that

is Permaculture summit.online.

So that's gonna be a nice collection of long, you know, of talks.

If you wanna like spend like 30 hours thinking about permaculture

water, this will be good for you.

That's amazing.

I'll put all the links in the show notes.

Well, thank you very much for joining me.

You're

welcome.

really appreciated it.

My pleasure.

As mentioned, the links are in the show notes.

Thank you for your patience.

The dust has finally begun to settle, so more episodes, greenhouse blog posts,

workshops, and music are coming soon.

If you wanna stay informed, head over to carmen porter.com

and join my mailing list.

Many thanks to all who have taken the time to reach out.

It's always lovely to connect with like-minded folk.