5 earth-healing projects

February 3, 2022 5:35 AM

Permaculture instructor Andrew Millison discusses five large-scale projects to capture water from monsoons, create water tables, refill aquifers, and bring farming to deserts and deforested regions [slyt]
posted by rebent (8 comments total)

This is fabulous, thank you so much for sharing!
posted by MiraK at 7:53 AM on February 3, 2022

These were interesting and I want to learn more about a couple of them. For better or worse, implementing any of those at such a large scale here in the US would require a phenomenal level of environmental review and permitting, though many of the actual techniques shown are used on a smaller scale routinely.
posted by Dip Flash at 9:40 AM on February 3, 2022

Thank you for creating this FPP. I'm a big fan of Andrew Millison. He is the rare combination of researcher, project director, and educator that you don't often see.

Another good person to know about in this space is Neal Spackman. Although his outreach is not as polished as Millison, his projects are equally compelling.

In home scale water capture projects, Arizona-based Brad Lancaster does excellent work. Although I recognize how important his research and advocacy are, I personally find his manner of speaking to be a bit off-putting. I mostly swallow my irritation and listen anyway.

Geoff Lawton is probably the most well known Permaculture educator today, and has a history of important work done for conventional government and private agencies, which is vanishingly rare among the Permaculture community. If the average person knows anything about Permaculture, it's probably from watching his "Greening the Desert" videos 15 years ago about developing a small city lot in Jordan.

So that's my list of Permaculturists with expertise in desert climates, if people are interested in this topic now, following their work is a next step.
posted by seasparrow at 9:45 AM on February 3, 2022 [2 favorites]

Dip Flash, I thought about that too. I assume there are the same strict records of land ownership in India as every other farming community throughout time. However, these groups were able to work together.

I kept thinking "wow, a few bulldozers would have taken care of this so much faster" and also "if everyone in my neighborhood spent 2 hours digging per week, we wouldn't need bulldozers".

I guess technological and industrial progress is both a tool for those with access, but also a barrier that prevents anyone without access from acting.
posted by rebent at 10:26 AM on February 3, 2022

I kept thinking "wow, a few bulldozers would have taken care of this so much faster" and also "if everyone in my neighborhood spent 2 hours digging per week, we wouldn't need bulldozers".

Watching timelapse videos of manual digging is incredible. Each person is carrying only a small amount of dirt at a time, but with enough people and enough time, progress is surprisingly fast. It's a fraction of the production you get with even small sized machinery, but if you don't have machinery and you do have people (hopefully either paid or volunteers, not people who are compelled to work unwillingly), then that is what you do.
posted by Dip Flash at 10:39 AM on February 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

with enough people and enough time, progress is surprisingly fast

I was once on a heavy construction job (a dam, overseas) where, at the start of the project, the senior estimator looked at the earthworks and commented "Looks like about a five thousand loader job".

...and being the idiot newb, I gasped "Five thousand front-end loaders? My god, how are we gonna get them all!?!"

Everyone laughed and clarified "No, he means five thousand guys with baskets to carry the dirt."
posted by aramaic at 11:38 AM on February 3, 2022 [2 favorites]

Thanks for the FPP rebent! dip flash maybe, but a lot of these operations are essentially lots of small gardens, and gardening is hard to control.

It is becoming necessary (and obvious, even to many here - NZ) that some level of disdain towards govt./council rules is becoming essential for survival), it's essential for advisors to be able to work within rules-based systems, and know when/how to work outside the rules too. I have hopes for a multi-lot neighbourhood community linked stormwater system where we'll largely decouple from the city system and do our little bit to stop polluting the ocean.

I'm scaling up and becoming the main advisor to larger and larger projects, I dislike the bureaucracy and politics, but they're often essential stepping stones to repairing the land, the Earth, and communities.
posted by unearthed at 12:41 AM on February 4, 2022

dip flash maybe, but a lot of these operations are essentially lots of small gardens, and gardening is hard to control.

I agree, scale is everything, and you can get away with just about anything if it is on a single private landowner's land. But just to give a sense of where you can end up triggering complex environmental issues here with most of the featured projects in the video:

1. Arvari River Restoration - they built 375 fully-spanning earthen dams over many miles of mainstem river. Even if a river had no endangered species or navigational usesthat would be impacted by blocking passage, that is likely to need full review (and likely lawsuits) over potential impacts to downstream water users. You'd also need to consider (meaning, potentially complex hydraulic and engineering analysis) changes to flood inundation and dam safety, for the ones near settlements.

2. Chikukwa Project - this looks like it was an aggregation of many, many small projects; as long as you weren't on public land, this likely wouldn't need any review or approvals.

3. Gravis Jodhpur - these are small scale impoundments on farmer's lands; this is an exempt activity here and can pretty much be done at will, aside from situations where a downstream irrigator is impacted.

4. Loess Plateau - earthwork at that scale is going to receive some oversight; how much will depend on where it is, what habitats are involved, etc. But this is a good example where the sheer scale would be hard to replicate here easily. It also involves water storage dams, which raise potential other oversight.

5. Paani Foundation - like Gravis Jodhpur, these are small impoundments/terraces on agricultural land; those can be built here without issue, including with technical support and funding from federal agencies.

None of this is meant as a criticism (I like these projects, and liked the video); one of my favorite parts about watching it was thinking about the regulatory structures that would make these kinds of experiments hard or impossible in other settings. Your point about knowing when to work inside rules and when to step outside of them is good.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:33 AM on February 4, 2022 [1 favorite]