The Premier of the Climate Reality Show with Jenny Pell & Guest Andrew Millison

Welcome to the premier of Jenny Pell’s Climate Reality Show! Climate instability affects us all, but don’t despair, there’s hope! Join Jenny as she talks with international colleagues and friends who are actively working on planet-cooling projects right now.

For the launch of the show Jenny talks with her dear friend Andrew Millison, Senior Instructor of Horticulture at Oregon State University.

Below is the transcription of the conversation between Jenny Pell and Andrew Millision for the Climate Reality Show.

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Andrew Millison

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From what I’ve seen when we look at history when people become of a like mind and when we really harmonize our intentions, it’s almost inconceivable what we could accomplish -Andrew Millison

Jenny Pell

Good afternoon. This is Jenny Pell with the Climate Reality Show. And I’m here for the premier podcast where we meet people all over the world who are working on solutions every day to usher us into the climate era. We’re going to meet people involved with regenerative agriculture, by remediation through mycology, and appropriate technology designers. And today we’re meeting with Andrew Millison. From Oregon State University. He’s on his way to Senegal and a few days to where he’s working on a really large-scale, Great Green Wall project. We’re going to learn about that today. Andrew probably has the most robust teaching platform in the world. He’s run 1000s of people through his program at Oregon State University. And then of course, those students go on to integrate that into their lives and their businesses in their homes and their neighborhoods. So, Andrew, I’m so excited that you’re my first guest. And I haven’t seen you in ages. I haven’t seen you since before COVID.

Andrew Millison

I know I’m so excited that you asked me, Jenny, and you’re just one of my favorite people in the world. So I just like having the time to actually just chat with you really?

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Jenny Pell
Right. Yeah, right on. Well, I want to put a little context to this show, because we’ve been gearing up to put this podcast together – the Climate Reality Show – for some time through Growers Magazine, which is our online digital platform for all kinds of things – appropriate technologies, regenerative agriculture, people that are growing food for their neighborhoods – we’re looking at large and small scale solutions for adapting and adopting to the climate change reality as it unfolds around us. We had the fires here on Maui that basically obliterated the city of Lahaina.. it’s hard times here. It’s a result of corporate chem-ag, land, greed, mistakes, fire hazards, invasive species, the list of ills that have brought this tragedy to our islands, is long… it’s a long list. And what phoenix is going to rise from these ashes?? Myself, I’ve been aware of, and believing in climate change for 40 years, and so have you. So that’s the sort of the preamble to what we’re going to talk about. But I really want to move quickly into hope and solutions and how to get involved in what it means to join up with this really vital movement around the world.

Andrew Millison
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, it’s really wild, when I talked to you just a little bit ago after the fires. And just to hear the on-the-ground report from you is I mean, I mean, I was, I started crying. We were talking honestly, just like on the phone. Just, you know, when we think about the things that are stacked up right now, you mentioned some it’s like the, where the overlap of capitalism gone wild, climate craziness, mismanagement of land and, all of these sort of other things that come along with those other topics. I mean, the truth is, we face a massive challenge right now, a scary challenge right now. And I really encourage people not to huddle in the fetal position here. And, what are you going to tell yourself that you did at the end, when you know, right?

Jenny Pell
What can you do, I mean, the result that we’re looking at around the world, it’s the interruption of the soil-food web. It’s the destruction of the flowing and meanders of the watersheds with all of the fertility and all of the biodiversity that lives in that. And in Hawai’i, of course, the destruction of the watershed is also the destruction of the lo’i (taro patch), it’s also the destruction of the key food sources that mālama (care for) that watershed all the way up, which, of course, then that sweet water filter, water comes down to the edge. And that brackish water, that’s where the fish teem, that’s where the fish are raised, in the fish ponds in some parts of Hawai’i. So we’re lucky in Hawai’i, we still have a relatively intact lineage of Hawaiians who know how to mālama ‘āina, they know how to take care of the land, they know how to take care of the water. And what we’re really excited about supporting is letting the indigenous voices lead. And I know that you’re working on projects around the world that have that same opportunity to give voice to the people that know the most that are from there. Right. So tell us what’s going on in Africa. I’m so excited about the Great Green Wall project.

Andrew Millison
Yeah, yeah. And so I just want to say I mean primarily at this point in my work, I am like an amplifier. So I am finding these different, really incredible large-scale, inspirational land restoration, watershed restoration, climate resilience, climate change mitigation projects. And I’m basically like when we say I’m working on these projects, I’m not necessarily working on these projects, I’m going and seeing the work that’s being done on these projects. And then I’m basically telling the story in a sense. So I mean, recently, I went to India this winter, and I’ve been beginning to put out a lot of the work there that I documented. And then I had the opportunity to go to Senegal was very short term just got asked just a little while ago, with an organization that’s working on the Great Green Wall of Africa project. The Sahara desert spans the entire northern expanse of Africa, the continent of Africa. And the Sahara Desert due to deforestation has been making a steady march southward. And so this is a collaboration, the UN’s involved, it’s 22 countries, planting a belt of trees that spans 22 countries, the entire width of Africa, to halt the southern expansion of the Sahara Desert. So that’s the Great Green Wall of Africa. And I was asked by a German organization, who’s called Planet Wild, they have people give them a subscription each month, and then they vet, and then they pick a project. And then they do some actions. So they’re planting 40,000 trees, that we’re going to go visit that project. That organization is called Trees for the Future that’s actually on the ground. And they’ve planted 300 million trees since their inception. But their goal is to plant 1 billion trees by I don’t know what it is maybe 2030. It’s, you know, pretty ambitious. But the cool thing about this particular project is that they are planting trees in what we think of as like a permaculture forest garden pattern. So they’re doing diverse plantings, they’re doing multi-story plantings. They’re doing hedgerows, windbreaks, it’s very much as opposed to a monoculture, tree plantation. It’s on the farm, diverse food producing with all of the wonderful plant guild associations with nitrogen fixers and creeping vines.

Jenny Pell
Also part of those new emerging forests that have forest gardens, healing forests, medicinal forests, all the overstory, understory, vines, all that stuff. It also very quickly impacts the small water cycle, right, so that generates of movement of water through the system. Yeah, that must be fascinating to document.

Andrew Millison
Yeah. And I’m always very interested when I go to a place to see what the land division pattern is, and how it relates to the watershed. So a lot of my work in India shows how their village-scale projects are also watershed-scale projects because the village boundaries are the watershed boundaries. So that’s one of the things that I’m looking at when we’re going to these farms and looking, I mean, we’re basically looking at individual farms, individual plots of like, a quarter to a half acre is the average size sort of garden or farm, that people are farming there. So I’m very curious to see how those different plots are arranged in relation to water flow is that something that’s considered like this is kind of some of the reasons why I’m coming in is to add my viewpoint. I mean, that’s why this organization is bringing me in to be in their video and also to document their work, but to give my evaluation of the project from the permaculture perspective, so I’m really interested to see how they actually are working with water flow, or in their tree planting.

Jenny Pell
Yeah, so you’re bringing your you’re bringing your mana – you’re bringing your wisdom – you’re bringing your knowledge. I mean, you have so much, you’ve seen so much and worked on so many implementation projects and designs.  People used to ask me, how do you get all these really cool design projects? Well, there’s just not that many people that do design work at this level. And I would say that that’s a challenge and an invitation to the audience. We need more designers of all kinds. We need people to design appropriate technology solutions. We need people designing small-scale watershed solutions, large-scale, you know, you name it, even like swales outside cities. But what we’re facing around the world and in Hawai’i is no exception. We’re having it really bad over here – one of the climate reality things is we’re getting these extended periods of drought, where everything’s just a tinderbox. And then we get rain events, and so much rain comes down. And that huge amount of erosion of course, washes through these these very ill watersheds, and that washes down to the reef or down to the ocean and chokes and suffocates the ocean and reef. So that’s a pattern that we’re looking at and how do we as designers, and how do we, as people who live in the land, find ways to adapt to longer periods of drought and rain events. So we want more and more and more passive water harvesting and a lot of systems, we want more and more roots, we want more and more mycelium in the soil. So when you look at that, are you working with like local nursery people? Are you developing templates that we can draw from? I think the template is one of the key things we need in the system right now is the core template for climate-resilient agroforestry. And people can overlay their own culture, they can overlay their own appropriate plant list, their own knowledge of the land into that.

Andrew Millison
I want to get a little bit, a little bit of Doom rest for a second here about where I live in the Pacific Northwest. And, you know, luckily, it’s kind of clouded over right now. And even we even have some rain in the forecast here. But it was September 5, which, in 2020, that we have the massive Labor Day, fought still firestorms here, that was just, you know, you zoom out and you start looking at these macro weather systems that was this cold air mass, polar airmass, coming down to the center of the country and displacing all of this dry hot air from the east out to the West. So we had this counter to the sort of oceanic jet stream flow, and it created this intense wind funnel and just pushed all of these fires down through these canyons into the valley here. And the fact is we’ve had a very hot, dry summer here, we just hit 108. Not long ago, it’s been extremely dry. And you look at these conditions and what people are talking about is basically like the northern retreat of the Douglas fir range, it becomes the scale of protecting yourself. And adapting becomes very vast. I did an interesting podcast interview with Tom, Tom Ward / Tommy Hazel, some time ago, where they laid out the forest, the forestry techniques, that if we were going to get out ahead of this inevitable die-off of a lot of the Doug fir trees and the migration of that range, we would be doing a lot of selective thinning, we would be leaving refugio in the wettest shade in microclimates in the western and southern slopes that are receiving the most heat and are drying out the fastest, we would be doing a lot of thinning, we would start to take species from further south, we might be looking in Northern California, we might be bringing folks up. And we would be assisting this transition, because it’s going to transition one way or another. Now, hopefully, the transition is not massive scale wildfire, right? And hopefully, we actually can get our hands in the highest levels, really of the government like the Forest Service. And hopefully people there can start to tune in, and we can get out ahead instead of reacting to major wildfires. I mean, that’s the hope with putting out all this education, like you said, templates and really like understanding what is the pattern response to this massive change in the ecosystem?

Jenny Pell
Right? Well, this is the conversation around our table, which is what you’re doing right now in your community, in your state in your watershed in your you know, in your bioregion, like the things we’re doing right now we’re gonna really inform the story of whether or not your tribe not only survives, but thrives into the climate change era. We have some really big decisions. And if I were if I were an elected politician, I would be really concerned about how I was going to feed, cool, heat, transport my people in the waning fossil fuel time. I mean, I read an article this week that said that the global fossil fuel industry is subsidized to the tune of $13 million a minute around the world. And we all know that the fossil fuel companies they measure their wealth by the oil that’s still in the ground, they haven’t even extracted it. They’re measuring their wealth by oil that they’re planning to burn. So this is insane. Like the level of insanity is huge. And I find myself you know, wearing really two hats. One is climate resilient agroforestry and the other one is neighborhood food. So how do we really quickly turn our immediate neighborhoods, like I live in a subdivision on Maui, we could grow so much food in this neighborhood. It’s insane. And you have a neighborhood food project to tell us about, what’s happened, just from your hub of activity of permaculture neighborhood food and how that’s radiated out through your community.

Andrew Millison
Yeah, well, I mean, I don’t even want to take credit because there’s so many people in my neighborhood that are like super gardener food people, I think I just live in a place where there’s a real concentration of that. I feel like I’ve had a subtle impact, through bringing lots of students through, having students design projects in various parts of my neighborhood, consulting with a lot of my neighbors. But I just happen to live in a place where I live in, Corvallis is the heart of the valley. So it’s a really agriculturally rich place. It’s Oregon State University, which is a land grant university. So there’s lots of just seed breeders and, and gardeners and orchardists. And I mean, it’s just like, I live in like a hotbed of horticulture.

Jenny Pell
So Alan Capuler lives in Corvallis? Yeah. Mushroom Capuler?

Andrew Millison
Down the block for me. Yeah, the Capulers live here.

Jenny Pell
One of the most amazing seed collection with a new taxonomy, right. Didn’t he develop a whole new taxonomy of seeds?

Andrew Millison
Right. Yeah.  Their whole seed collection is a stone’s throws down the road for me. And there’s lots of people like that, that are around here. I feel like I’ve brought in the permaculture voice and the permaculture, the specific permaculture techniques and the design protocol. I’ve had a lot of students come through my class. A lot of, at Oregon State University when I teach on campus, I mean, my students are, they’re not necessarily Corvallis, locals. But they’re Oregon locals. They’re kids whose parents have farms who have land who are going to inherit land. Oh, yeah. My parents have, you know, 100-acre vineyard up in Yamhill. County, oh, my parents have 300 acres in Southern Oregon. So it’s like, there’s this

Jenny Pell
Fourth-generation cattle ranching family from Eastern Oregon. Right?

Andrew Millison
I get that. I mean, that’s like, that’s my students basically. So, you know, in a sense, like, Oregon is a place where everybody pretty much recognizes the word permaculture. And I don’t think there’s a lot of places where we’re even conventional people, like know the word permaculture.

Jenny Pell
Did you read Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson?  He has a whole chapter on permaculture. And he mentions it several times throughout the book. And that one chapter where he just shines a light on people from all the different iterations of permaculture around the world, and how you’re welcome at that table.

Andrew Millison
I wanted to say, kind of taking a couple steps back is, it can be so overwhelming and despair-causing when you think of “how can I face this massive gargantuan, government, industry, corporate infrastructure”, and you can just feel really powerless. But I feel powerful. When I actually make change locally, the impact of these projects I visit, these projects, some of them have something to do with the government, most of them are like people-powered projects at a massive scale. And like, we there is a lot of stuff that can happen to really move the needle of the climate. And, you know, I’ve found that it’s, it’s a surprisingly small area of reforestation you need to do to actually alter rainfall patterns. Like, it’s not out of our hands.

Jenny Pell
You know, right. And you and you stack the functions of pollinator pathways, and you stack the functions of watershed restoration. And you stack the functions of reef protection and you forest at the top, you know, that’s the it’s one thing that COVID showed us was how quickly the ecosystems rebound. And it’s like we’re looking at here on Maui, our economy after the fires is, there’s no economy, they plummeted, we depend so much on the tourism economy that we have to diversify our economies. We have to diversify economies, we have to have dignified living wage-paying jobs that are in service to this. These are in your own community, your own watershed, your own neighbors, and your own county.

Andrew Millison
Yeah, absolutely. And at the same time, there is the complication that there’s a lot of people that live in places that really cannot support those populations. I mean, there’s a lot of people like on a big camping trip, basically, where all of their food, their water, and their energy is trucked in and I can start to list off cities, Phoenix, Arizona. Well, a lot of stuff in Hawaii, right? The percentage of food coming in or Las Vegas or places that just cannot naturally support that population. So there’s a little bit like, like sometimes when I hear people getting strict sort of bio regionalism, which I mean, obviously, we do need to maximize production, watershed health within the watersheds, the bioregions, the areas we live. But we also like I’m going to visit in Senegal, and I’ve been been doing my research, because I was looking at the landscape we’re visiting. And I was looking at the population, Dakar about a city of 4 million people. And I said, Where’s all the farming?  I’m looking on Google Earth. I see farms, but I don’t see massive farming. Well, they import 70% of their food. Okay, you know, where? Where is it? What is it, wheat? Is it from I think it’s from Poland? Is it from Ukraine is from Russia? You know, like, I’m these are things I’m not sure. But like, we live in such a globalized system right now. That it’s, it’s complicated. We can’t just cut off the global system of like food shipment and energy shipment where we really have, catastrophe.

Jenny Pell
I agree with that. And we have to scale up. But we’ve got to get to, for example, in my neighborhood, if we could grow 5% of the food that we consume for everybody in my neighborhood. That’s like, up from .05%, right? So that’s huge. And for, for us to scale jump from there to 10 or 15, or 20%. Like if we had salaried neighborhood permaculturalists in a subdivision that was their job. You know, in five years, these neighborhoods would be full of food. And so it’s really a design challenge in that way. But what if you get 100 houses in a neighborhood to each put in 100 bucks a month, you know, wow, okay, all of a sudden, you have salaries for two people. And that would be amazing. So looking at the solutions is that the people need to jump into hyper action at this point, I would say that collectively, those of us that are already working in the realms of climate change and climate adaptation, like these fires right down the road from us, it lights a fire under our collective asses.  We’re already in motion, those are the people who we hang out with. This is the language that we speak, but it’s making it making the gravity of it understood, and then also helping people have super accomplishable actionable items and ways to participate and shift. We feel like language is a big part of that, and learning how to approach this with both a humbleness and a stridency at the same time.

Andrew Millison
Yeah, absolutely. I am very shocked that people are as complacent as they are. And I don’t know what the triggers I mean, in your case, it was a very obvious trigger of what you know, figuratively and literally lit a fire under under everybody’s asses. And I am waiting for the series of events that really actually lights a fire under the collective because, I mean, it’s got to happen.

Jenny Pell
Well, this is what I’ve been saying – it compounds and intensifies from here. So here, we had the fires. And I said to my gang, you know what, and all we need now is a storm to take out Long Beach where most of our stuff is shipped from (on the Jones Act, by the way, so we can’t even ship it directly to Hawaii, because that’s ridiculoua. So we need to get rid of that), but if Long Beach goes out, our shelves are empty. We import 85 – 90% of our food overall in the Hawaiian islands, but we import like 98% of staples, wheat and rice and all that stuff.

I think that you’re right, the collective effect is huge. And it’s going to also cause the displacement of a lot of people. And I’m looking forward to interviewing a colleague of mine, who’s a professor at Lund University in Sweden, and he also writes the UN disaster report, annual disaster report, and works with the UN High Commission for Refugees. We talked in the past about climate change, people on the move, and I one point asked him ‘what are you going to do about all the climate change refugees’, this was some years ago, and he said, ‘they’re not refugees’. Because refugees have this definition, such as they’re fleeing persecution, the definition of a refugee is a very specific definition. I don’t care if they’re a refugee, or whatever you call them, there’s going to be a lot of them. And we have to figure out how to absorb that those populations on the move is some really great work being done. I think it’s Rosemary Morrow. There’s a few people that have been doing Permaculture Design in refugee camps.

Andrew Millison
Natalie Topa has done a lot of work like that in Somalia, and now she works for the World Food Program, the UN. And when we look at all the political tension around the southern border of the US, all these people coming north from Honduras, a lot of that is from ecological devastation. When we look at the migration of Africans and people from the Middle East into Europe, all the political tension around that there’s all these big political things, we can break it down to land degradation, watershed collapse, hydrologic collapse, climate change, soil depletion, like this. So it’s all tied into, in a way, to the health of the watershed. And if you have a healthy watershed, you have a, you have the shock absorbers that can actually handle the drought or the intensive storm. But if you don’t have a healthy watershed, if you don’t have stable soil, you know, forested slopes, then when that pulse of either pulse of heat comes, or that pulse of water comes or whatever the extreme weather event comes, your ecosystem, your watershed is the shock absorber to that on a very localized level. So repair of localized landscapes is actually the solution to the refugee crisis, because people aren’t going to leave places that are healthy and thriving. And it’s also the solution to being resilient against climate extremes.

Jenny Pell
Right and it’s also land access I mean, when you look at the lands above Lahaina that used to be a breadfruit forest with lush wetlands, and sure it was hot and dry but it had watersheds where people grew lo’i – they had taro growing, kalo growing all the way up the watershed, and it was legendary for its beauty, and its lushness and its greenery. Wetlands, beach access, canoes, when the culture was rich, and with all of those things. And why do corporations get to keep owning that land, if they are going to completely and utterly destroy the land, destroy the watershed, destroy the reef, kill the culture.. it’s just sitting fallow being a fire hazard. I don’t know how to change land tenure at this stage. But being able to shift these types of fallow agricultural lands back into productive resilient, syntropic agriculture, with passive water harvesting landscapes; we need these fractals of solutions, so that we can we can scale jump from them.

Andrew Millison
I mean, a lot of land is sitting in it’s lowest common denominator land use – the cheapest, easiest use of the land that can be managed by the fewest amount of people whether it’s chemical fertilizer input or pesticide or herbicide, I did that whole video I did on Oahu and everything and I got a glimpse through that, through staying with the Nation of Hawaii and looking at the work that they’re doing restoring their Ahupua’a there in Waimanalo, I got a glimpse of like, the richness the, the rich potential of the Ahupua’a, you know, and then you go down from there, and there’s this military base. And it’s like a lot of just kind of unused land. So when you see the incredible system of the traditional Hawaiian people and the terraces and the like, hyper-intensive management of diverse food production, and then you go and you see, like, broad scale, sort of semi-wasted land.


Jenny Pell
I remember studying, when I was doing my early permaculture trainings and learning over time from different teachers, you know, that there’s only a few ecosystems around the world that have endured for 1000s of years, or 1000 years or more, and the Hawaiian system is one.

Andrew Millison
One of the other ones is a year agro-ecosystems, like agricultural ecosystems

Jenny Pell
Humans migrate. So they move to new place, and then they completely rip-up all the resources, and then they just move on, and then they settle on the next place. So patterns of migration, but the enduring ones include one from Hawaii. And then there’s the one in Spain that has the “cork and pork” – they had the pigs and the agroforestry system with nuts.  And so that’s an enduring system. It is so hard to see the Republican candidates get on stage and every single one of them as a climate denier.

Andrew Millison
It’s interesting because I’ve heard analysis that and people are like, actually, when you pull the population, I mean, Republicans and Democrats and independents and everybody like that is the prevailing belief by the majority of the population is that climate change is happening because you can’t tell someone who’s experiencing 115-degree record heat in Oklahoma that like really remembers that it’s never gotten that hot before. You can’t tell them “no, everything’s cool”. That’s all fine when you’re sitting in your little bubble watching TV, but then you go outside. And you’re like, actually, things are kind of scary and different.

Jenny Pell
My family lives in Italy. They live in northern Italy. And it is so hot right now they can’t even go outside. And my sister was telling me that it’s quiet, where the animals and where the insects and where the birds and where the noises just like it’s just everything is seared. It’s just waiting for one matchstick, one cigarette butt out the window and Italy’s on fire. And last summer, the Po River ran backward, the key irrigation source for Northern Italy ran backwards with brackish water in the river. You can’t irrigate your crops with that. So when I talk about the compounding and intensifying of Climate Reality, game on.  Our old friend, Toby Hemingway, he used to talk about the peak moment of what’s going on – peak oil, peak water peak population, right? We had this little grace period, we are up here watching the energy ascent culture. And here we are, we had this window of time for us to make change. And I feel like it’s an aperture at this point like, it feels small. But you know, what, through the singularity, what happens?


Andrew Millison
But at this at the same time, I’ve got to say, especially some of these projects, like the Pawnee Foundation, where we’re talking about like 16 million people working on watershed restoration in a region. In India, what I consider biggest permaculture project, but they don’t say permaculture project there. It’s the water cup competition, which is a competition between villages to which village can install the most amount of water harvesting structures in a 45-day period. It’s sponsored by Bollywood star, Amir Khan, who’s a megastar, and everything, they have all this corporate donation, so they have big prize money. And they literally, I mean, I’ve documented this and these are the videos I’m currently putting out right now on my YouTube channel. They have literally fixed the water problems of 1000s of villages, in the neighborhood of 8000 villages participated in their project, and in the neighborhood of 1000 to 2000 villages, they would consider completely fixed their water problem problems, and now are moving on to maximizing their farm yields with organic methods. So I’m just saying that I mean, I personally have witnessed places that have literally in a very short period of time, shifted their entire reality, literally from poverty, from like water depletion, tanker trucks for their water supply, people leaving and going to live in slums, and migrating farm workers, to people that are literally rich, like they’ve literally become rich, and they have abundant water, they have multiple cropping periods a year, they’re investing in the infrastructure of their villages, the kids are suddenly able to go to college. I mean, this is a very rapid transformation, all because of watershed-scale water harvesting, and replenishing their aquifers.


Jenny Pell
Leadership, where’s the leadership in the United States? You know, this is the challenge for me, I think that this spring, so spring 2023, I was presencing, that it’s going to be the summer of hell in Europe. I didn’t think it would be on Maui. You know, we can grow food year-round and, but okay, so Europe is in an intense drought and fire moment – it’s really, really intense. And so, there’s a lot of organizations and people and individuals stepping up to contribute to the currency, the currency that we need, the flow that we need to fund these projects. Pick a project, pick people that you like, fund them, fund permaculture, a syntropic agriculture fund, your watershed coalition, fund Growers Magazine fund, Abundant Earth foundation, you know, here we are, like, I would like to challenge people to whether it’s, I’m picking the number 13 because it’s just a nice girly number, right? So that you could give 13% of your income or 13% of your time or whatever combination of income and time to plan it to these projects to these vital projects and teaching people these skills. We would be off to an amazing start.  My collaborators, the Abundant Earth Foundation, has several projects around the world. But we support all kinds of projects. And that’s our goal is to shine a light on people that are working on solutions. And inspiring people inspires our audience, inspire your audience, to take part and change. You can all take permaculture design courses, how many students have you put through your MOOC? And what is a MOOC?

Andrew Millison
We had the Massive Open Online Course run for a couple of years, we had 45,000 people go through that course. You know, as far as my online permaculture design course, we’ve had 1000s of people go through my YouTube, I have almost 30 million views on my YouTube channel. And that’s basically just like public education. I have people from around the world we now are, we’re now dubbing into Spanish. Now, my Spanish-language channel is suddenly getting started to get a lot of views as well. So I mean, people are super hungry for this information. And people are just it’s just, it’s a it’s a grassroots dissemination. I’m all about just like free grassroots dissemination of information, we’re past the point where we can have hold this information behind the sort of paywall, and, you know, I mean, there’s some practicality to it, if you’re gonna, if you’re going to take someone’s time as an instructor, and all the stuff we do with our online course, then, you know, we have to there has to work financially, but, but like, my personal goal, using the surplus of my program at Oregon State University, is to put free information out as easily digestible to the masses. And I’m hoping that that I mean, it’s, it seems like there’s some triggering going on from that, however small but you know, the whole thing is, like you said, the team, the swarm, the flock, like we are a flock, we are a swarm. And if the swarm can, each person can kind of do their particular thing, but we, you know, collaborate, communicate, and, you know, hopefully, there’s some sort of like hive mind that we can get things done that you can’t do in a top-down, you know, power dynamic, basically. Right?


Jenny Pell
That’s absolutely correct. Like that. The need for decentralization across the spectrum of, you know, food, power transport, you know, all of that stuff is really important now, so we’ve gone through this sort of failed experiment in massive centralization of systems. And we need to get back to more bio-regionalism that can scale. And you know, people in Seattle are always going to drink coffee, there will always be trade, there will always be movement of people and goods around the planet, no doubt about that. But we need to do it in a permanent way. We need to do it in a way that doesn’t create the Great Pacific fucking Gyre, like, it’s time, it’s like game on for shift. And I really want to let people know that there’s this huge network around the world that’s engaged in shift. They do everything from grow backyard gardens, to design hydrological systems for cities that are sustainable, to do the modeling for climate change. One of the cool projects I’m learning about now is people who are anticipating the climate change of 510 and 20 years, and then convincing their clients or convincing their projects like your Great Green Wall, to put 10% of it in crops that you’re anticipating are going to be that much hotter or that much wetter that much whatever windier so that you that resilience is starting to be built in in Yes, it’s an experimental edge, but we really need that right now.

Andrew Millison
Yeah, well, we say diversity is resilience, you know, so I mean, also, once I, how much time do we have? Because I have a couple of tangents I would like to go into but I’m just not sure if we’re like, go. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I mean, so you know, at the same time, where say where I live, the average temperature is going up, the nighttime temperatures are going up, the extreme heat spikes are going up. But at the same time with the instability of the Jetstream. There’s also more erratic cold events, with you know, polar vortexes coming down. So it’s like, there’s the double edged sword of okay, so you want to move into hotter crops, but you also may have these spikes of cold temperatures. So it’s like it’s like it’s not it’s not a linear raise and temperature. Like you said, it’s not climate. It’s not noticing, like global warming anywhere. There’s, there’s a no one location is just warming, I guess. It’s like, the the spikes and stuff like that. I did want to say one interesting thing, you know, you’re talking about, oh, there’s always going to be this like international trade. And I don’t know if you’ve looked at the work of this guy, Peter zine. He wrote a book called The End of the World. It’s just the beginning. I don’t agree with a lot of his like, political views, but he He lays out this really pretty convincing argument for the end of globalization that we are, you know, based on a lot of different things based on geography based on the demographic collapse of industrialized countries, you know, and that basically, we’re gonna go from globalization to regional regionalism. And in a regional world, Hawaii, for example, maybe more connected to the other islands, you know, Polynesian islands, basically, than it is to the US. You know, and I mean, there’s, you know, there definitely could be with the, just the change with like us reaching all these tipping points in resource availability. And, you know, his argument is that, like, the seas are not going to be safe for mass global shipping in the future, right, that like, everything’s been safe since World War Two, and it’s a whole long story. But I mean, you’d have to read it yourself and see if you’re convinced by it, but I’m, I’m looking at a world where we’re not going to have everything produced anywhere moving all over and one chip from Taiwan, the superconductors there that’s coming from some other parts from China and then being assembled in Malaysia and coming you know, all this stuff, and then coming to the US, like, those days are numbered as far as I’m concerned. And so even if it’s not like bio regional like the Oregon and you know, Cascadia is I don’t believe going to be you know, its own little world that doesn’t experience trade trade with other people. But it definitely could be like regional. I mean, it could be that North America is primarily doing most of its trade within the North American continent. Because the you know, the transport in that area is going to be more feasible than what we have right now is goods, hopscotching all over the planet back and forth.

Jenny Pell
Agreed. I mean, I don’t want to end the conversation on the ills of globalism because there’s so many that we could just be to kvetch about that forever, but I would, what I do want to share with people is that I believe that the shift is on the Climate Reality is here, it’s not going away, it’s going to get worse. What are you doing? How are you participating in change, are you You know, we have to give people inspiration and hope and education and opportunity to participate.

Andrew Millison
My little like, positive, you know, positive note on the whole thing is that from what I’ve seen, and when we look at history, when people become of a like mind, and when we really like when we really harmonize our intentions. There, it’s, it’s almost inconceivable what we could accomplish. If we were actually focused on what we need to be focused on for the survival of our species, the thriving of nature and the thriving of the planet. I mean, the solutions have been demonstrated, that’s, you know, that’s kind of my work is showing, like, look at all the solutions that are demonstrated all over the place. It’s not, that’s not the obstacle. The obstacle is just people getting together, focusing, figuring out what to do, and doing it instead of, you know, fighting each other are wasting our time in division. So, I mean, like, we can do it. anybody listening? Like how can you harmonize with your friends, neighbors, communities, people you meet online? How can you harmonize and actually be part of the shift towards goodness, what else you’re going to do?


Jenny Pell
I think it’s a really good message. I really want people to feel empowered, I want people to also know it’s pretty amazing what you can do in a short amount of time. Thank you, Andrew. I can’t say how much I appreciate the work that you do in the world and the difference that you make and the people that you inspire. You’ve inspired me for many, many years. Thank you. So thank you.

Andrew Millison
Thank you for calling me up. I always like if I’m looking at my phones like Jenny Pell, like yes, I love talking to you and hearing what you’re up to. And so, thanks for having me I really appreciate it.

Jenny Pell
Thank you so much, Andrew, for coming on the show today. I want to let the audience know, people who are listening and watching, that if you want to learn more about Andrews projects in Senegal, at Oregon State University, and really all over the world in India, you can see them in the links below and you can go to growers magazine.com For all those details. Also, can you tell us again, the name of the organization at the Great Green Wall if people want to donate to that project?

Andrew Millison
Yeah, Great Green Wall Frontline. There’s another organization I just heard about, Neil Spackman is on the board of directors. So great Greenwall frontline is a, like a really like native indigenous-based organization of community-based project where the organizations I’m visiting are actually not based in Senegal, they have big organizations in Senegal, but one of them’s based in the US. So they’re getting, a lot of their donations are coming in through the US kind of thing. And then I’m also going to see the United Nations World Food Program. And I’m going to look at their Great Green Wall projects, which I imagine are going to be very different from the more like food forest-based ones from Trees are Future. So that’ll be interesting. And I’ll probably do about three or four episodes on my YouTube channel on the ground at the Great Green Wall of Africa.

Jenny Pell
Right on, right on. All right, changes afoot. All right, thank you, Andrew. See you next time. And thanks, everybody, for watching, and we’ll see you next time on The Climate Reality Show.

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