Transcript
Can Forestry Be Permacultural? Episode Transcript
This is an AI-generated transcript, formatted and edited by humans for accessibility and accuracy.
In this episode of ‘In The Woods’ podcast, hosted by Lauren Grand of Oregon State University’s Extension Service, we delve into the application of permaculture principles in forestry. Joined by Andrew Millison, a seasoned permaculture designer and educator, we uncover how permaculture-oriented thinking—ranging from road placements to water harvesting and species diversity—can transform forest management for long-term health, productivity, and resilience. Learn about practical examples from Oregon and global insights, including innovative projects in India and Sub-Saharan Africa. Whether you are an experienced forester or a small woodland owner, this episode is packed with actionable insights and advanced strategies to enhance ecological sustainability and economic benefits in forestry.
Table of Contents
00:00 Introduction to In the Woods Podcast
00:35 Meet Your Host and Today's Topic
00:58 Introduction to Permaculture with Andrew Millison
02:13 Permaculture Principles in Forestry
04:05 Water Harvesting and Road Placement
06:05 Long-Term Forest Development and Diversity
09:41 Real-World Examples of Permaculture in Action
13:00 Permaculture in Global Contexts
19:54 Practical Applications for Landowners
25:06 Low-Cost, High-Impact Permaculture Techniques
30:33 Lightning Round and Final Thoughts
34:32 Closing Remarks and Credits
[00:00:00] Introduction to In the Woods Podcast
Lauren Grand: From Oregon State University's Extension Service, you are listening to In the Woods with the Forestry and Natural Resources Program. This podcast brings the forest to listeners by sharing the stories and voices of forest scientists, land managers, and enthusiastic members of the public. Each episode, we bring you research and science-based information that aims to offer insight into what we know and are still learning about forest science and management.
Stick around to discover a new topic related to forests on each episode. Thank you for joining us on another episode of In the Woods.
[00:00:35] Meet Your Host and Today's Topic
Lauren Grand: I'm Lauren Grand, Oregon State University's Extension Forester, and Associate Professor of Practice, and I'll be your host for today's episode. Today we're exploring what happens when we apply permaculture thinking to forestry—from observing natural systems to designing with resilience in mind. Permaculture offers a fresh perspective on managing woodlands for long-term health, productivity, and diversity.
[00:00:58] Introduction to Permaculture with Andrew Millison
Lauren Grand: Joining us today is Andrew Millison, a permaculture designer and educator with Oregon State University. Andrew brings decades of experience in ecological design and has been a leader in teaching how permaculture principles can guide everything from backyard gardens to large-scale landscapes, including forests.
Welcome to the podcast, Andrew. Thanks for being here.
Andrew Millison: Thank you, Lauren. Thanks so much for inviting me. I appreciate it.
Lauren Grand: Anything else you want to share about your experience or things you enjoy about permaculture before we dive into what that is?
Andrew Millison: Yeah. Well, I'll say that for me, the most fascinating thing in my recent life in permaculture has been getting to travel around and visit and document some of the largest-scale land restoration projects in the world that are using a permaculture lens or something similar. In recent years, I've gotten to see a lot of examples in many different climates, and many of those examples include large-scale reforestation efforts. So, I’m excited to talk about forests.
Lauren Grand: Yeah, great. It sounds like you have a lot of cross-disciplinary experience. That would be really helpful for all of our listeners to hear.
[00:02:13] Permaculture Principles in Forestry
Lauren Grand: Okay, so, let’s start easy. For many of the people who listen to this podcast who aren't familiar with permaculture, can you start with what exactly permaculture is and how it's used?
Andrew Millison: Yeah, so, my elevator definition is that it's a sustainable land design method, right? Or it's a protocol—it's a system. So, we can use the permaculture design system to design at scales from the apartment balcony garden all the way to really massive-scale landscapes: huge ranches and farms and revegetation sites.
So, permaculture is really a lens. It's a way of design with the ultimate goal of designing for sustainable human settlements. So, how do we design the landscapes that we need to survive? Food, water, shelter, medicines, fuels? How do we design those landscapes where we are actually benefiting nature instead of degrading nature through our life support systems? So, permaculture—it's human-focused, but how can we create great lives for humans while also creating great lives for other species and the ecosystem?
Lauren Grand: Okay. Yeah, that's a good way to think about land management, and I think a lot of times when I'm talking to other foresters and land managers, they hope for that outcome as well. So, maybe there's some good recommendations that you can make that can help reach that outcome. So, in thinking about forests as an example—as you said, it emphasizes working with the natural system—so how can we use that approach in that forestry lens?
[00:04:05] Water Harvesting and Road Placement
Andrew Millison: So, it might be surprising a little bit, but the first thing that comes to mind for how forestry could really be done better using that permaculture lens I was talking about is in the placement of roads and access ways within a forest management system. What we see out there is that a road can have such a huge impact on a landscape. There are many examples where a poorly placed road is draining water out of a system. It's causing erosion, right? It's really depleting the system and degrading soils. At the same time, a well-designed and well-placed road can actually harvest water, infiltrate water into the subsoils, build a water table, harvest organic matter, and create a really stable access way for managing a forest.
Permaculture is a land planning method—a land planning system—really looking at what we call the mainframe design. And the mainframe design we start with is water flow and access. The access ways should be very much married to the water flow, and we design the access based around our design strategies for water.
So, I would say in forestry, that would be my first thing that I would love every forester to really think more about, because I think that it may be an underrated design feature with a really strong impact on the landscape. So, water harvesting, right? That's a big part of it, and I've seen some really nice forest projects out there that are utilizing water harvesting, including ponds and water storage that can both benefit the forest as well as benefit the hydrology and natural systems.
And then when we actually get into the forest planning itself...
[00:06:05] Long-Term Forest Development and Diversity
Andrew Millison: Permaculture really takes a long-range view. Now, I understand that all forestry systems are definitely not created equal. I mean, we have everything from clear cuts that are completely oblivious to what the landform is—they're just taking as much timber as they can—versus people that are doing selective thinning. The permaculture perspective would be looking at the long-term forest development.
So, some of the sites that I know that are really practicing permaculture and forestry simultaneously are really designing their forestry system to have old-growth characteristics. They're like, "How can we actually take wood out of this forest continually over a long term and simultaneously grow a really healthy forest that's not going to be reset to zero every time we log?" So, that would be like thinning, spacing, leaving the right trees in the right place to create this long-term kind of old-growth forest type of density.
And then another thing in permaculture, we would talk about diversity of species, right? So, we wouldn't be looking at a monoculture forest system like just a Douglas fir plantation on grid, where you're taking out the understory as the trees are growing and creating a closed canopy of one species. I would consider that to be vulnerable. It's vulnerable to any sort of pest or diseases that could come and wipe through one species. I know that a lot of the fires that we have—the wildfires—really spread much more strongly through monoculture tree plantations than they did through more diverse forests that have more irregular spacing and meadows and breaks in between.
We'd be looking at diversity in a forest system as really something that would be embodying the permaculture principles as well. And also, not just diversity, but putting other layers of useful species in a forest. So, we're like, "Yes, okay, so, maybe timber's the main yield, but could you have understory of berries? Could you be intentionally cultivating mushrooms and having other food sources? Could you be intentionally cultivating habitat for species that you're then going to harvest for meat, like deer or elk?" So, it would really be looking at polyculture systems that mimic natural systems. We wouldn't just have, say, a monoculture Douglas fir plantation—you're looking at single age, one species planted on a grid. We'd be looking to create forests that have multi-age, that have many species, and have many different ecological niches within.
Lauren Grand: Okay, so, diversity on multiple scales as opposed to just species diversity.
Andrew Millison: Yeah.
Lauren Grand: Yeah, so, that sounds pretty common to what many landowners are looking for as they're looking for multi—they have multi-values in their management system and multiple objectives. And so, thinking about how those different systems work and the diversities of both spatial and species dynamics could help be able to reach those different objectives, and those can be done on large and small scales.
Andrew Millison: Yeah, for sure.
Lauren Grand: Cool. Okay.
[00:09:41] Real-World Examples of Permaculture in Action
Lauren Grand: So, do you have a specific example of a project that you know someone's done, or you've seen—it sounds like you've seen around the world—that might have blended these principles to sort of give us more of a conceptual idea of how this really works?
Andrew Millison: Yeah, yeah. Well, I'll start with Oregon and my really good friends at the Center for Rural Livelihoods, and they have—I believe it's a 50-acre site—it's like a rural skills permaculture education center, and they manage about 40 of those acres in forests that they do pull a lot of wood out for their buildings. Yet they're managing it like I was talking about, with old-growth forest characteristics.
So, it's a really cool example where they've actually integrated—their forest roads are water harvesting structures, and then they've put in ponds in different locations within the drainage there. And then they are intentionally logging for diversity. They've got understory production of, like I was mentioning, things like mushrooms, things like different berries. And then they're also really cultivating the edge of the system. So, even though they have mostly Douglas fir, grand fir overstory, they are transitioning into their cultivated area with fruit trees and nut trees. So, they actually have their cultivated gardens and their cultivated orchard, and then those orchards and gardens blend into this managed native forest.
So, it's a really nice example. The whole site is also on a south-facing slope, and the architecture of the trees as they step from the tall trees into the gardens—the whole thing is like a south-facing bowl, basically, with the tall trees behind it on the sides, and then everything kind of steps down into the sunny central area. So, it's a really good example of permaculture design, and it's not just like I was talking about—the roadways, the water catchment, the diversity—it's also recognizing the overall positioning in the landscape and actually using the forest and designing the location of the forest around maintaining solar access to the areas where they have housing and structures and other cultivation.
So, that's a really great example. And they actually have tours, and I encourage everybody to visit there. They also do a lot of natural building, so, they use the wood, and they have some really innovative wood techniques that they've done in their buildings to utilize the small-diameter wood. So, it's not just big-diameter wood. They're valuing—they're not just cutting and then burning the slash, so, to speak. They are also utilizing small-diameter wood for their specialized building techniques in their timber structures. So, it's top to bottom, full cycle. I know they actually do—and this is not something that everybody can do—they actually are pulling logs out with horses when they can. And some of that is just preserving traditional knowledge, which is valuable itself. And I'm sure some of your listeners are doing horse logging as well.
Now around the world, I've seen...
[00:13:00] Permaculture in Global Contexts
Andrew Millison: In other climates, some really fascinating hybridization of permaculture cultivation types of systems and forestry. One of the most interesting ones that I saw was in the Cauvery Watershed of Tamil Nadu, Southern India, where there's a really big problem with the river drying up, right? And everybody's cultivating annual crops and taking water out of—pumping out groundwater. And a lot of times in the dry season, everything gets completely desiccated. Then you have big rains, and you have a lot of run-off through the system.
So, there's an organization called the Isha Foundation based down there in South India, and they are actually planting trees where they're educating farmers and they're making tree seedlings—diversity of tree seedlings—available for very inexpensive to farmers, and they're having farmers start by just integrating forestry crops along the margins, the boundaries of their sites. And depending on what they're growing, they might have a wide spacing of trees integrating in with the agricultural—more like annual agricultural crops or low-growing perennials that they're growing there—with the goal of actually having a continual planting and harvesting of timber species integrated in with the annual agriculture as a way of maintaining canopy cover, shade, and soil stability over a wide region.
Their goal is to plant about two and a half billion trees within this watershed, and that's what they feel like they need to maintain about a 30% canopy coverage in the entire watershed. That's what they feel that they would need to actually stabilize this eroding landscape and maintain and reinvigorate the river flow by using trees. So, they're using trees in order to ultimately maintain flow in the river by slowing the overall movement of water in this huge watershed.
So, that was a really cool project. I spent about five days traveling around with them, and the other cool thing about that is that a lot of these trees are being harvested at around 20 to 30 years. A lot of these farmers are on this gerbil wheel of annual agriculture—needing to take out loans, some years that are good, some years are bad, some years there's a pest, and it's always variable. But when they put in these tree crops as infrastructure within their farm, then the timing is such that they have about once in a generation, they have this windfall of cash. So, that can be investing in making new buildings. Maybe they are paying for a big Indian wedding or something like that, but it's this once-in-a-generation kind of windfall.
So, they really see these tree plantings—integrating the trees into their annual agriculture systems—as like an investment fund that they then get to have the yield about every generation. Or some people will plant, then 10 years later they'll do another planting, so, they'll stagger it. So, they'll have an ongoing income over time. But what we've seen in other projects I've seen is when you stimulate the farmer's income, when the farmer's income is central to the design, then you have wide-scale adoption basically, because everybody's ultimately looking out for their own self-interest.
Lauren Grand: Yeah, that's a really interesting story and kind of a unique way to think about melding sort of two disciplines in a way that you can both benefit your primary crop but also have a secondary source of income. And I see that application to be hugely possible in forestry with, as you'd mentioned, besides the timber species, other non-timber forest products that could be enhanced during management.
Andrew Millison: I have another cool story, actually. I've recently been working with the World Food Program, the United Nations World Food Program, in sub-Saharan Africa. I've been to—I've seen projects with them in Senegal, in Niger, and in Chad. And the work that they are doing there to recover large areas of degraded landscapes—and these are places that are very dry, hot, extremely hot nine months of the year, and then they have a three-month rainy season—so, they're putting in water harvesting structures, they're growing grasses, and then they're planting trees. They're planting these hardy native acacia trees that are thorny. And they're not typically what we would think of in Oregon as forestry trees, but there are incredible benefits. They're not necessarily harvesting them for building materials. I mean, they're cutting them for fuel wood because people are using wood, but the main purpose of the tree—well, there's a lot of ecological benefits of the trees, I would say.
So, there's wind protection, right? Because of these incredible desiccating winds from the Sahara Desert. There's incredible habitat benefits. They're creating nectar—there's honeybee production. And then there's just keeping the landscape cool and soaking water into the ground in these water harvesting structures. So, it's building the water table, but the agricultural use is really interesting. This shocked me when I understood how the trees were being used agriculturally, is that in the deep dry season, everything—every grass—is dried up. Everything's been nibbled down to the ground. There's lots and lots of livestock animals there, but these thorny trees are actually food for camels and goats who can browse the branches of these really tough, extremely thorny species. And so, the forestry part of this project is actually their deep dry season animal fodder.
Lauren Grand: Oh, okay.
Andrew Millison: Yeah. So, I mean, just another example that kind of flips the script a little bit of what we think of as forestry here in the Pacific Northwest.
Lauren Grand: Yeah, that's a really interesting example and kind of helps move into the next question that I wanted to ask you.
[00:19:54] Practical Applications for Landowners
Lauren Grand: That's something that you might be able to think of that maybe forestry owners or smaller woodland owners might be interested in using right away after hearing this. Let's say you've sparked their interest, and they want to try this out. What's something—and I'll kind of tell you what I'm interested about hearing first, because you mentioned water harvesting and road systems a lot, and my forestry brain is going to fire right away—so, how are people using, or how can they use this water harvesting from road systems? What are the applications? And maybe what are some other quick things that people can sort of dive into their new excitement around permaculture after hearing us talk?
Andrew Millison: There's a site—it's mostly a forestry site—it's called Cougar Mountain Farms. It's up in Saginaw, up in the mountains close by to Cottage Grove, and they've installed a whole lot of ponds there with the goal specifically of wildfire mitigation. So, one thing about getting these ponds in there—some of their design is around having the ponds big enough and having enough open space that firefighting helicopters can actually come and dip water, because otherwise you're up there, there's no source of water up there. So, if you actually want to see a fire effectively fought and your house—if you have structures up there protected and your farm protected—having a pond where the firefighting services can actually pull water out is a really big advantage. And then, of course, like you're saying, fire breaks through well-placed roads and also fire breaks through just bodies of water is really great.
One thing—if people got interested in the idea of animals browsing, right? And we're talking about cultivating these forest edges—I mean, there's a lot of species that are really good browse for some of the animals that we raise here, like sheep in the Willamette Valley. So, I mean, stuff like willow and alder and elderberry—I mean, a lot of these are just these kinds of shrubby, low-growing trees that if you're going to be utilizing that edge between your taller canopy, closed canopy species like the firs, you could really help to add to the nutrition of your animals by growing some of these other species.
Now we're doing an agroforestry project outside of Philomath, close by here to Corvallis, and it's actually in one of these low areas not far from the Mary’s River that seasonally floods. So, it's an area that farmers are farming fields all around there, but there are these boggy areas that are really kind of a nuisance to farmers because they never know if it's going to be a dry spring. Like right now we're having a dry spring. Oh, maybe you could actually get in there and plant those areas. But lots of springs, it's not dry and farmers can't get into those areas.
And so, we're actually doing an agroforestry experiment at Confluence Farm along with Jason Bradford, where we've planted ten acres of widely spaced tree rows. So, these trees—there's a lot of benefits to these trees. One, they could be harvested periodically for timber, firewood. Some of them, on the edges, we're putting stuff that actually you could harvest fruits from. But most of these are things like alder trees and poplar trees and willow trees. So, there is some browse element to them from the animals. When you cut the trees down, when you do harvest, you're going to get lots of sprouting of suckers, and a lot of that—the animals will browse those.
But they serve ultimately as a refuge from extreme heat for livestock. When we had the unbelievable heat spike of 2021, where we were up at over—I don't know what we were here in town, probably 113, I think Salem was at 117 or something—I mean, it was just absolutely unfathomable heat. It really made a lot of small landowners and farmers and people with livestock realize that you need a shady refuge in a heat event like that to be able to move your animals in and have some shelter. So, I really think that integrating small woodland areas into a farmstead—you have the yields of those areas, but you also have this climate resilience where you have a refuge for animals. Not just cultivated animals—I mean, not just sheep and cattle, but also wild animals as well, just to take shelter.
Lauren Grand: Yeah, that sounds like a really cool project. We'll have to see if we can take up some more of your time when you finish and see how well that works out.
Andrew Millison: Yeah.
Lauren Grand: Okay. So, some of these things that you've mentioned kind of require a lot of infrastructure, might be a little expensive to put in, or might take time as landowners decide what their overall objectives are and what direction they want to go.
[00:25:06] Low-Cost, High-Impact Permaculture Techniques
Lauren Grand: Is there anything that you might be able to recommend as sort of—I know we always want a quick fix, simple fix—but is there any low-cost examples, but still have high impact that you could recommend for permaculture concepts in forestry?
Andrew Millison: Yeah. Well, there's two things I'll say. I mean, one, just talking about getting in these edge species—stuff like pole planting willows or poplars is completely free. I mean, you just go, and you just cut off—in the right season, you cut off new branches and you can just stick them down in the soft, muddy earth and they'll grow on their own.
Lauren Grand: Yeah, and I really like your suggestion and examples of this because in forestry, those mid-story species take a long time to come back after reforestation and through maturity of forest. So, helping to put those mid-story species in is really great ecologically in forest systems in general. And to hear that they have these other benefits is really cool. I didn't know that.
Andrew Millison: The other one that comes to mind is just doing some mushroom production in the understory. Places like the Center for Rural Livelihoods and other cool ecological forestry sites that I've visited—I've seen some really nice shiitake production systems, especially if you have a pond that you can throw the logs in and then soak them during the summer and you get a flush. It's pretty low cost. All you're doing is taking logs of the right wood. People often use alder. And then I guess the cost is buying a bunch of plugs—shiitake plugs or other species you want to do. I've seen shiitake done very successfully. And then they just stack them in a kind of a grid or lean them up against a tree and then throw them in a pond for 24 hours and take them out. Then come and harvest, and they might do a number of flushes throughout the season. So, I mean, that's a really easy, low-cost, but high-value way that you could utilize an understory area of a forest system.
Lauren Grand: And delicious.
Andrew Millison: Yeah, and delicious. I know I'm kind of a shiitake addict myself.
Lauren Grand: It's always an added benefit when you can enjoy what you're making. Okay, cool. My interest is sparked, and I want to learn more. Any last-minute things you want to add that you feel like we didn't get to cover today while we were chatting?
Andrew Millison: Yeah. I mean, one other thing I'd mention as far as something worldwide that I have seen that is just an incredible forest product is bamboo. And a lot of people that are doing permaculture, especially in tropical areas, are utilizing bamboo as this just incredibly fast, all-purpose, biomass-producing, food-producing, building-material-producing... There's a great nursery here between Corvallis and Albany called Bamboo Valley. He's got thirteen acres of bamboo and he's brought in some really interesting timber species from other places that we didn't know that they could grow in the Willamette Valley. So, I think that bamboo kind of gets a bad rap because it can spread when it's not planted in the right location. But I would encourage people to really look at the benefits of bamboo because it's an incredible material for so, many different uses. So, I would just throw a little plug in for bamboo.
Lauren Grand: Okay. Yeah, good to share. Is there any recommendations you have for looking at bamboo? If you are someone concerned with it spreading, is there a specific type that people should look for?
Andrew Millison: All the good timber varieties are more spreading varieties. I wouldn't say you're looking at the type—I would say you're looking at the location. It is fairly limited by water here because we have such dry summers that it's not going to spread vigorously into a dry area. Where people have the most problem with it is when it's planted anywhere near a structure and you haven't planned for your control perimeter, so, to speak. So, when you plant it near a house and then time goes on and it just starts popping up and it pops out close to structure. So, you need to give yourself a wide berth—you need to imagine what is this going to look like in its grown-out form. That's a mistake a lot of people make is just planting trees and not thinking, "What's this tree going to look like in 20 or 30 years?" Same thing with the bamboo. "What's this bamboo going to look like in 20 or 30 years?" And that's where you make a mistake there and then people are cursing bamboo. And it really was the fault of the person that just didn't put it in the right spot. But it is somewhat limited by water, and I think there's a lot of good applications for ways that we could see it useful in our environment here.
Lauren Grand: Okay. Well thanks. That's a good added tip. We're coming to a close here and I have to say it was an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast, Andrew. I really appreciate you sharing how these permaculture principles can be applied to forestry and especially ways we can observe natural systems and design with long-term resilience in mind. So, thanks so, much for sharing your expertise. Just want to remind our listeners that as you were listening today, if any other questions came up or we didn't cover a specific topic related to permaculture that you were interested in, drop us a comment or send us a message on our website at inthewoodspodcast.com.
[00:30:33] Lightning Round and Final Thoughts
Lauren Grand: But before I let Andrew go, I'm going to make him answer all the questions from our lightning round. So, don't go yet.
Okay, Andrew, I feel like I'm going to get an exciting answer from you for this one compared to some of the other guests I've had on the podcast, but maybe not. We'll see. What's your favorite tree?
Andrew Millison: I have a lot of favorite trees.
Lauren Grand: That's a common answer.
Andrew Millison: My favorite tree changes throughout the year, throughout time. But right now, my favorite tree—the tree that in my yard I'm really pushing for, and I really want to see amazing fruit this year—is the Pakistani mulberry.
Lauren Grand: Okay. That is a new one.
Andrew Millison: Yeah, it's a mulberry that grows in just a little bit of a hotter environment than here. So, mine got hit really hard with the ice storm a couple years ago, but it's coming back, and it's got three- or four-inch-long mulberries.
Lauren Grand: Okay, so, you're rooting for that tree.
Andrew Millison: Rooting for that one. Yep.
Lauren Grand: All right, well, we'll root with you. Okay. Thanks for the first Pakistani mulberry answer on our podcast. That'll be an interesting one. I don't think we'll get a repeat, but maybe we will. I don't know. I'll be surprised. I'll have to have more permaculture folks on.
Okay. What's the most interesting thing or tool that you use in your work?
Andrew Millison: We do a lot of really detailed mapping, and so, I think having LiDAR maps and bringing them into the field and just really getting as high-resolution mapping that we can have is the thing that's the most helpful for me to bring in the field. Really being able to see what the wider watershed is and what the topography is below the vegetation. Sometimes you see such dense vegetation, you can't really tell what's going on necessarily. So, I would say that the mapping resources that we bring are very valuable.
Lauren Grand: Do those help you with your water and road design?
Andrew Millison: Yeah, it's absolutely indispensable when you're looking at putting roads on—a lot of the road design we're talking about is like a one in 200-foot drop, very subtle. So, not on contour, but just slightly off contour to move water very slowly across the landscape and deposit it into a storage location, for example.
Lauren Grand: Okay. And then, so, lastly, what would you recommend to our listeners in terms of resources, if they wanted to dive a little bit deeper into this topic?
Andrew Millison: Yeah, well, the Permaculture Designer's Manual by Bill Mollison is like the Bible of permaculture, and it's a big, thick book, but anybody that really wants to get into permaculture—I mean, this is—you're going to love this book. It's got a lot of stuff about forestry and of course covers climate zones from all over the world and also has a lot of stuff about what permaculture is more known for, which is cultivated landscapes, food gardens and such.
Lauren Grand: Okay.
Andrew Millison: Also, we have a permaculture design course online. We teach through Oregon State University non-credit through PACE, Professional and Continuing Education. So, we have people from all over the world, whether they're enrolled students or not, taking our permaculture courses online here at OSU.
Lauren Grand: Okay, great. Those are awesome resources. We'll be sure to have links to those on our website so, our listeners can find them. And again, well, that's all for our episode today. I just want to thank you again for being here. I had so, much fun chatting with you.
Andrew Millison: Thank you, Lauren. It was great talking with you as well.
[00:34:32] Closing Remarks and Credits
Lauren Grand: We hope this conversation has sparked some new ideas about how permaculture principles can inspire more holistic, resilient forest management. Big thanks to you again, Andrew, for joining us and sharing your insights.
This concludes another episode of In the Woods. Join us in a couple weeks to explore another topic on Oregon's amazing forests. But until then, what's in your woods? Okay. You're all done.
Andrew Millison: All right. Thanks Lauren. Have a great rest of your day.
Lauren Grand: Okay. Thank you so, much. You too.
Andrew Millison: Bye.
Lauren Grand: The In the Woods Podcast is produced by Lauren Grand, Jacob Putney, and Scott Leavengood, who are all members of the Oregon State University Forestry and Natural Resources Extension team. Other members of the team who've been involved in the podcast include Carrie Berger, Jason O'Brien, and Steven Fitzgerald. Episodes are edited and produced by Carrie Cantrell.
Music for In the Woods was composed by Jeffrey Heino and graphic design was created by Christina Friedhaus. Funding for In the Woods is provided by Oregon State University Forestry Natural Resources Extension, the Oregon Forest Resources Institute, and the USDA Renewable Resources Extension Act funding. We hope you enjoyed the episode, and we can't wait to talk to you again next month.
Until then, what's in your woods?
List of Resources
- Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual by Bill Mollison - https://library.uniteddiversity.coop/Permaculture/Bill_Mollison-PERMACU…
- OSU Permaculture Design - https://workspace.oregonstate.edu/osu-permaculture-design
- Oregon State University's Extension Service - https://extension.oregonstate.edu/
- Forestry and Natural Resources Program - https://www.forestry.oregonstate.edu/forestry-and-natural-resources
- Center for Rural Livelihoods - https://www.rurallivelihoods.org/
- Isha Foundation - https://isha.sadhguru.org/
- World Food Program - https://www.wfp.org/
- Cougar Mountain Farms - https://www.facebook.com/cougarmountainfarm/
- Bamboo Valley - https://bamboovalley.com/
- inthewoodspodcast.com - https://inthewoodspodcast.com/
- PACE, Professional and Continuing Education - https://workspace.oregonstate.edu/
- Oregon Forest Resources Institute - https://oregonforests.org/
In this episode of 'In the Woods' podcast, hosted by Lauren Grand of Oregon State University's Extension Service, we delve into the application of permaculture principles in forestry. Joined by Andrew Millison, a seasoned permaculture designer and educator, we uncover how permaculture-oriented thinking—ranging from road placements to water harvesting and species diversity—can transform forest management for long-term health, productivity, and resilience. Learn about practical examples from Oregon and global insights, including innovative projects in India and Sub-Saharan Africa. Whether you are an experienced forester or a small woodland owner, this episode is packed with actionable insights and advanced strategies to enhance ecological sustainability and economic benefits in forestry.
