Regeneration Projects
Launching Initiatives
PINA identifies and helps launch promising new projects from our member-partners through development, grant administration, and operations support.
Design Contests
PINA announces yearly contests and awards prizes up to $5,000 to: Best Community/Social Design, Best Income-or-job-producing opportunity, Best Ecological Benefits, Best Graphics and Presentation, and Best design from a recent PDC graduate.
Fire Ecology Restoration Project
PINA Developed Project for Wildfire Risk Mitigation and Ecosystem Restoration
In the Winter of 2021-2022 PINA successfully completed a grant-funded program that trained 3 crews in Wildlands Biochar Production in Oregon added on to conventional forest thinning for wildfire reduction. By replacing burn-piles with simple to operate, portable kilns the crews created 28.5 cubic yards of biochar that was applied to the forest floor, increasing soil health and sequestering carbon while creating a more open forest safe from wildfire. Once forests are restored in this way, they are able to be burned on a small-scale regular basis again. The traditional indigenous knowledge practice of cultural burning can then resume without risk of catastrophic wildfire. We hope this combination of techniques can create an emerging new wildlands biochar industry to add a financial stimulus to perform more Fire Ecology Restoration across the many acres of forest that need it across the West.
Read more about the program at Permaculture Design Magazine
Your help can move these efforts forward. Support PINA and our ability to fund important projects like this one by donating to the PINA Fund for Regeneration.
Integrated Water Harvesting Earthworks
PINA Design Contest Winner
Tao Orion and Abel Kloster won the 2018 PINA Design Contest $5,000 award and built a strategically important and multifunctional pond at a permaculture site near Cottage Grove, Oregon.
The once healthy forests of this region suffer from drought with sporadic high intensity storms due to climate change and industrial forestry clear-cuts in much of the region. In 2017, participants at the Center’s Advanced Permaculture Practicum on Water and Forestry designed a Keyline forestry system that included the construction of a large pond at the top of the site. This highest pond would be central to rehydrating the entire catchment. After submitting this design in the PINA Design Contest and winning the 2018 Grand Prize, PINA also shot a documentary on the importance of this project and the implementation of the site design. Now, the new pond has increased water retention in the watershed and has extended stream flow later into the dry season, while also serving as a bridge, improving access to the site’s managed forest tracts.
This project demonstrates the dramatic impact that PINA’s carefully targeted funding can make on critical projects in land, community, and climate regeneration. Please, check out the film above, share it with your community and join us by donating or becoming a member of PINA today. We can do much more together!
Click here for the full Project Report.
Click here to see the original Project Design.