KunstlerCast 440 — Dr. Shane Simonson on Zero Input Agriculture, Taming the Apocalypse, and the Neo-Medieval Future

Dr. Shane Simonsen is an Australian experimental farmer, author, podcaster, and thinker based in the subtropical Sunshine Coast hinterland of Queensland (on around 40 acres among the Glasshouse Mountains). He holds a PhD in biochemistry and previously worked in academia and as a teacher before leaving in his late 20s — disillusioned by institutional structures, the global financial crisis, and concerns over peak oil— to pursue independent work in biology, ecology, and sustainable systems. For the last decade he obsessively developed hardy staple crops for his little mountain village. Australia is uniquely vulnerable to energy system disruptions and totally unprepared for post-industrial agriculture. Shane blogs weekly at Recombination Nation.  His podcast of the same name interviews amateur plant breeders, geopolitical experts and culture innovators. His non-fiction book Taming the Apocalypse explores a post-industrial future built purely on biological technology  He also wrote a novel under the nom-de-plume Haldane P. Doyle, Our Vitreous Womb, imagining a biotechnological civilization in the distant future.