This chapter recounts the speaker's early awareness of peak oil and its impact on their journey from research chemist to experimental farmer. Exploring the shift from conventional to holistic approaches in agriculture, it highlights the interconnectedness of ecosystems and promotes regenerative practices amidst challenges posed by climate change. The discussion also critiques modern agricultural methods while advocating for a reevaluation of historical indigenous land management practices and the potential of innovative, adaptable crops.
The climate emergency is impacting our entire eco-sphere. Plants are at the core of every food chain but we have no idea how fast they can adapt to changes that are taking place in decades where once they took Millenia. Which is where human ingenuity and intervention could be game-changing. If we put our minds to it, could we help plants to evolve in ways that serve the entire web of life?
In this regard, Dr Shane Simonsen is someone who has oriented his entire life to making sure that we have the right seeds to grow the food we'll need as industrial agriculture grinds to a halt.
In this regard, Dr Shane Simonsen is someone who has oriented his entire life to making sure that we have the right seeds to grow the food we'll need as industrial agriculture grinds to a halt.
Shane has a prodigious output. When he's not writing his substack on Zero Input Agriculture - this means no water, fertiliser or pesticides, and the former of these is seriously impressive when you know he lives in subtropical Australia - or recording his Going to Seed podcast with Joseph Lofthouse, or writing Taming the Apocalypse as a non-fiction view of how the world could be if we got it right, or converting this into fiction in Our Vitreous Womb… when he's not doing all of this, Shane is farming in the aforesaid sub-tropical zone of Australia, exploring the means of production in their most grounded sense; creating parrot-resistant maize or hybrids from Bunya Nuts and Parana Pines - species that haven't been on the same continent together since the tectonic plates last shifted and Australia became separate from South America.
Shane is a polymath's polymath: he has a PhD in biochemistry which means he can trace down ideas to their roots and then extrapolate back up and join them with other ideas to create something new. He celebrates the old gentleman scientists of Victorian times who may have been innately colonial products of the trauma culture, but they played at science, they did things that weren't obviously oriented to producing the next paper or winning the race to the next patent: they had fun, they followed their intuition and most of the really big advances in our technologies arise from them. Shane is also aware that most of the big advances in human evolution came when we were under serious pressure as a species.... kind of like we are now. So he's made it his life's task to find ways we can feed ourselves with low technology in a changing world. What species will survive and how might they grow? What hybrids can we intentionally create that will open up new spaces of possibility? How can we - how will we - transform ourselves in this changing world?
Zero Input Agriculture Substack https://zeroinputagriculture.substack.com/
The Going to Seed Podcast with Joseph Lofthouse and Shane Simonsen https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-going-to-seed-podcast/id1713240427
Shane's speculative fiction 'Our Vitreous Womb' https://haldanebdoyle.com/
Taming the Apocalypse - Shane's non-fiction https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/212297242-taming-the-apocalypse
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1955162/
Gail Tverberg Our Finite World https://ourfiniteworld.com/author/gailtheactuary/
Going to Seed Online Community https://goingtoseed.org/pages/community
Any Human Power Book Club Sunday 15th September 6-8pm UK time (BST) https://accidentalgods.life/any-human-power-discussion/
