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.
This podcast is sponsored by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold and silver. Vaulted is backed by McAlvany Financial Group, which owns ICA, one of the largest and longest continuously operating full-service gold brokerage firms in the United States. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com/JHK
