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The old paradigm is breaking apart. The new one is still not fully shaped.
If we're going to emerge into a just, equitable - and above all regenerative - system, we need to meet the people who are already living, working, thinking and believing at the leading edge of inter-becoming transformation.
Accidental Gods exists to bring these voices to the world so that we can all step forward into a future we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.
We have the choice now - we can choose to transform…or we can face the chaos of a failing system.
Our Choice. Our Chance. Our Future.
Join the evolution at: https://accidentalgods.life
Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast where we believe that another world is still possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for a future that we would be proud to leave as our legacy. I'm Manda Scott, your host and very much a fellow traveller on this journey into possibility. And once again, I want to remind you that we are holding an online book club for my novel Any Human Power, on Sunday 15th September from 6pm till 8pm, UK time. It's on zoom, it's free and this is your chance to come and ask questions, explore ideas, and meet other people who are also exploring those same ideas. I'll put a link in the show notes, but if you want to go directly, it's on our gatherings tab on accidentalgods.life. And that apart, as we move into this final quarter of 2024, I am really trying to focus on the people who are building the radical, research based, grounded, and yet amazing and hopeful visions of the future and bringing them into being. You and I need to get to grips with what's actually happening on the ground so that we can replicate it in our own communities.
Manda: And this week's guest, Dr Shane Simonsen, is one of the few people that I've met who gives his entire life to bringing that future into being. When he's not writing his Substack on zero input agriculture; and that means no water or fertiliser or pesticides (which is seriously impressive when you know he lives in subtropical Australia); when he's not recording, he's going to seed podcasts with Joseph Lofthouse or writing Taming the Apocalypse, his non-fiction view of how the world could be if we get it right. Or turning this into fiction with a series of short stories that come together in Our Vitreous Womb. When he's not doing all of this, Shane is farming in the aforesaid subtropical zone of Australia, exploring the means of production in its most grounded sense. He's working out what will grow, what will continue to grow, what has not yet grown but could grow, as we move deeper and deeper into the transition that is coming. He's creating parrot resistant maize. He's creating hybrids from things that I can barely pronounce and I'm not even going to try. But they haven't been on the same continent together since the tectonic plates last shifted and Australia separated from South America.
Manda: But he's seen old trees, a century old that are not producing seedlings and he's trying to work out why not and what to do about it. He's testing it all out, and he's growing things to see what works. And this is the point. Shane is a polymaths polymath. He has a PhD in biochemistry, which means he can trace his ideas down to their roots and then extrapolate back up and weave them through other ideas to create something new. This is human creativity in action. He's playful and he's curious, and he lets his own intuition guide him. Which in other words, might mean he connects to the web of life, asks 'what do you want of me?' And then responds to the answers in real time. Which, yes, is exactly what we're all about. So for an amazing race through things that could be done, with someone who is actually doing them, people of the podcast, please welcome Dr Shane Simonsen of Zero Input Agriculture and the Going to Seed podcast.
Manda: Shane, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. Tell us how you are and where you are and what time it is with you. Because it's quite early in the morning over here and it definitely isn't where you are.
Shane: Yes. So I'm on the other side of the planet in subtropical Australia, and our winters are probably comparable to your summers in certain years.
Manda: Definitely this year.
Shane: Yes. And I'm very well. I'm recovering from a recent, fairly serious illness, but I'm most of the way back onto my feet. Maybe we'll cover that a little bit later. Just one of those things that happens. And yeah, in more detail I'm in the middle of the Sunshine Coast hinterland, among the Glasshouse Mountains. So you can walk up them in an afternoon, but we call them mountains because we don't have much in the way of elevation in Australia.
Manda: Right. And they're called Glasshouse Mountains because they're covered in glass houses or because they're the shape of a glass house, or why?
Shane: I think the story is, when Captain Cook was sailing past the coast, he spotted them and they reminded him of glass houses for some reason.
Manda: Colonialism in action. How lovely is that? Exactly right. And just for curiosity, because it is the middle of July here and it's allegedly summer, and it's actually 14 degrees out there. What temperature is it in the middle of your winter?
Shane: So yes, we get light frosts every second year in low hollows, so not very cold. But the flip side is it's that cold for such a short period of time, we have no warm clothes, no bedding, our houses are unheated and everything's oriented towards the hot end of the year. So we've had relatives come from Scandinavia during our winter and say they've never felt so cold in their life, because if it's one degree outside, it's one degrees inside, right?
Manda: And they're used to superinsulated houses with triple glazing, and everybody wears woolly jumpers. How hot does it get in your summer?
Shane: So we have a kind of bipolar summer. Sometimes it's very dry and it'll get into the low 40°C, and other times it's very, very humid. And it it struggles to get over 35 Celsius. But we're at pretty much 100% humidity and it'll often just rain for months and months on end.
Manda: But if you went over 38°C with 100% humidity, you'd all die. That would be a heat dome, would that not?
Shane: Uh, in theory. In theory. But you usually get one or the other. Right.
Manda: Okay. All right. Yes. Until climate change makes a mess of things. And finding ways to mitigate climate change in agricultural venues is your life and everything that you orient towards. You're a podcaster, you're a Substack writer, and you've written fiction and non-fiction, all oriented towards the ways what we might loosely call regenerative agriculture could see us through. We're going to go into detail about exactly what you do, but tell us a little bit about how you came to be the person doing this, because it's not necessarily the most obvious track.
Shane: Yes. I've had a very autodidactic kind of life trajectory. I've always been a very independent and disagreeable kind of person who's always caught up in my own kind of passions and projects. And as a child, I was particularly driven by interest in biology, and I'd grow every plant that I could get my hands on and catch every animal and keep it for a while. And I was lucky enough to grow up on the very edge of suburbia, where there was still a lot of wildlife around us. And I had very permissive parents who let me build greenhouses and take over the garden and do all sorts of things that most children didn't get an opportunity to do. So I was very blessed that way. I went into research science. I shifted away from biology towards chemistry because it's more employable. And I mean, that worked according to plan, but I think it made the whole greasy pole of academia, of like climbing frantically to try and secure a position less inspiring. So I left academia, that track in my late 20s and just kind of threw away the last 12 years of dedication and started afresh. And a lot of that was inspired by becoming aware of peak oil around the global financial crisis. And the GFC happened just after I'd abandoned that academic career as a bit of vindication that this is a foreshock of things to come.
Manda: Right. And you hadn't been aware of peak oil ahead of that? Because certainly in my world, peak oil was being talked of in the mid 90s by the transition town people. But presumably that was quite a small bubble. It hadn't reached chemistry academia in Australia.
Shane: Yeah. It was a bit more of an obscure topic. But when I stumbled across it, it made immediate sense. I have a very distinct memory as being a young child in the back of the car, pulling into the petrol station and just watching what was going on. And just getting a feeling that something wasn't right about it. There was something suspicious or strange or significant about this very innocuous kind of unimportant thing going on, that was putting everything else into motion and making the whole world possible. So I'm a big believer in the power of intuition and the subconscious, despite all of my academic training.
Manda: It's not usual in a chemistry graduate. We could explore that.
Shane: I could have very easily ended up as a monk or an alternative culture kind of practitioner.
Manda: Yoga teacher or something.
Shane: Yeah something like that. A herbalist or some kind of those healing modalities. When people suggested after leaving high school with very high marks that I become a doctor, from what I knew of the traditional medical system, I couldn't imagine anything less appealing to do with my life. But if I'd realised I could have gone into alternative medicine, or gone to Cuba and learned how to practice medicine in the Third World, where you don't have all the fancy machines and tests, I probably would have jumped on that.
Manda: And so you would have gone towards a more holistic way of thinking, rather than the incredibly reductive way of thinking that is modern medicine. And in the end, obviously was chemical academia. So you abandoned that. You became aware of peak oil, global financial crash, which is quite an interesting leap. We could even spend half the podcast seeing how did you get to that, but let's not, because there's a lot more interesting stuff to do. You are now really in depth exploring regenerative agriculture and particularly seed biology in its broadest sense. What took you down that route?
Shane: Well, I would call myself more of an experimental farmer because I think there's enormous, I hate the word untapped, but maybe unrealised potential for human beings to form symbioses with other organisms. And we're a very unusual creature on this planet. We've changed the game in many ways, but I think the way we can intersect and interact with the rest of the system has a lot of parallels in evolutionary history. We're not completely novel. So a really good analogy I like to draw is when the first insects started pollinating plants, they caused this explosion in species diversity that had never been seen before. Like flowering plants are a relative newcomer on the scene, but changing the way that they could evolve and creating a whole new relationship just opened up all sorts of new possibilities. And I almost see humans having the potential to be the universal symbiont on planet Earth, because we are so flexible in our anatomy and our behaviour and our culture that we can form meaningful interactions with virtually every species on the planet, and no other organism has done that before us.
Manda: We'd have to know what we wanted to do and why we wanted to do it, though. It would need not to be by accident, I think. I mean, obviously we do quite a lot by accident. We pretty much by accident created biophysical breakdown. But I'm imagining that in the way that you see things, we need to be much more clear about this emergent edge of inter becoming. We might not be able to see that we are the insect creating flowering plants, but we could get to the edge of possibility intentionally. Is that where you're taking us?
Shane: After a very long time in academia, particularly modern academia, which is all about like designing your goals in advance and then going through the the processes, and then you tick the boxes and you achieve what you set out to achieve and bingo, you're a successful scientist. And when I look at the deeper history of science, when it was really making extraordinary progress, it was a completely different model. It was basically just playing around, being curious, being open to serendipity, not having somebody breathing down your neck that you had to achieve a specific thing by a specific time. And that serendipity of just bringing together the ingredients that allow something new to happen, I think is so much more powerful. I mean, either way, you're going to get bitten by the law of unintended consequences in complex systems. So yeah, that's kind of how how I view this experimental farming. I'm trying to assemble a set of durable biological resources that future generations and cultures and societies can use in different ways. That it's not an end point, it's a tool that's built of an infinite fractal diversity of smaller tools that all fit together in all sorts of complex and unpredictable ways.
Manda: Okay. And let's dive into that much more deeply in a second. But I'm still curious as to how you got from being a research chemist to being an experimental farmer. It's not an immediately intuitively obvious leap.
Shane: So based on my interest in plants and my history of growing them, I convinced my parents to leave suburbia and move to where we are today. A few years after that, I was very lucky to buy a larger property which was next door to them. We became friends with a very old farmer, and when he sold up, we managed to buy the property from him. I'd been talking to him for years about my smaller experiments of like trialling every crop that I could get my hands on, going through the genetics and trying to figure out what we could actually grow in our local environment, that was locally adapted. Because if you look at the history of agriculture, there was a patchwork of genetic diversity across the landscape, where every little valley had their own varieties that were tried and tested for that soil and climate that fitted into their culture, and that were diverse enough to respond to changes that inevitably unfold over time. And all of that was swept away, particularly among staple crops, when industrialisation just conquered everything.
Shane: In Europe and Asia, you have the challenge as industrialisation runs out of steam, of rediscovering that history. In Australia, we've got the much bigger challenge because we went from a hunter gatherer culture to industrial agriculture with almost nothing in between. So we don't even know which crops grow in which areas. We're starting from a blank slate, which is kind of terrifying given the projected timelines of how things might go, but it's also a huge opportunity to discover and stumble upon new solutions that were never tried before.
Manda: Okay, so two things occur to me immediately. And one is, how fast is climate change moving in Australia? If you discover something that grows today, in ten years will it not grow? Let's park that one for a moment, because that's quite a deep place to go. Moving from forager-hunter, hunter-gatherer to industrial farming. I am understanding from the periphery of some of the things that I'm reading that Australia was in fact a managed landscape much more than cook and the others realised when they got there. It just didn't have square fields with hedges around them and sheep inside, so they didn't recognise it as any form of agriculture. Can you speak to that a little? Or am I just picking up edges that aren't really relevant?
Shane: Sure. So on my podcast, the going to seed podcast, I was really lucky to interview Bruce Pascoe a while ago. So he wrote the book Dark Emu, which is an account of the pre-colonial land management and agriculture of the indigenous people. And there's some controversy about the details, but I think the broad picture is that there was a different form of relationship to the local ecosystem that enabled those people to survive in what is a very volatile landscape, and pretty much always has been. Touching back on that idea of climate change, it means something different in Australia, because we've always had a very changeable climate on every scale. It's been studied.
Manda: What sort of time scales are we talking? You mean within a year it's changeable, but within a decade, a century and a millennium, it's also changeable?
Shane: Yeah, all of those scales, there's evidence of massive regular changes. Like almost an order of magnitude worse than other parts of the world that have had much more consistent climates year to year.
Manda: Just for interest, do we know why that is?
Shane: So Australia is parked between two bipolar oceans that flip back and forth between being warm and wet or cold and dry. So the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, you've got El Nino on one side, and that's the biggest influence. And on the other side, we now know that the Indian Ocean has a similar phenomenon. So depending on which combination of heads and tails that they flip up every year, you can go from having well, a really good example is within the last 3 or 4 years we have had a period where we had, I think it was about nine months of non-stop rain. During the peak of that, we got over a metre of rain in three days. In three days. It just never let up, it was so insane. The following year, we flipped to having the pretty much equal to the driest recorded year in the last century. And then the last year we've had another six months of non-stop drizzle. It's been like UK weather, which we almost never get here. So that makes agriculture very challenging because, well, when you even look at medieval agriculture, the way things from my research seem to have worked, is that out of every five years you'd get like one major crop failure, but you would have enough grain in storage that you'd be able to muddle along and then get the next crop produced.
Shane: And just based on random allocation of those 1 in 5 bad years, one in every 25 years you'd get two crop failures in a row, and then you'd have a proper famine.
Manda: And then people would starve.
Shane: Yeah, you'd have a proper famine. The elderly and the children would be the ones who would be most likely to die, but the working age people would probably find a way to muddle through, and you'd be able to start again the year after. And that dynamic allowed you to build up relatively complex societies with enough technology to manage everything. But in Australia, when we have this random flip back and forth between really wet and really dry, the ability to produce four out of five years a good crop of a storable grain doesn't really work. So I've been developing other crops, like perennial tuber crops that you can also extract the starch out of. So one in particular, the canna is an amazing starch crop. So there's a few ways that you can use that; once you establish the the stands of it during the wet years, it tides over during the dry years and it grows opportunistically whenever you get rain. That's the other big weakness of grain crops; it needs to be wet when you're planting them and dry when you're harvesting them.
Shane: So even the month to month variations can mess things up. And Australia gets often too volatile for that to work easily as well. So the other advantage of this canna crop is that it's really easy to extract the starch out of the tubers. And starch is a really interesting product once it's purified like that. If it's dried down properly, it can be stored indefinitely, whereas dry grain only lasts for a few years. Like it deteriorates over time and becomes less and less edible. Whereas pure starch, it's like honey, you can find it in Egyptian tombs and it's still edible. It also has double the energy density of grain, because you've gotten rid of all of the fibre and the stuffing and all the other ingredients. Which means if you are transporting it, then the energetics of moving it around is more efficient than doing it with grain. Same reason, like if you've got tubers that are full of water, they're 90% water, they're uneconomical to put on a ship and move long distances. Like potatoes, even in the modern industrial era, are not traded between continents because they're too inconvenient; they're too fragile, they bruise, they have all of these problems with them.
Manda: And yet we ship apples from New Zealand. But they also bruise. Are they just higher value? You pay per apple instead of paying per kilo.
Shane: Yeah, they're higher value. So a starch based food culture that develops social complexity and maintains it through all this volatility might be a possible model that has never really been tried before. It's always been grains on medium to empire scales or tubers on like a village scale. There's also tree crops which were being developed in the eastern United States and in Brazil before colonisation wiped out those populations. The remnants of those efforts are still around today. A lot of the species that were seen as wild had been undergoing selective breeding for hundreds of thousands of years, and we're only starting to realise they have that deeper relationship with humanity.
Manda: So what kind of tree crops? What are we talking about? Things like hazels for nuts, walnuts, nut crops?
Shane: Yeah yeah. Nut crops. The pecans and the hickories in the US underwent a lot of development. Oaks were intensively managed. I'm trying to think of other ones.
Manda: But you're not eating acorns. The oaks would be intensively managed for building, for structural use.
Shane: No no no. There are species of acorns that were major staple crops for the indigenous people.
Manda: Really? I thought acorns were poisonous to people. They're certainly poisonous to horses.
Shane: They have varying levels of tannin in them. But there are procedures that you can go through to remove that tannin before you eat them.
Manda: Oh, interesting.
Shane: And it can actually make them store much better because of that tannin. So these defence chemicals are not always a negative if you have a way around them.
Manda: Interesting. Okay.
Shane: And I am also working on domesticating a local indigenous staple nut crop, the Bunya nut. It's a big spiky conifer from the age of the dinosaurs that gets these basketball sized cones on them with spikes all over them, and they're full of large, starchy nuts that are somewhere between a chestnut and a pine nut. And the model that I'm using is that when a species is domesticated, when it's brought into symbiosis with humans, it almost always involves a hybridisation event, when two or more species are cropped. So if you look at pretty much every crop that humans grow, go back to their origins and they're a hybrid of two or more wild species. And we're starting to appreciate that a lot of speciation happens through hybridisation. And this is something that humans can become more actively involved in. A really good example of the power of this is macadamia nuts grow wild around me in this area. There are four wild species, two of them are kind of poisonous, two of them are edible. And 100 odd years ago, a random gentleman plant collector managed to get two of these species and grew them side by side, and they spontaneously Hybridised. That's the foundation of the multi-million dollar macadamia nut industry that we have today. It was all just random chance, and that's how most of our species were created for domestication. We now have the understanding and the opportunity to start doing that domestication on a conscious, deliberate scale. We were Accidental Gods in terms of the foundation of our civilisation, our agricultural tools. We have the potential to become Conscious Gods in the future, from that perspective. And that's what my book Taming the Apocalypse explores; the potential for future domestication and the development of completely new agroecological systems, rather than just the grass based ones that have dominated up to this point.
Manda: So two threads are opening up in my head. One is I've spent quite a lot of time watching YouTubes of Georgia Ede, who's a Nutritional psychologist, I think, and she's looking at the impact of diet on behaviour and mood and the epidemic of mental health. And she's very keen on what we might loosely call a paleo keto diet. She doesn't really like the idea that we're eating carbohydrates. And I'm wondering whether that is relevant or whether we just get over it because we're going to need to eat something, or whether we feed the starches, say, to livestock, although they're not really designed for that either. We're discovering a lot of the omega three omega six imbalance happens when you feed carbohydrate corn to livestock, and they're meant to be eating pasture. So that would be one area. Let's explore that. And then the deeper one that's opening wide is the difference between hybridisation and genetic modification. Because I used to live in Cambridge and there were a lot of very, very smart people with no connection to the web of life at all, total technocrats who were perfectly happy putting, say, scorpion venom into a tomato because they felt that it would offer some industrialised down the line increase in yield, profit. And I used to become instinctively quite upset about that. And you're talking about hybridisation, which a different thing and which perfectly obviously happens in the world, whether there are people or not.
Shane: It happens in the wild all the time. Exactly.
Manda: So you're just being the gentleman farmer. And I love this idea that, as you said, and it hadn't really occurred to me before, but the era where science really flourished was the kind of gentleman scientist. And yes, they were all horrible colonialists, but they had plenty of money and lots of time to just play, and often basically never got past the age of 14 in their heads. They were just, let's mix all these things together and light it and see if it explodes. Oh yes it does! That's fun. And on every level. And we need to get back to that level of play being and intuition.
Shane: Intuition was also like often scientists had breakthroughs from dreams or visions, or they thought, many of them were talking to angels and stuff as well too, if you go far enough back.
Manda: And deliberately cultivating it. Yes.
Shane: Yeah. And it was the norm. It was the culture. So I'll start off answering that question by pointing out that my fundamental belief is that biological systems are irreducibly complex. So our high technology, like sequencing an entire genome is oversold for what it can actually do. It's very fragile because it's built on this huge pyramid of unsustainable industrial technology, which is going to go away at some point. So that's my core belief. If you look at people doing basic research into biology, it's this constant parade of them finding more and more levels of complexity that they didn't realise was there before. That if you actually look at the promises of biotechnology, it just keeps cutting them off at the feet over and over again. A really good example of this that I saw recently is that a genome isn't just a bag full of genes; most of the genome is all of the spacing material that we used to call junk DNA. But little by little, we're finding out that it's got all of these incredibly complex functions. So a really interesting one of these that doesn't get talked about very often is that when the chromosomes go from their little blocky X shapes that we're used to seeing, to actually functioning, they unwind into this huge tangle of like spaghetti that has a specific three dimensional structure. So the genes on different chromosomes that need to talk to each other end up being arranged side by side, so that the messages can efficiently move between them so they can coordinate their actions. So you can take a genome sequence and a gene that you want to put in that genome sequence, but we have no reliable tools to say where you should put it in that sequence, because they've only managed to determine the structure once, in yeast, and at enormous complexity and expense. So the progressive mode of going to the Star Trek future would say, 'oh, we'll just scale that up and we'll be able to do it at the press of a button for everything'.
Manda: Yeah, I'll do it in a second and it'll all be fine.
Shane: Yeah, but I don't think we have the time or the resources or the technology or the imagination to achieve all of that. And I like to point out that a team of highly trained scientists with a multi-million dollar laboratory, in six months they can move one gene between organisms. I can go out into the garden with my finger, get pollen on it, and I can move tens of thousands of genes just like that and I can bring together species that have been separated. In the case of the Bunya nuts, the hybridising species that I'm going to use is from South America. So the Parana pine grows in southern Brazil in a region with a very similar climate to us. They love growing here and they are known to hybridise with bunyas. Kew garden is one place where they grew a couple of them side by side, and they crossed, so it can be done. And yet they've been separated for I think it's 30 million years since Gondwana broke up and they're coming back together. But it took crazy fire monkey humans to make that happen. Otherwise, they'd be waiting for, like, another 60 million years for the plates to drift around again and bring them together.
Manda: And because everything's random, that might not actually happen. Oh, I love this. I'd love to just explore genetics with you. Maybe we haven't got time for it, but let's just, with your vast encyclopaedic knowledge, talk to us a little bit more. Because it did seem to me very reductive that now we can sequence the gene. We're going to know everything. And very soon after being able to sequence the gene, we discovered that epigenetics was a thing. We don't really know what that is. It feels to me, it's a bit like when politicians talk about geopolitics, it's like we've suddenly got this fuzzy area that we know nothing about, but big complex stuff happens and probably influences everything. And epigenetics felt to me like that. We've discovered a word that means we don't understand it, basically. And so we're going to label anything we don't understand epigenetics, and push it into this box. And maybe one day we will, but at the moment, look, here's the genome, we can sequence it. Yay! Aren't we clever.
Shane: And we can patent changes and here's a business model.
Manda: Make money out of it. Right. God.
Shane: Yeah it's really interesting you make the connection between the theory and the practice of economics with biotechnology. And I don't know if you've seen the Adam Curtis documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace?
Manda: That sounds horrendous.
Shane: So it's an amazing exploration of the early to mid 20th century, the emergence of computation and modelling and complexity theory, and the early attempts to apply that to ecology and economics, and how it all basically just went horribly wrong because the systems were irreducibly complex. And our hubris thinking, oh, we can measure everything now, therefore we can control and predict it, just blew up in their faces. And maybe this is just like the human story that we do over and over again.
Manda: We're doing it with AI now. There are a bunch of basically five year olds in Silicon Valley who think they're going to build God, and then they're going to solve for everything. They talk about solving, solving for energy, solving for genetics, solving for everything. And it's like, guys, do you not understand complexity? And they genuinely don't.
Shane: Mhm. So yeah, that's my basic position. I remember living through the publication of the Human Genome Project, I think it was the late 90s, and all the promises that went along with it. And there was a technique in the early days of that called DNA microarrays, where they could analyse the expression levels of many, many genes in an organism all at once. So you could feed it a particular nutrient and watch all the levels go up and down and take all of that data and pump it into a computer model and it would tell you something. And then somebody went back and actually looked at the primary method that the people were using, and they realised it was basically just spouting out nonsense. Like none of that data, all of those thousands of researchers that spent years piling up all of this microarray data.
Manda: And it was mince.
Shane: It was it was basically just nothing.
Manda: So I have to say, in the diet stuff that I've been watching Georgia ede points out there's an enormous amount of the information that we're given as fact, is based on retrospective, what they call epidemiological diet studies.
Shane: Self remembered, do you remember what you ate for breakfast last Tuesday? Yeah, exactly.
Manda: What did you eat a year ago? Yeah. Not even last Tuesday. What did you eat for breakfast a year ago last Tuesday. And you're given five options and you can only take one of them. And 'I don't remember' is not a valid option. And then people people come out and make statements based on this absolute, unmitigated random rubbish. Apart from anything else, people lie because they tell you what they think you'd like to hear or what they would like to hear. No, I never eat sweet things for breakfast. Absolutely not. No. Perish the thought. Chocolate for breakfast? Never.
Shane: And then you throw in human genetic and microbiome diversity on top of that. And it's just such a mess. The way I look at it, if you look back to the days of pre germ theory medicine, you would have a condition like consumption is a really good example. So that's when people cough and they get skinny and eventually they wither away, like they're eaten from the inside. And eventually they discovered a microbe, the tuberculosis bacterium that they attributed, like they linked to consumption. But there were probably lots of other conditions people had which had similar sets of symptoms that had nothing to do with tuberculosis. And then that's ignoring terrain theory and the health of the people and the balance of the relationship between the microbe and the humans. And again, back in the day where we thought consumption was like this formal thing, it wasn't. It's not that much more sophisticated than naming the demons that are possessing people.
Manda: Absolutely. Yes.
Shane: But that's what humans do. We feel this drive to name things, to try and feel like we can start to get a handle on them.
Manda: And we forget that correlation is not causation, also. We all know correlation is not causation but if I find statistical greater than 0.01 in my paper, I am going to assign causation to my correlation because then I get another grant. It was that era where scientists didn't need to earn money and could just play and experiment. And now if you don't make a discovery, your grant funding ends. So you have to make discoveries. Anyway, that's a whole separate thing. So we're back to being firemonkey humans creating hybridisation and you creating, did you say a piranha pine? As in savage fish with big teeth.
Shane: Oh no. It's slightly different spelling. It's p a r a n a is the sperm donor in this very ambitious project. So yeah, I've gone around to all the remnant trees of the Bunya pine in my area, I've managed to locate lots of these old populations. And the diversity in those ancient original trees is quite staggering. So that was really good, that side of the equation. And if you look at these old trees, they're not recruiting seedlings under them anymore, because there's been some change in the ecosystem. So rats or I don't know. Again, evil spirits, there's some demon that's possessed the forest. So the trees last for 200 years and most of the ones I've seen are 100 years old. So we've got about a century to bring that genetic diversity under our wing and take care of it and make it part of us, otherwise it's going to be lost. There's a limited window to do this work. And this is why I'm so keen to get this message out.
Shane: We live at an unparalleled time in history where we have a global information system, we have a global payment system, and we have a global postage system, all working like Star Trek teleporters and communicators. And any other time in history if you wanted to gather biological resources and figure out what actually wants to grow in your little corner of the world, you would need like a fleet of ships and years and a royal decree to even have a hope of not coming back in a coffin. And now we can do it just sitting in our computer office in an afternoon. So that opportunity isn't going to last for much longer.
Manda: Because peak oil?
Shane: Yeah. Well, I mean, during Covid the postal system cracked up. And for places like South Africa, which I think are on the leading edge of this process, it's getting harder and harder for the postage system to work. I've had people go to a post office and say, there's no stamps. There's been no stamps for months. We don't know when we're going to be able to send anything again. So the lights are starting to flick on and off in the periphery of the system.
Manda: Aren't they just.
Shane: I strongly suspect that Australia, because of its really remote location, is going to be one of the early parts of the global system just cut off. The end of the British Empire is a really good example of how these systems tend to behave. They basically look at a colony that they've been extracting value from and say, oh, we're not making money from that anymore, just cut that tentacle off and let it go on its own way. I mean, Sri Lanka and Lebanon are really good modern examples of that. When you cease to serve the global capitalist squid, then you're disposable. And yeah, Australia has a very narrow economy. We're the producer of last resort because we're so far away and we have high labour costs.
Manda: But you're exporting huge amounts of ore and things. You have huge mineral deposits that as far as I can tell are going straight to China, so they can sell you back the products of that. That won't stop immediately, will it? And the getting stuff, when we talked to Simon Michaux, the actual capacity to mine stuff out of the earth is going to become increasingly important as things begin to close down, I feel.
Shane: Um...Australia it's funny, our economy, if you look further back before the recent record boom, has a very on again/off again kind of mode. So our mining industry would traditionally go through boom and bust cycles because we are the producer of last resort. So when commodity prices are low there's always somewhere else that's cheaper. Like they don't have as many environmental regulations or labour laws or they're just closer to the consumers. But when the price spikes, that's when suddenly all of our mines kick into action, so that we can capitalise on it. And then the price drops again. So that's been the history from the 40s until about the 90s, and that's when China entered the World Trade Organisation and got connected as the world's factory, basically.
Shane: And I've seen a really interesting analysis by Gail Tverberg. She's an actuary who's become really interested in resource economics for probably over a decade now. I think she goes way back to the GFC kind of interest in peak oil. And her conclusion was that China was put in that position, it was welcomed into the world as that factory, because they had the world's last large, high quality coal reserves in Inner Mongolia, that could produce the cheap electricity to make all of that possible. And those reserves are now starting to reach... I mean, it's tricky. We talk about peak and there were all these predictions of collapse the second that we tipped over the top.
Manda: Which isn't what it happens.
Shane: No, it's way messier than that. And in some ways, ever since we started using fossil fuels. We've been on the downslope in terms of quality and convenience and profitability, and it's a steady slog. Have you ever seen that party game where you get connected to a bungee cord and you've got to run, run, run to try and grab a flag? And the funny part is that eventually it gets too strong for you and you get snapped back, right? That's the kind of model that I see, that we're stretching this cable, and it gets harder and harder with every step. And whether the cable snaps or we get pulled off our feet when we lose our balance, that's kind of the discontinuity point that might happen in the future. But I don't know. A future where the system manages to preserve its most profitable core and fling off bits on the periphery to preserve itself, I think that's probably... I mean, look at the Roman Empire. It got too big and too complicated for the bureaucracy to manage anymore. So they said, let's just split it in half so that it's easier to keep track of. And then the western half disintegrated quite rapidly, but the eastern half which had better soil and rainfall, managed to keep going pretty much for another thousand years. In some ways, it never really ended.
Manda: No. I think we're in the dying days of the Roman Empire as we speak, but that's a separate conversation. I'm quite interested in this. We'll come back to plants and hybridisation in a second, but there are few people who've got the breadth on this to really talk about. So I'm listening to Art Berman, who's an oil analyst, who's saying definitely that what is being traded as oil now is actually fractions of other stuff. So we're definitely over the oil peak. And as you said, as soon as you start drinking a glass of water, it's going to be empty at some point. The only question is when. Also, Simon Michaux again, in his conversations with the Chinese, they have the 2049 project, which is that by 2049, every single thing that is made and bought on the planet will be under Chinese control. They don't need to have the kind of empire that Britain and then America had, which is imposed by violence. They can have an empire that is economic. If you want stuff, you have to buy it from us and therefore we get to set the price. Having said all of that, the Chinese are not stupid. I remember somebody once on a podcast I listened to explaining in depth that technocrats end up running countries, but the technocrats in the UK and the US are all PPE graduates (Politics, philosophy and economics), and in China they're engineers. And that makes for very, very different set of assumptions, belief systems and operating processes. And the Chinese are not stupid, and they're very well aware of the biophysical limits that we're hitting. So they think that by 2049 there will still be stuff being made and people who have the finance to buy it.
Manda: And I look around the world and I see, I think, and I don't know to what extent this is a hope, this is what I'm throwing at you. I see biophysical realities crashing up against an overly complex economic system such that it cannot continue. And I remember at college a long, long time ago, being taught that in a closed system, so like Australia or Pennsylvania, you create a currency that only operates within your closed system. Nobody outside Australia wants this bunyan nut that we suddenly call the currency; it's something that we can make, let's say we call it an Australian pound. And only the government can create these. And for every hundred the government spends out it actually creates 105. So it gives out the 100 as loans Requiring a 5% interest and it spends it's 5% on stuff the government does, like building roads or whatever. So there's always 105 in the economy. It has 5%. Interest, there is always enough. You don't need an infinitely growing economy. You can have a completely stable economy provided nobody is squirrelling away their pounds or siphoning them off. Provided the bucket doesn't leak anywhere. The Governor of Australia realised this, came to England very excited, told the Bank of England and 'died of a heart' attack on the boat home. So basically he was clobbered on the head and pushed over, because they did not want someone to have discovered that you didn't need an infinitely growing economy.
Shane: Yes. Yeah.
Manda: And this was somewhere around 1870, 1890.
Shane: very interesting. It echoes what happened with our most popular prime minister ever, Gough Whitlam, when he started pulling Australia out of the US orbit. And if we had been some South American country, his helicopter probably would have crashed.
Manda: They would have invaded you.
Shane: Yeah. There would have been an assassination or something like that. But luckily the CIA could just tap the Queen on the shoulder, and she tapped our governor general on the shoulder, who dissolved our parliament and they were just thrown out.
Manda: What? What was he doing that was so dangerous to the US?
Shane: So the things that had been tolerated up to that point were free universal medical care, free university, all the usual kind of populist, progressive things of that era. This was in the 70s. Where he went too far was he discovered that the Americans in our surveillance base in central Australia, Pine Gap, were using it in ways that were spying on the Soviets and the Chinese that made Australia a potential nuclear target. And he didn't like that and it went beyond the original agreement that they'd made with the Americans. And he was going to shut it down. And they got to him before he had a chance to do that, because the Americans wouldn't tolerate being blinded on this side of the world. So, yeah, we're their little eyes and ears, that's us.
Manda: Wow. You know, if we weren't heading very fast towards the edge of the cliff, the kind of timeslip novel that took those two in and then maybe produced... I could see it writing itself in my head now. But taking us forward, I'm thinking, as things begin to close down, as the periphery closes down and everything locks into the centre. And if Trump gets in, America is a basket case. Where is the centre that isn't China is a very interesting question. Probably a separate one for this podcast, but I could imagine an economy, an Australia wide economy, that worked along that model and worked fairly well, and then it would presumably shrink down to state size. Because as you can't move around as freely because fossil fuels are not there. However we design our transport, you still need to crack the hydrogen, electricity still needs to be produced somehow, and you still need to create the things to make it. And currently they're all made in China, so the capacity to be mobile shrinks. Presumably the climate becomes even more unpredictable and less hospitable.
Manda: I am still in shock at a metre of rain in three days. I think we have it bad here and we have like six inches. How does anything survive? We've got almost no insects at the moment. We were on holiday last week in the middle of nowhere in Wales, and I counted four birds. It should have been alive. And there was a robin, a chiffchaff, a house Martin and a coal tit, one of each. We're in the middle of biophysical collapse, and people don't seem to be realising. There's not going to be much to eat next year either because hey, we are growing very little and around the world nobody's growing very much so. So we're on that teetering edge. And I'm wondering, from your Australian perspective, whether there's the native intelligence or just basic human intelligence to go, okay, we don't need the rest of the world. We have what we need. Let's just become an island. Close in. Change the model, particularly the economic model, the structure and the value system underpinning it, and we can tide this. Is that a future that you see as possible?
Shane: Again, I always go back to biology. And I think of large scale economies like great towering trees. There are lucky little tiny shoots in just the right position to get bigger and bigger and start muscling other plants out of the way. And they build up this huge infrastructure and they do what economies do. They take minerals from the soil that aren't really useful down there, and they take sunshine and carbon dioxide up in the air that on their own aren't useful. And they set up networks that bring them together and create value and the potential for growth. And they get bigger and bigger and bigger. But at the very heart of that tree, they're unable to maintain the core of their structure that made all of that possible. There's the heartwood that eventually is going to rot out, and there's no way for the plant to renew that. So it's inevitable that that tree is going to fall at some point in the future, and that's going to open up this huge, empty space where all of these other plants of all different scales and sizes, can suddenly bloom and take off and have a period where they start the whole process over again. The only thing that that tree can do, as it feels the stress of age coming on, is to divert resources into producing as many seeds as possible.
Shane: And that's what I see as the only viable strategy with the huge, hyper complex world economy. And this is what I'm trying to do here on the farm. I'm trying to bring together a minimal, functional set of durable resources that can lay low and weather any storms. That can be valued enough by the people around them to preserve them and carry them forward to the point where people actually need them. And this is one of the major difficulties that I face. So I particularly focus on staple crops, which if you look at, for example, the permaculture movement, I mean they talk about staple crops, but for most people living in the suburbs it makes far more sense to grow vegetables. Because you get more of a return on the investment and they make more sense in a small space. If you seriously want to grow staple crops, you need a large amount of space per person to actually make a dent in the diet. And I've done a lot of studies of pre-industrial agricultural systems and you do need a lot of space, and there's kind of no getting around that.
Manda: And a lot of energy or human power?
Shane: Yeah. That too, that too. So when do you live in a world where you can buy a year's worth of industrial staple crops, like dry grain for a few hours worth of industrial wage work, it's very hard to persuade yourself to spend weeks or months or years developing staple crop systems that need no irrigation, no fertiliser, no pest control. And that's that's the challenge that I'm setting myself with zero input agriculture. And I'm making progress. But for example, my most recent parrot resistant maize crop that I've developed over the years, and I actually calculated the time equivalent energy return on energy invested for this crop. I wrote it up on my Substack. And I ended up spending about 30 days worth of labour, preparing the space and planting and maintaining and harvesting and all of that. And I got I think it was about a 10th of the time that I put in back, as day's worth of calories. And that might seem terrible, like you need a minimum of two to 3 to 5 profit over the one that you invested, in order to maintain like a medieval level complexity of human civilisation. But I remind myself that the industrial system uses more than ten calories of fossil fuels to produce one calorie of food. So I'm already ahead of that. And it was a really bad year where I lost probably about half of the crop to pests, because I didn't harvest it at exactly the right time, and the weather was a bit challenging.
Shane: It was one of those marginal years. I've looked over climate records and I reckon probably about 5 or 6 years out of every ten I would get that 3 to 5 energy return on investment. But occasionally we get droughts and you can't get the crops started in time and occasionally we get floods and the whole thing gets washed away. Though I'm preparing an area that's a little bit higher up in the landscape to grow crops during wet years. So that's the other thing. With these pre-industrial staple crop systems, they relied on access to the entire ecosystem, so that you could find the little patches of land that were well suited and that gave you a diversity of responses depending on what the climate did that particular year,the weather did that year. If you look at the feudal system of agriculture, they took all of the fertile land in the village every year and then parcelled it off to all the different families. But each family would get some high land, which would be too dry in a drought year, and some low land which would be too wet during a flood year. So it kind of hedged its bets in that kind of strategy. And the idea that you can just look at a map and say, I've got ten acres, I should get a ton per acre, completely ignores the detail and the intricacies in that landscape. I mean, even in relatively flat landscapes, you still get areas that used to be swamps that were drained, but they're the first place to turn boggy in a wet year.
Shane: The mineral profile and the subsoil profile varies dramatically across the landscape as well. These these lost systems of reliably growing staple crops at scale without inputs are for the most part, lost. The genetics is lost. The culture is lost, the techniques and technology is lost. And bringing it back into human hands in a time where if you have a crop failure, you're not going to starve and you're not going to lose your progress and your complexity, and you can try again and do better the next year; we've got a limited window of time to do that, and there's only a small number of weirdos like me that are willing to spend like weeks and weeks and weeks growing a crop and sustaining and developing the genetics that has a chance of working. All of that preindustrial landrace staple crop genetics is in seed banks. A lot of it is being run by governments. So interested people, genuine breeders, can access it and start pulling it out and testing what works in their environment. Some of it has been sold off to commercial entities and good luck getting your hands on that ever again. So it's like 10,000 years worth of hard won tinkering and inspiration and serendipity lost in, you know, a century. And we need to claw back and fill in the gaps with new crops. If we are unable to find old crops to do those jobs.
Manda: Gosh, yes. So many questions arising out of that. Because this makes complete sense. And we talked on the podcast a few weeks, months, probably now to the Gaia Foundation, who are doing pretty much that, trying to rediscover the land race in the UK. So there are other people doing it. But one of the things that is obvious here, and I'm guessing is obvious in Australia, is the rate at which the climate is shifting. And I remember back in the early years of this millennium, somebody pointing out that unless we move them, trees will move... Let's say everything's getting hotter, they'll move uphill up the mountains to where it's cooler at a certain rate. And, you know, they spread their seeds and the seeds grow. And those trees spread their seeds, and they'll keep basically walking up the hills very, very slowly, like giant Ents. But if the rate of change of climate overtakes them, then they become extinct. And there is nothing we can do about that.
Shane: If or if their functional habitat is discontinuous, because it's just these little parcels in reserves and national parks, that can be an issue as well. On the climate change issue, if you look at the models in detail, the closer you get to the poles, the more extreme the changes are. And if you look at the biology, the closer you get to the poles, the more narrowly adapted particular species are to particular cold regimes. So I definitely think the more temperate climates are going to experience more dramatic changes. In terms of extreme heat, the continental equatorial regions are the ones where, I mean, you already have huge chunks of land in the Sahara, for example, where basically no one can live because it's already too extreme. So that's going to shift around and expand in unpredictable ways, but it's kind of just the edge of something that's already there. In the subtropics we're going to have relatively little change. The high altitude tropics as well, which are some of the most amazing agricultural regions in the world, like Uganda and Papua New Guinea and highland Mexico and parts of South America, I think there will be some effects on those, but it will be much less than other places.
Shane: And because our climate in Australia is already so volatile, climate change is one thing that I'm not actually that concerned about. The other thing that I bring up as well, NASA itself put out a model, you can find the paper, where they combined peak oil models with climate change models. And they did a similar thing to the limits of growth, where they put together a whole lot of different sets of assumptions, because they didn't assume they knew what either one perfectly its behaviour would be. But all of the different combinations that they put together had a really hard time getting over 450 parts per million. So we may already be close to the peak of absolute CO2 levels. Whether we get other effects with methane and stuff on top of that is more difficult to predict.
Manda: And nitrates. If we start burning hydrogen in large amounts, we create all the knoxes. And people don't seem to get that. It's like basic chemistry, guys. You don't burn hydrogen and just get water. You're burning hydrogen in air, which is 80% nitrogen. Hello? And that's 80 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.
Shane: This is just my personal perspective, but when I see the kind of doomsday, the worst case scenario climate change models, they're built on the assumption of continuing to increase our fossil fuel consumption all the way up to 2100. And I think we're pretty close to the peak of total fossil fuel consumption around about now. I'm not foolish enough to try and pinpoint a particular day, like it's going to be Tuesday afternoon.
Manda: Why do you think this? Because at the moment our renewables are increasing, but our fossil fuel use is increasing because we have a global economy that still requires to grow and global economic growth is absolutely tied to fossil fuel use. How do you see that playing out?
Shane: So at the moment, the bulk of the increase in fossil fuel consumption is coming from natural gas. Coal has pretty much flatlined. Oil has flatlined, if you're generous and include all of the other kind of liquids that come from all sorts of weird places. Even biofuels go into the oil statistics. So, I think oil may actually be slowly declining. And based on some people's analysis of reinvestment in new fields, there could be a steeper descent in oil production rates on the horizon. And a lot of the natural gas production, this huge boom in natural gas is coming from fracking for little traces of oil. So the sustainability of that gas production is also likely to be questionable. I mean, it's kind of like you got to pick your poison. It's either continued economic growth and we run into really serious climate change consequences, or we run out of resources to use for fuelling industrialism.
Manda: And then the global economy falls over. How do you see that playing out?
Shane: Oh, well, the original predictions were that the financial system was going to go first. And after the global financial crisis, the realisation struck me that modern money is basically infinitely stretchable.
Manda: I'm so glad somebody else gets this! Nate Hagens keeps going 'we can't increase the debt ceiling'. I'm going, why not? We're making it out of nothing. You just make more money. And until the point where people realise that you can't eat the money and it's not actually worth anything, you just create more.
Shane: Exactly. This is the way I visualise this. So imagine you've got a bathtub full of really delicious, thick, nutritious soup and everyone's putting their straw into the soup and sucking and that's how they keep themselves alive. But the soup level starts getting low, so the central bank, with nothing else available, pours water into the bathtub and stirs it around. And we can suck again, but it's a less nutritious meal than we had before. And at the same time, there are institutions which get really, really good at sucking up huge volumes of fluid, which allows them to get the same amount of value they were getting before and disadvantaging everyone else. So eventually you reach the point where it's just water. It's like not actually worth sucking it anymore, and the whole system grinds to a halt. So that's the way I see modern financial capital. It's functioning as this kind of extractive siphon of drawing out and concentrating this diminishing pool of real resources and putting it in the hands of the elite. And I've said this on other podcasts, I'm actually quite sympathetic to our elites. They're either completely oblivious to what's going on, or if they do realise, it's kind of like waking up and you're strapped to the top of a rocket full of explosives underneath you, and it's your job with a few little tiny levers to try and keep it airborne, otherwise you get obliterated along with everyone else who's in the cargo bay.
Shane: You only have to look at the history of civilisations to realise how often the masses just rise up and swamp their elites. And the elites are becoming increasingly dependent on really high technology to manage the perceptions and the behaviours of these masses below them. And I actually predict that the elites are going to become more and more reliant on things like AI, as they become more distrustful of middle managers to do their bidding reliably and faithfully. And when we finally lose those two chip factories in Taiwan that make that whole industry possible, they're going to forget how to rule. Like they're not going to know how to manage the sentiment of the population the way monarchs of old who didn't get their head chopped off had an instinct for doing. They're basically powerless.
Manda: Well, that would be a nice thought. Because in the meantime, the AI is is absorbing more power. We thought Bitcoin was a very bad instance of blockchain because it used a lot of power, but the AI has blown that completely out of the water. They're using astonishing amounts of power. Then they end up going, well, we're just going to solve for nuclear fusion with the AI so that we can keep the AI going. Well, good luck with that, guys, because even if you get the technology, I want to see how fast you can put it together. It's kind of scary.
Shane: It brings up a recent post that I did on my Substack, where I read a whole bunch of books and I did basically a summary of the history of the iron industry. Because the symbiosis between coal and iron production is basically the heart of industrialisation. Everything else on top of that is just lichen and moss and parasites hanging off the edge of the big tree. And my prediction is that with declining populations and demand and economic activity, we have built up such a huge reserve of iron and steel that we're going to shift to an economy that gets by just recycling old smelted iron, which uses like a 10th of the energy of smelting new iron. And we're going to do that for so long that by the time those stocks run out, we're going to forget how to smelt iron from scratch. And particularly the high quality surface ores are gone. The reason why Australia is exporting all of this iron ore is because we've used all of the iron ore that's convenient and easy and high concentration, over pretty much the rest of the planet. So you'll end up with an Australia where there might be a little bit of iron ore left that could be smelted, but there's no population here. There's no trees to turn into charcoal that are near the iron ore mines, they're all out in the desert. And you need to have that unusual combination of trees for producing charcoal or a surface coal deposit that can be dug by hand and machines, next to high quality iron ore deposits. Also next to water power if you actually want to generate more than a very small amount of low quality iron. So England had particular hotspots that had all of those magic ingredients side by side, that were used all the way back to Roman times. Like the forest of Dean, I think is a major one. There's nothing left there.
Manda: And Wales and bits of Yorkshire. Yeah.
Shane: Yeah. Right on the border of Wales. So if you went back there with no modern technology, like no diesel powered machines and all that stuff, to just squeeze the last bit of iron and coal out of the low quality reserves, you couldn't make iron. The industry is probably and the technology may well be lost. We could be living through the beginning of the end of the Iron Age. And when you think about going back to like medieval style technology, could you do it without iron? Without the tools and the fasteners? They didn't use a lot of iron, but it had a few really distinct uses.
Manda: It has the properties that you need. I'm thinking of the Vikings who managed to get it out of a particular moss. They just gathered tons and tons and tons of moss. And if you kind of smelted the moss down, you would get enough iron to make a sword. And that was what you needed it for, because that might have got you more moss.
Shane: But you would have cut down a forest to do so, to make all of the charcoal. And I would bring up the example of the New World civilisations. That when the Europeans arrived in Mexico and saw those cities and found them to be as big as the biggest cities in Europe, and to be cleaner and more sensibly governed and superior in so many ways; they were built without iron. They were built without metal.
Manda: And without wheels either, or at least not wheels on the carts.
Shane: So the idea that there is this one model of civilisation, that's just the accidental combination of technologies that we stumbled into. And we this period of disruption that we're about to go through, that was kind of projected and elevated and everything mixed up during the age of industrialisation, I see it as an opportunity for transformation on a scale that is at least equal to the start of agriculture, and probably significantly more transformative.
Manda: Okay. And if that's the case, so I currently exist in a mental framing of initiation culture versus trauma culture, and that the trauma culture led to the age of agriculture because you can't do this ownership of land and ownership of animals if you are intimately bound into the web of life as a Conscious node. And I have again, a framing that says the only way we get through the meta crisis is if we reach a spiritual state of evolution, where we are reconnecting from our 21st century reality with the web of life, and then everything arises from there. First of all there's an obvious question of whether that makes sense to you. But then if this is an opportunity for transformation and if it is equivalent to the agricultural shift, which was a values shift first; what do you see as the values that could underpin where we're going? And are they the ones that are likely to underpin where we're going?
Shane: Now, this is another example of a situation where I defer to Serendipity and play, and throwing different sets of ingredients in a pile and letting groups of real humans play around with them and see what combinations they can come up with. Rather than setting out with a five year plan of we will achieve this by this particular end. When you try and force complex systems to do something within a particular framework is usually when it blows up in your face. The Soviets trying to do their form of crop breeding based on Lysenko and all of his grand delusional promises of what he was doing, is a really good example of what happens when existing organisations try and engineer a particular goal for political reasons, and how blindly they can push through to that, regardless of all of the disasters that are happening along the way. Politics is often more a game of promises than results.
Shane: This reminds me of another Substack post that I did called The Genie in the Bottle Neck. And I actually looked at the whole history of human evolution. And basically every time there was a big step forward, there's evidence of a major population bottleneck. So around the time that Homo sapiens emerged, there were massive planet wide ecological stresses that pushed all of those pre-existing hominins to their absolute limits. And something during that disruption triggered a change in us and we became our modern, creative, loopy selves. I really wonder what the Neanderthals thought when the Homo sapiens turned up with body paint and tattoos and feathers hanging off them and just so over the top, you know.
Manda: Manic firemonkeys.
Shane: Well, part of the trick of modern humans seems to be that we have a finely tuned level of insanity that allows us to play and mess around with new solutions in a way that previous hominins didn't. Once they found a solution set, they tended to stick to it for really, really long periods of time. Whereas modern humans, there's something very different about how we approach the world and each other. And I suspect that something like that is ahead of us in our future, because we are facing something like a population bottleneck. We've probably got about ten times more people on the planet than we can support. I very much think that just demographics...I'm not actually expecting that it's going to be like a sudden piling up of the bodies in the street overnight.
Manda: No. We're just not breeding as much as we were. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Unless the Americans manage to take over the world and force women to be broodmares, and then that all falls apart. I have a question, though, about when do you see modern humans arising? Because we know, for instance, that the cave paintings in the south of France were created over a space of 25,000 years. And that suggests to me that you have social and cultural stability for actually a very, very long time. And presumably there was some kind of climatic crisis that pushed everybody into a different form of behaviour. But given stable conditions, it seems that Homo sapiens then was capable of remarkable continuity of, let's assume, cultural behavioural connectedness, systems. Are you assuming early modern humans arise at the time of agriculture, or are you going back 300,000 years?
Shane: Oh no. This is 50,000 years ago when there was that first big out-of-africa push. See here's the thing. There's this weird distortion when you look back at the past, that the further you look back, the less information you have and the more similar things appear over longer periods of time.
Manda: And we look back through very given lenses of our current assumptions, which may not be accurate.
Shane: Yes. We have more information the closer you come forward. But there seems to be a common pattern in humanity and in biology as well. Like everywhere that you look, that there are repeated waves of partial replacement. And this has happened multiple times in Europe. So there was the first hunter gatherers from 50 to 30,000 years ago that displaced the Neanderthals. But they didn't exactly displace the Neanderthals, they interbred with them.
Manda: A lot of inbreeding.
Shane: So there's actually more Neanderthal DNA alive in humans today than there was when there were just Neanderthals in Europe, so they didn't exactly go extinct. The species concept kind of doesn't really work. It's another one of these like put a label on it attempts, that doesn't actually map reality very well. So after the hunter gatherer our humans arrived, then the early agriculturalists arrived from Turkey is where they mainly appeared. But it seemed to be a pattern of mostly men spreading out, but the hunter gatherer women mostly survived. What the details were of that arrangement. Mhm.
Manda: One assumes it was kind of bloody. It does seem to have happened very fast.
Shane: It was probably bloody. But then that happened again when the Yamnaya horse riding people from the Russian steppe swept through. And then we had a repeat of that with the industrial humans spreading out all over the rest of the world. And now we've got Brits in places like Australia where you didn't expect them to be. And this pattern of partial replacement happens in indigenous cultures as well, where you have enough data to actually put together a model. Like even in Australia, there was a wave that arrived 5000 years ago and brought the dingo. They were probably being pushed out of Southeast Asia by the first rice farming agriculturalists spreading down from southern China.
Manda: Right. Yes. That was my question. When do we assume that the first peoples of Australia is are right? Because it seems to have split off probably before the 50,000 years shift in Europe. And then was that a stable population until Cook and the others arrived? And it sounds like not.
Shane: No no, no. Even in Australia, there seems to have been a very early arrival of people around about 50,000 years ago. So part of the very first modern humans leaving Africa, they seem to have been mostly coastal dwellers and not very good at hunting. They seem to mostly live on the coasts.
Manda: Because they were quite good at fishing, presumably.
Shane: Yes. So there was another wave that arrived from South East Asia about 30,000 years ago that did a partial replacement. The only survivors of that were in Tasmania and in a few highland tropical locations and Papua New Guinea seemed to have been spared that. So you might notice that the Papua New Guineans and the Australian Aborigines, they're very close to each other, but they're quite distinct as well. And they've been on different trajectories. So that population 30,000 years ago were the ones that drove the megafauna extinctions and caused massive ecological chaos. And the same thing happened in the Americas when the first hunting humans arrived there with, again, evidence of an earlier, less obvious wave of humans that arrived that were mostly coastal and didn't cause massive megafauna extinctions, or at least not as obvious. So when Europeans turned up and triggered yet another wave of ecological chaos, it wasn't completely new. This has been happening step by step. I mean, even with Homo erectus, there is evidence of an extinction signal in small elephant species at the time that they presumably were capable of hunting. So and again, the further you go back, the less crisp the data is, but the patterns are there over and over and over again.
Manda: Right. Interesting, because I heard Schmachtenberger talking about this and saying that he'd seen new data and that the extinction waves were not as clearly cut, but I don't know the data. Because it makes quite a compelling narrative of human behaviour over time, but we don't know.
Shane: But the funny thing is this isn't unique to humans. So if you go back to the very earliest evolution of animals, trilobites were the first species to develop armour and slicing jaws. And as soon as they could do that, they went on a rampage across the oceans and they ate every soft bodied creature that they could get their little pincers on.
Manda: And so then everything develops shells or the capacity to move much faster than a trilobite.
Shane: Yeah, yeah. And other creatures copied that adaptation. So eventually the trilobites died out, but we were left with crabs and insects and other creatures that used a similar approach. And the interesting thing is that these shifts in evolution, the simple model is, oh, they just accumulated mutations until they had the structures to allow them to build that new thing. But there's also an evolution happening of the planetary metabolism. So they now think that why creatures took that long to develop jaws and shells, they actually needed the chemistry of the oceans and the atmosphere to just gradually creep until it reached a point where the chemistry made sense.
Manda: Okay, you've got enough calcium lying around to be able to make your jaws and your shells.
Shane: Exactly right. And I think that the appearance of humans is linked to a similar change in the metabolism of the entire planet. So the emergence of what we think of as our deepest human ancestors, like fire wielding monkeys that are on upright legs and run all over the place doing crazy things, that happened at a time when the planet reached its lowest ever carbon dioxide level on record. It got to such a low level that they think that the plants that had evolved to tolerate low carbon dioxide levels, particularly in the tundras and the grasslands and all of the megafauna that were dependent on them, those ecosystems basically crossed that threshold and started to fall apart. And the emergence of humans as this really weird, fire wielding species that had never come before, maybe this is all part of some planetary Gaia process; that we're putting carbon back into motion, that had been lost for millions of years. And this is just a theory, and it's even more hand-wavy than the most sophisticated climate model out there.
Manda: Yeah. And I can feel the GB news crowd fastening onto this as okay, it's happening, but it's okay, it's all a design. We can keep burning the fossil fuels as much as we like because Gaia wants us to. That would be a whole new thread of reform UK.
Shane: But they also have to accept that we're just about to run out of them. So the party is nearly over. And there is going to be all sorts of chaos and disruption and unpredictability. But the only way that you can transform a system is to put it under stress. If everything is perfect, if the weather's never changed, the fish keep turning up in the river, the cave is dry, why would you change anything if you have a successful recipe? I mean, you need a meteor to hit the planet if you want to move from dinosaurs to mammals.
Manda: Or you need the fire monkeys to decide that they don't care about being the instigators of another mass extinction event and see what arises.
Shane: The really interesting hypothesis, though, if you look at the trilobites and then other creatures doing the same thing when the conditions were suitable, I like to think that humans are like the first trilobites of our particular lifestyle. And that there are other creatures that are equally capable of being intelligent and sapient and meta social and having culture, and that humans could even play an active role in bringing those species into a new form of consciousness.
Manda: Okay, this is where I was heading. I mean, partly whatever it is that arises is going to have to thrive on polyfluoroalkyl substances in the rain and nanoplastics in the clouds. And we don't know what that looks like, because it's not the things that are living in the oceans at the moment. So we've got the whole Ray Kurzweil, who originally wrote The Singularity Is Near and has since written a book called The Singularity Is Nearer. And the fact that you get to put that on a title and nobody tells you that that's not actual English makes my teeth really ache. However, the singularity is approaching. And my definition of singularity, which is not quite Kurzweil's, but at the point when we when we design and build the silicon entity that can design and cause to be built its own successor, then we are redundant in the evolution of intelligence, not in wisdom, not in necessarily spirituality, but in the capacity to manipulate data. And we must be extremely close to that now, if not already past it.
Shane: I don't agree.
Manda: Why not?
Shane: I think it's hype. I think it's Silicon Valley drumming up more venture capital at a time when they really needed it, and that the models have been completely oversold.
Manda: Okay. What's stopping us?
Shane: A couple of things.
Manda: Where do you see the boundaries and the barriers?
Shane: Okay. So first thing if you accept the assumption that a brain is just a computer, it's just a computer with really, really tiny transistors that can turn on and off and make other transistors turn on and off.
Manda: And we don't. You and I don't think consciousness arises from there, and a lot of Silicon Valley does. But that doesn't stop them creating data manipulation to a very high level.
Shane: Oh, well, I mean, anyway, that's a separate issue, but I'll get back to that. If you wanted to reproduce the amount of hypothetical calculations in a single human brain, you would need the energy output of the whole Three Gorges Dam to sustain that. Or you could give three bowls of rice to a Chinese peasant, and they could do all the thinking for you.
Manda: Why? Because it happens in a person on three bowls of rice, why could it not happen in the right silicon chip with the energetic equivalent of three bowls of rice? Why? What's stopping it? Why is that not parity?
Shane: No, no, it would take it would take a Three Gorges Dam worth of hydroelectricity.
Manda: Why, though?
Shane: Because even in silicon, the transistors are so energy intensive and so large compared to what a neurone can do, that there's just no comparison. It's like so many orders of magnitude less energy efficient.
Manda: But they're shrinking. The current transistors are less damaged than the wavelength of light. They're tiny and they're getting smaller.
Shane: Yeah, but they can't get smaller than an atom. Basically as they get smaller, they get more sensitive to flaws.
Manda: Sure. But they don't need to be smaller than an atom to be the same size as your neurone. Your neurone is not an atom. It's a functional membrane across which atoms flow.
Shane: I think it comes down to the functional connectivity of the brain, is, vastly superior to what transistors can do. They can only have a limited number of effective connections.
Manda: You don't think quantum computing is going to be a thing?
Shane: It will be useful for a couple of niche applications like cryptography and finding prime numbers.
Manda: Or weapons design.
Shane: Uh, we're pretty capable of doing that. But I'm very sceptical. So what I think AI will do is facilitate low level functions like automated surveillance, particularly of abstract information, like typing. It's getting better, but it's still more resource intensive to process things like audio, like people speaking or video of things moving around. But that still uses like orders more computational power.
Manda: But it's still pretty good. I can have a conversation with Faith about something completely random we've never spoken about before, and my Facebook feed within minutes is full of adverts for that thing that we've never spoken about before.
Shane: We've observed that as well.
Manda: So it's already managing that.
Shane: Yes. But they're very simple routines. And the reason why I see elites loving AI is solely for the purpose of control. So when you have a king who has advisors, who has people who go out to do his bidding, he has to be able to trust all of them are on his side and that they're competent in what they're being asked to do. If you can replace all of that upper level of the control mechanism with AI, you concentrate all of that control in the hands of a much smaller elite. And it's the same thing that happened with shoe production going from the hands of craftsmen into machines and factories. It allows centralisation and control. And that's where I can see AI having an impact. But I can also see it blowing up in the elites faces when the resource pyramid that makes it possible goes away and leaves them basically naked.
Manda: Yes. And have you read Douglas Rushkoff and the survival of the richest and what he calls the escape fantasies of tech billionaires. They're already thinking down that line. We're going to have to stop because we're way over time. But this is so interesting, I had so many questions about the hybridisation of plants. Maybe we'll come back for another go because we kind of got off that.
Shane: Oh yes. I would love to come back.
Manda: So one last question and maybe this is something that we save for part two. If we take what you said about AI as accurate and the tendency of elites to want to concentrate power, and the fact that we're running out of the motive force of that power, which is fossil fuels. Musk thinks that quite quickly and quite soon, we're going to be injected with things that are going to bring the cloud into our brains. And this is assuming that he understands what consciousness is, which I'm pretty clear he doesn't. But if we're stepping forward into evolution, coming back to my question about spirituality and values; I don't know quite where it's going, but it seems to me that at the moment we have a value set which is predicated on scarcity, separation and powerlessness. Zero sum, take as much as you can, who dies with the most toys wins. And that that itself is not a sustainable concept base. In your concepts of the future, even 30,000 years into the future, where do you see us as human beings? How do we feel and how do we engage with each other and the world? How do you see us moving forward?
Shane: So this is despite all of the challenges and difficulties that may well lie ahead of us. I mean, we're already living through it. Life is steadily becoming more challenging for everybody. I'm still really hopeful about the future, because there's a basic principle that turns up in biological and complex systems all the time. When you combine hybridisation with stress, when you throw different ingredients together and then you kind of squish it in a particular way, it surprises you again and again in its ability to come up with new functional solutions. And we have gone through probably one of the most spectacular processes of hybridisation and mixing everything up in the world. Like organisms and cultures and people and ideas have been scattered all across the entire planet in a way that never would have been possible without industrialisation. So I try and look on the bright side. This period has been utterly improbable and unexpected and just astounding in so many horrific ways. But I like to think that there's going to be enduring benefits as well too. So, I mean, a really good example of one that's very well established. So the Polynesian people are the last major, distinct culture to appear in the pre-industrial world, and they're the result of a group of sailors leaving Taiwan who were Austronesian, East Asian, for want of a better word. And on their journey, they stopped at Papua New Guinea and they picked up people. It mostly seems to have been male sailors and females that jumped on board.
Manda: Or were dragged on board.
Shane: Yeah, you can use your imagination to what actually happened there, how traumatic or celebratory the details were. The ultimate story is, though, that you ended up with that combination of influences creating a whole new kind of people. And it wasn't just the people themselves, like the crops and the livestock and the cultures and the technologies that they brought to that mixture. And then they threw it into the middle of the Pacific Ocean, like one of the most desolate, hostile environments when you're sailing from island to island that you can imagine. And they survived and they adapted and they created some of the most, amazing, wonderful cultures. And diverse cultures, too. Like there were warlike people, there were peaceful people, all sorts of arts and cultures and agriculture and adapting to the situations they found themselves in. But I think part of the reason they were capable of doing that is because they brought these two disparate influences together, and that was just two cultures that weren't that dramatically different from each other. Industrialisation has now taken all of the ideas and all of the organisms and all of the cultures, and it's brought them all into contact with each other. And now we're about to apply this enormous stress and pressure to adapt to the reality in our little tiny pockets all around the world. And if that doesn't transform humanity for the better, I don't know what will. I see this as something that is as significant as the emergence of modern humans, Homo sapiens, 50,000 years ago. And it's a self-imposed disaster by any stretch of the imagination. It wasn't that the the climate wobbled a bit and all of the the rain stopped.
Manda: Or a meteor hit or any of the things that have created stuff.
Shane: Or a giant volcano went off or something. We did it to ourselves, and that's why it really hurts, as the song goes. I don't know if you know that song? Is it an Australian one? I think it's an Australian one. Maybe it's American.
Manda: I don't know. I don't do music, so it doesn't matter where it comes from. I won't know it. But okay.
Shane: But again, it proves the point. It's cultural cross-pollination. And we have a limited window where it's relatively easy to bring the ingredients together so that the next generation can play, and they can use those tools. And the only tools that I see, the only technologies I see that can survive the end of industrialisation and last indefinitely, are biology and human culture. They're the only truly renewable resources that we have. And the potential synergies between them, we're only just starting to explore those. I'll end on just one thing. So in my book, Taming the Apocalypse, it opens with a retelling of the myth of Prometheus. So the gods originally gave man fire. And if you look at the original story, they also gave them culture. And humans use those two gifts from the gods to bring us to the point of industrial civilisation and disaster. So in my story, we get one final gift from the gods, and it's the gift of Demeter. It's the ability to create new life forms. So Demeter originally gave us just a couple of crops, just a very narrow range of crops to keep us fed.
Shane: But because of the ecological like demands of them, we basically destroyed the planet trying to grow more of them. If we can start producing organisms that synergize with us, that suit the local environment, that are diverse all over the planet and continue to change as our planet continues to change, we will go from being those early humans who accidentally found fires from a lightning strike to a much later set of humans that could create fire deliberately, by doing much more complicated things like rubbing sticks or smashing the right kind of rocks together. We went through that early stage of accidentally having biological technologies. We just, you know, stumbled upon across natural hybrids at the right time and started growing them. And the next thing you know, we've got Babylon and ancient Egypt built on top of those very flimsy little grassy foundations. If we now go through a transformation where we learn to create new biological entities at will, that fit the environment, rather than changing the environment to fit the few biological tools that we have, it will completely transform our relationship to the planet.
Manda: Right. And for those of you watching on YouTube, you can look behind Shane and see great vats of seeds. And the fact that you're doing this is extraordinary and wonderful. And I will put links in the show notes to everything that you do. Your podcast, your Substack, your two books, and we'll link to the various other things that you've mentioned. Because it seems to me if people take one thing away from this, it's get growing things. Get curious about what really grows in your environment that is edible and useful, presumably also for fibres. We're going to have to clothe ourselves. We're going to need fibre, fuel and food from the things that we can grow. And working out what will work in your own environment, wherever you are in the world is absolutely crucial. Is there a network of people who think like you that we can join, or do we need to set that up?
Shane: There are little seeds sprouting everywhere, but the one I will recommend is the Going to Seed Discourse forum. That's where people who are amateurs, all over the world, doing crop breeding experiments and producing their own novel.
Manda: Discord forum or discourse?
Shane: No, it's Discourse. Yeah, I got mixed up on that too.
Manda: And where does it happen? What is its foundation on the net?
Shane: The going to seed group is a non-profit in California, I think they're mostly based out of.
Manda: Okay, so it'll have a website that we could look up or a Facebook page. Somewhere in the Giant Squid.
Shane: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They've got all of that.
Manda: Brilliant. Okay. We will find links to that too. Fantastic. We are so far over time. This has been so interesting, so entertaining. I'm so impressed with your capacity to look broad and deep and then reach conclusions that other people are not reaching. So, Shane, thank you so much for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast, and we will come back for a second go, probably in the spring because I seem to be booked forward into February now, but let's see where we get to. Thank you.
Shane: Thank you.
Manda: Well, there we go. That's it for another week. Enormous thanks to Shane for the depth and the breadth of his thinking, and for his capacity to make things real. Really to actually do stuff in the ground and with the ground and on the ground that could be creating the seeds of our future in absolutely literal senses. Inevitably, we had another half hour's conversation after I switched off, and I so wish I had recorded it. Although I do have doubts as to whether you all really want a two hour podcast out there. You could let me know sometime if that's the case, because really often when we both relax thinking that the microphones are off, whoever the we is, the conversation really sparks on. Anyway. Shane is coming back towards the back end of the year, so we will have another bite at that. And he's got a whole bunch of other completely different interesting stuff that we can explore.
Manda: There were so many questions we didn't get to in this one. Even going deeper on this would be worth it. Knowing that he's coming back, if you have any obvious questions, please send them. Put that in the title and I swear I will at least put them all in the same folder and read them before I see him. Probably. Anyway, there is a huge amount to digest from what Shane is doing. I have put links in the show notes to most of the things that I think we mentioned. Follow them up, read his Substack, listen to his podcast, read his books. They are amazing. Head over to the Going to Seed online community. To join up with their discourse you have to read their book or go to one of their courses, but that doesn't seem like a bad idea. Because actually, as our world simplifies, which is inevitable, we're going to need to know how to feed ourselves. And however we choose to do it, it seems to me that being maximally creative with what could possibly grow as our climate and our weather and everything associated with growing shifts, is going to be a really, really good idea. Along with learning how to make dresses out of nettles and how to weave and sew and spin and knit and all the things that I am really not very good at. I will stick to growing the beans, which I used to think I could do quite well and then this year has kind of blown that out of the water. So we'll see. Anyway, head off and explore. Everybody eats stuff, we all need to get on board with this one. That's it for this week though.
Manda: We'll be back next week with another conversation. And in the meantime, as ever, enormous thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot. To Alan Lowles of Airtight Studios for the production. To Anne Thomas for the transcripts. To Lou Mayor for wrestling with the video and getting it onto YouTube. To Faith, just for being there. We couldn't do this without you. And as ever, the same to you. Thank you for being there. We absolutely wouldn't do this without you. This podcast would not exist if I didn't really believe that serious numbers of people were taking on board what we said and beginning to change the world. So thank you. And as ever, if you know of anybody else who's interested in food, who wants to understand how we can move our creativity to the emergent edge of inter becoming around the concepts of growing our own food, then please do send them this link. And that's it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.