Greening The Apocalypse

We talk changing your life and career in response to environmental fears with corporate world exile Andrew Lucas, now gardening expert and commercial compost maker, and co-organiser of the conference The Future of Local Food. Later in the show we ponder why environmentally themed music sucks. To listen back to our full show the week before on this topic, complete with really shitty (and some good) music, stream it here.

We speak with Lachlan Simpson about the ever mysterious 'cryptocurrency' bitcoin. Bitcoin has both its many critics (who worry about crime and tax avoidance) and champions (who promote its decentralised, private nature). But this night we explore its environmental impact and energy demands. It turns out it takes a lot of juice to power a cryptocurrency and keep it secure and anonymous.

Zainil Zainuddin grew up on a self sufficient farm in Malaysia but these days she's a researcher and scholar in local food and urban agriculture, currently doing her PhD at RMIT. Some of her studies so far have involved working with home gardeners in Melbourne to figure out exactly how much food they grow. So what does home food production offer urban resilience, and how much can we really grow at home?

Where will Melbourne's food come from as urban sprawl, climate change and farm degradation reduce local growing capacity while the city grows to a projected 7 million by 2050? We ask Seona Candy, a food and urban systems researcher at VEIL (Victorian Eco Innovation Lab), who's recently co-authored the report Foodprint Melbourne.

While three fifths of the world's calories come from just three crops, John Ferris grows over 700 different edible species (not to mentions hundreds more cultivars) at his nursery business, Edible Forest Gardens! It's veritable botanical imaginarium of uncommon food plants, strange and wonderful! He brings some samples in for us to taste. :)

Let's squeeze more people into smaller houses. That's actually the main theme of the show as we think about sharehousing and grannie flats from environmental and happiness perspectives. To help us we have Kulja Coulston in the studio. When she's not presenting The Grapevine on Triple R, Kulja is managing editor of Sanctuary Magazine, which is about sustainable home design and architecture, a publication of the ATA (Alternative Technology Association). Check out their free Sustainable House Day where you get to see in other people's private homes.

Asking "what is agroecology, and can it save the world?" with agroecologist and permaculture researcher Rafter Sass-Ferguson, who joined us on the wires from Portugal. Rafter is currently a visiting researcher at the Center for Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Change at the University of Lisbon. Check out his work at Liberation Ecology.

Tonight's guest Russell Shields talks food security for asylum seekers. After years with the food rescue operation SecondBite, in 2014 Russell co-founded The Community Grocer, a not-for-profit and social enterprise that aims to improve access for people living in public housing to fresh, affordable food. These days he works at the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, working to ensure that asylum seekers have access to good food, and drives the ASRC Food Justice Truck.

'Ethicurean' farmer Tammi Jonas joins us in studio to talk about the problems with your supermarket's bacon, and more ethical and tasty alternatives. Tammi with her family runs Jonai Farms in Central Vic raising pastured rare breed pigs, and she's also something of an agrarian intellectual who writes, talks and organises towards a regenerative, ethical food system, including being the current President of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance.

We talk urban planning and the big issues facing Melbourne with James Larmour-Reid, Managing Director at Planisphere. Planisphere is a planning, urban design and landscape architecture consultancy. James is also the Victorian President of the Planning Institute of Australia. James also helped set up 3000acres -- and urban community gardens on underused land program -- with our co-host Kate Dundas.

Our guest is community organiser Theo Kitchener. Theo is founder of several groups, including Doing It Ourselves which aims to both broaden understanding of the debt crisis and peak resources and encourage action for the sake of personal preparedness, happiness and ethical living. And the associated Livelyhood which is a network of mutually supporting co-operatives for working and playing together.

We talk with Professor Steve Keen, Head of the School of Economics, Politics and History at Kingston University London. He's one of the few economists who anticipated the Great Financial Crisis and says that mainstream economists failed to anticipate it, not because it was an unpredictable "Black Swan", but because their theories give them blind spots, which caused them to ignore the cause of the crisis: banks lending too much money to finance speculation rather than investment. He's also one of the few prominent economists with a bit of ecological literacy. His book Debunking Economics, first published in 2001, and now in an updated and expanded edition, explores these issues and more. He's also behind a crowdfunded global financial modeling software project called Minsky which he believes could "hopefully mean that economists never again lead us blindly into a crisis like the Global Financial Crisis". See his websites: www.debtdeflation.com/blogs | www.ideaeconomics.org

We talk shop, without the supermarket, with Robert Pekin, a former 4th generation dairy farmer, who like tens of thousands of his small- and medium-scale colleagues, lost the family farm in the 1990s, as a casualty of the de-regulation of the Australian dairy industry. And just like it is for so many dairy farmers in the current dairy crisis, this was a personally very traumatic time for Robert. His path to redemption and healing led him to the discovery and practice of community-supported agriculture (CSA), and he established, and now runs along with his partner Emma-Kate Rose, the social enterprise Food Connect in Brisbane, which since 2005 has been on a mission to create a fairer food system for both farmers and eaters.

Deano Goodbrew, of The Goodbrew Co on getting tipsy on kombucha and the challenges of food regulation for small producers, and about Save the Planet, a new political party and community campaign focused on reversing global warming and re-creating a safe climate.

We talk about how to use dead wombats and doormats to improve your soil with one of Australia's gardening legends, and author of over 140 books (!!!) Jackie French.

Talking going off grid living with maverick inner Sydney sustainable living guy Michael Mobbs, author of Sustainable House and Sustainable Food. www.sustainablehouse.com.au www.streetcoolers.com.au

Alison Pouliot is an ecologist and nature photographer with a passion all things wild and in particular the world of fungi. She chases the fungi season around the world, dividing her time between the mushrooms seasons of Switzerland and Central Victoria. The latter is where you can follow her through the forests in search of fascinating and sometimes edible fungi on her popular fungi foraging and ecology workshops. Check them out at www.alisonpouliot.com.

You, sweet listener, produce one of the best fertilisers known to humanity, several times a day. And if we keep putting it into drinking water and sending it out to sea, we don't have a chance of hanging around on this planet. So this show we talk the whys and hows of using urine in the garden.

Talking about how our domesticated herbivores -- cows and sheep -- can be used to restore landscape, with "restoration grazing" practitioner Jodi Roebuck. He tells us that the solution to overgrazing -- one of the most environmentally damaging practices in the wold -- involves increasing the number of animals on the land. WTF?, you say. And he talks about how the methods he uses improve grass growth and carbon capture into the soil. (Check out Roebuck Farm on the facecrack.)

Bushy's mate Stephen Pepper stops by the studio to discuss his move from a busy North Melbourne intersection to living off the grid in an old classroom in the Macedon Ranges. Stephen discusses the day to day reality involved with going off the grid and provides some helpful tips for people interested in this lifestyle.