Nicole Foss
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Cory,
The fate of property prices will depend greatly on location, mostly on how easy it is to earn a living in the vicinity. In places where there end up being almost no employment prospects, the fall will be much faster, and perhaps go almost to zero. Where economic opportunities remain to some extent, there will be price support for homes.
When I lived in England in the 1990s you could buy a four bedroom council house in Gateshead for a pound. These were quite nice houses, but to the council there were a huge liability. There was no work in the area, so no one wanted the homes and the council wanted to get out from under the maintenance burden.
You may be able to find something very cheap sooner rather than later. It’ll depend on your own ability to do necessary work, so as to save on contractors, and on your ability to earn a living in the area in creative ways. If you can earn a living where other can’t, then you can take advantage of very low house prices in challenged areas.
There’s a major difference between a low price on the surface and affordability. More people can afford todays high prices than will be able to afford tomorrow’s low ones, because of the current access to credit. In the future the opportunities will go especially to resourceful people with practical skills who have also saved capital as liquidity.
In many ways collapse will be rapid, but as I said, it will be far more rapid for financial assets than for physical ones, since those have no underlying value at all.
I checked my inbox, but I don’t see it. Which email address did you use? The one I have access to is theautomaticearth(at)gmail(dot)com . As I said, I will come and discuss the concerns in good faith.
I’ll still be doing lectures, but much less. There’s not much demand for them at the moment, since everyone went back to sleep again, and that makes it difficult to string together enough engagements for a trip to cover its costs. The last trip in the US made a significant loss for instance, since costs were higher than usual with two people. I need to be able to fund travel and I can’t really do that at the moment, so I’ll be staying put more and doing other things.
The community here is really something special in my opinion, despite its initial difficulties. One of those has been some hostile neighbours who did want a gated community for their subdivision of large homes (which pre-dated Atamai), and were displeased at the presence of the village. They have created significant friction and caused the development phase to drag on longer than envisaged.
Atamai has absolutely never been planned as exclusionary – quite the opposite in fact. There are younger people with young families here as well as older people. There is a working farm providing produce and a vineyard business as well. There are people here from New Zealand, Australia, the US, Canada, Germany, Italy, India, Malaysia, Japan and the Philippines. By no means are all of them wealthy.
Communication is so important, and that didn’t always happen as effectively as it could have done in the early days, which left disparities of expectations and some hard feelings. A major amount of effort was subsequently devoted to addressing concerns. As the village has developed, more emphasis has been placed on process and consensus, and on setting the development on to a solid community footing. There is a tremendous amount of potential here.
If the dinner invitation materializes, I will go and discuss Kris’ concerns in good faith.
Cory,
Financial assets get repriced very quickly, because they have no underlying value. Once people realize that, they can get repriced to pennies on the dollar, or to nothing at all, within a day. Houses are not financial assets. Real assets that do have underlying value reprice much more slowly. They are likely to fall almost as far, but over a longer time.
Anything is worth only what someone will pay for it at any given time. In order to find out what that figure is, the asset must be bought and sold. If that doesn’t happen because there is no meeting of minds between buyers and sellers then there is no price discovery. The sellers will tell themselves the house is still worth what it once was, or perhaps they will think it’s gone up over time, because that’s what they’re used to. Actual deals in the real world will set the price, and for everyone who owns that class of asset, not just for the people who made the deal.
In a huge crash of financial asset value, the downward pressure on home prices would accelerate, as financing would no longer be available, and people would no longer have the capacity to pay the previous prices. This would be expected to lead to a long period of illiquidity, then sharp price falls, with the rinse and repeat dynamic taking hold thereafter. I am expecting house prices to fall some 90%, but those who wait too long to sell would end up stuck in an unforgiving buyers’ market. The time to sell an asset one can’t afford to be stuck with is before the switch to buyers’ market, especially if that asset was leveraged. Otherwise the risk is being stuck while unemployment rises relentlessly and interest rates skyrocket. Loan servicing gets drastically more difficult under those circumstances, and the risk is repossession, which means walking away with nothing as a best case scenario, or walking away with a millstone of debt round your neck and no home if your mortgage is a recourse loan. Bankers may call in good loans as well, effectively making a margin call on your house. It’s so much better not to be in that position.
I would be happy to come and discuss your concerns. I think I should be able to manage Sunday, although I will need to ask about borrowing a car. Please contact me at theautomaticearth(at)gmail(dot)com
Variable,
Canada is not a bad place at all. There are lots of resources and plenty of space, but there is a very large ‘adjustment’ coming. There’s no real sense of limits in Canada because there haven’t really been any in living memory. Canadians are told they’re living in an energy super-power with the best banks in the world, but neither of those things is true. Believing that sort of comforting fantasy has made Canadians very complacent, so they’re sleep-walking into disaster. There are some places in Canada where people listen (parts of southern and eastern Ontario, the west coast, and Halifax from my experience), but so many remain oblivious. The vulnerabilities are significant due to the extent of private debt (one of the highest in the world) and the structural energy dependence (the highest per capita in the world). There is going to be an all-mighty wake up call at some point.
There will be here in NZ too of course. Nowhere will be immune. Both Canada and NZ have tremendous property bubbles, varying in intensity in different parts of the countries. In Canada the major cities are pretty much all affected. In NZ Auckland is the focus of property insanity, but over-valued, poorly built houses are the norm all over. NZ’s major vulnerability is its trade dependence, particularly in relation to energy.
Cory, house prices do not fall that quickly. The way that property bubbles burst is that the market tops out and goes illiquid, sometimes for a long time before prices fall. Sellers hold out for their price and buyers refuse to meet it, so nothing moves for a while. Eventually some sellers are forced to accept a lower price, at which point the whole neighbourhood is repriced because you have price discovery on comparable properties. Buyers see prices falling and sit back and wait for them to fall further, so another period of illiquidity ensues, followed by another fall. Prices ratchet down over many years. Getting out before that happens is a very good thing to do. Otherwise it can be very difficult later on. Trying to sell into a buyers’ market is a recipe for lots of wasted time and effort trying to keep a home in saleable condition at all times, getting low ball offers and being faced with expensive conditions on any prospective sale.
The market rebound in the US is very temporary, and has only occurred at all because all the mortgage risks were under-written by the taxpayer. Without that support, there would be no mortgages issued and prices would have fallen more quickly. That support is not infinite however, and is in fact coming to an end. Expect the property market to seize up again when it does.
Renting provides flexibility for an uncertain future. It is not a bad bet at all.
Kris,
You are obvious embittered by whatever experience befell you, but you are making sweeping generalizations and painting a picture which is inaccurate with regards to the current situation here. The houses here are not money pits at all. They are modest and simple, but well constructed and built with a view to providing their own food, water and energy, which is the way it should be. Affordability is an issue everywhere in our global property bubble era, but Atamai is doing it’s best to address this: https://www.atamaivillage.org/affordability. The cost of lots is partly due to the fact that the land comes already prepared for building and with rainwater tanks installed. Lot prices also contain a contribution to building the commons.
You mention quarry-like building sites. There is current building work to construct small housing platforms with their rainwater catchment tanks on existing lots, and also the work to build the space for the community centre, retention ponds and school, with planned co-housing in behind. When land is not flat, some such work is inevitable, but obviously temporary.
The people who live here are mostly ordinary people who are not extremely wealthy. Some rent, like me (I’m in a comfortable little cabin, about 20″ by 10″). Those who did have more resources have mostly put those resources to work building the community infrastructure. People have come from a variety of places, including other parts of New Zealand, and they have a wide variety of backgrounds too.
As I said, I know all these people and like them very much. I have tremendous respect for them and what they are doing. They are all trying together to build something special, and have committed all their time and resources to making it happen. Problems which occurred under previous management are not the fault of the current trustees, who are dealing with legacy issues along with everything else. It would be very unfair to pin previous difficulties on them.
There is an attached farm here, and an agro-forestry project, as well as the village itself. In total it is 130ha of potential for community self-sufficiency. As I said in the video, there is a tremendous amount of joined up thinking here. They understand limits to growth and are doing more to address it than almost anywhere else I’ve been. There have been growing pains, but these are not insurmountable.
Again, I would be happy to discuss your experiences and concerns. Feel free to contact me. I would like to hear whatever you have to say.
Kris,
Atamai had some significant problems initially, but is under entirely new management since that time. It is not now and never was a gated community. It is not an up market housing development. Houses are very modest in size and simple. Indeed they are required to be. I am here, and I don’t have half a million dollars, to put it mildly.
Exchange rates are not a help to immigrants, they are a hindrance, since the kiwi dollar is very over-valued. Locals here pay very high prices for homes in NZ because of the property bubble, and people like to buy more than one so as to rent one out and grab a capital gain (more so in Auckland of course than here, but some of that happens here on the south island too). Most of what is bought is very low quality, leaky, poorly insulated etc.
The houses at Atamai are well built, and not expensive in comparison with the surrounding area. The lots are pricey, but one need not own a lot alone. Sharing one is fine. Leasing or renting are fine. The intention is to build much more affordable housing and co-housing. The new trustees have put their own money where their mouths are. I know them well, and they are very much people of integrity.
Please feel free to contact me to discuss your concerns.
Cory,
Selling out the an over-priced property market is still a good idea. Look at what’s happening to that market in the US (assuming that’s where you are). Ilargi has documented how it is teetering on the brink. There is a very long way to fall. Sitting on the sidelines in cash is absolutely the way to go for anyone who cannot afford to own outright. It’s uncomfortable in the meantime, but your decision will reward you in the longer term.
While Atamai does need investment and resources from those who can afford to contribute them, the door is not closed to people with other things to contribute, such as enthusiasm, physical capacity to do the necessary work, skills etc. A whole range of ages and skills is necessary. I am not in a position to buy a lot and build, but I am still here, staying in a lovely little sleep out. Here’s the list of skills they’re particularly looking for:
1. Certified builder
2. Digger driver/heavy equipment operator
3. Surveyor
4. Green architect
5. Electrician
6. Plumber
7. Joinery Operator
8. Accountant
9. Lawyer
10. Baker
11. Nursery manager – to produce everything from veggies to trees
12. Landscaper
13. Mechanic/electrical /engineers
14. Inventors of practical things
15. Stockman – cattle and sheep and goats, etc
16. Dairy person/ Cheese maker
17. Farm manager- food production
18. Food processor – to add value to foods produced
19. Mason, block layer
20. Property manager to maintain infrastructure
21. Café / general store operatorI find that far more people are listening in the antipodes. I think that’s because in both Australia and New Zealand, they tend to have a sense of limits. New Zealand is two islands and Australia has a brittle environment prone to kick people at a moment’s notice, so they know they have to be prepared. New Zealand is small enough to operate at more or less a human scale, which means even the highest level of political organization is not utterly inaccessible. There’s a decent resource base here, although much of it is currently being mis-used. I told them on national TV here that the whole country badly needs a Plan B when globalized dairy exports are no longer possible, and therefore neither are imports.
I love Canada, and the UK, where I also lived for a long time, but ultimately I felt I could do more here. I also find the US political culture quite threatening and am not comfortable living too close to it, although I am still happy to visit periodically.
I am not gone and I am not going. I am still here, just working from a different base. I have always worked from wherever I happened to be. Now I happen to be in New Zealand. There are things I need to do here, so I am balancing my time between those things and research/writing. Over time I am hoping to have more time for writing, not less, as I will be spending much less time travelling. I do intend to travel occasionally, but lecturing will no longer be my focus. I have an Australian tour with David Holmgren coming up in July for instance. I am hoping to do more permaculture teaching as well, based at Atamai and elsewhere.
In the longer term, I will be looking for the funding to set up a bioregional institute here, which they would like me to run. The thought of doing that fascinates me. I intend to design a curriculum of information with regard to limits to growth, workshops for working through the necessary decision tree for moving forward and classes in all manner of practical skills for adaptation. There’s so little real, relevant education available at today’s educational institutions, so I intend to establish one of my own. If people would like to help to make that happen, I will be looking for funding and for fellow teachers.
The village is looking for more inhabitants as well, since a critical mass of people makes adaptation very much easier. One does not necessarily have to have a lot of money. Every lot can have a major unit, a minor unit (granny flat) and a sleep out, so rental possibilities will be available. There should end up being a wide range of ways to engage with the village. It will be possible to share titles and set up businesses to serve the village and the wider community of the upper south island (biochar, plant nursery work, sustainable building etc etc). The idea is to have a fully fledged village economy, and young, enthusiastic people will be very welcome.
New Zealand is looking for immigrants, but one would need to be under 55. It really is an amazing country. Try googling Abel Tasman National Park for instance. That’s 25 minutes from my doorstep, and I go walking there whenever I get a chance. See you here if you’re interested 🙂
D, indeed I don’t touch either wheat or soy, ever. I agree we can’t support 7 billion people on a paleodiet (although when people eat satiating proteins and fats they don’t actually need much food because what they eat is so nutrient dense). We can’t support that many on anything other than an industrial system, but we can only do that while we have the energy. Since energy is finite, we’re not going to be able to feed 7 billion at some point no matter what we do. We’re a very long way into overshoot, and catabolizing our natural capital (soil fertility) as we try to stay there. That’s a recipe for carrying capacity collapse.
The impact will be vastly broader than for those who hold dollars. Credit underpins everything today. Even those who are no levered up are going to find all kinds of things they depend on don’t work anymore. What about spare parts for tractors as an example? Or chainsaws? When trade takes the inevitable hit, we’re going to regret not making things like that in our own countries anymore. Selling produce will be very difficult when the customers have no money, so cash flow will collapse.
The dollar isn’t going to collapse any time soon, though it will eventually, like all fiat currencies. Cash is not a long term bet at all, but it is a good short term one, especially US dollars. A good balance is a productive asset with no debt, like your farm, and enough liquidity to see you through for a year, so you can pay the property taxes that will be skyrocketing.
It isn’t inflation we’re facing, it’s deflation. It won’t destroy your farm, but it will make it very difficult to run as a business, and it will be seen as wealth and targeted by the taxman, whether or not you have cash flow. It is going to take a hit in many ways, but it’s still a good option in comparison with the other possibilities. No one is going to be unaffected by a major economic depression though.
One point I’ll be covering in part two is the strip mining of soil fertility through, which industrial agriculture does very effectively. I’ll be writing about GMOs and glyphosate in relation to soil fertility too (and later their health effects). Something to think about if you want subsequent generations of your family to be able to live on the land.
D,
I’ll have plenty to say about wheat and soy down the line, when I get to writing about nutrition 😉
Starving people do indeed bring down governments, and I fully expect that to happen in more and more places. So far the US government’s way to deal with hunger is to provide minimal food allowances in a humiliating way, but to use the process to further enrich the top of the financial food chain. I can’t think of a much worse way to go about it.
Pretty much nothing flows once the credit markets dry up. It’s amazing just how much of everything we depend on depends in turn on the circulation of money in the economy. People found that out in the Great Depression, when they said they had everything but money.
I know plenty of farmers with debt, particularly those who had been trying to expand to stay ‘ahead of the game’, with more land and new equipment. Quota can be ridiculously expensive too.
Energy dependency is huge. On average modern farming uses 10 units of energy for every one it produces. That’s insane. Without those energy inputs (and the fertilizer etc inputs that energy enables), many people would be finding out that subsoil isn’t very productive. The original topsoil has been strip mined for a long time.
Grains are indeed the cheapest way to feed people, and you’re right that an awful lot of people would starve without them. Their energy dependency means that much grain production will be going away no matter what we do. So will much of any moving food around, not matter what kind of food it is. Moving food around costs money and energy, and we’re going to be short of both. You point out how much grain input is required to produce ‘animal outputs’, but most animals should not be eating grain in any case. Pastured meat is healthy, grain fed meat is not. Pastured can be done in a low energy way.
The Russians fed the population (on cabbage soup mostly) from 10% of their arable land when the big farms failed. There’s a lot that can be done with community gardens. Granted it won’t feed everyone, and certainly not in the way they’re accustomed, but small scale food production could make a big difference.
Agreed that embodied energy and water are important considerations for big food importers who are short of both.
Personally I do see a major collapse in grain production, and I think it’s going to cause chaos.
I hope your children do indeed get to own your land. Of course it’s a vastly better bet than the stock market, or any financial ‘asset’. If there’s no debt on it that may well be possible. Be careful though. Property taxes are going to go through the roof, and a liquidity crunch will make coming up with that money far more challenging than it is now, especially when consumers can’t afford the produce. That’s what happened in the Depression.
Judy, would you like to talk to Shani directly? I could put you in touch if you like. If you email our TAE address I’ll give you the contact details. She’s an amazing person, and very approachable. I’m sure she’d like nothing better than to see her model emulated elsewhere.
By the way, this article has spawned some controversy, which I fully expected. One particularly personal attack came from Guy McPherson, who resorted to misquotes out of context followed by character assassination in place of intellectual debate. This was addressed by KMO of the C-Realm podcast: https://c-realm.blogspot.ca/2014/01/dirty-pool.html
I find this kind of response highly distasteful, especially from someone who does not know me and is clearly unfamiliar with my work. I am thankful that the vast majority who hold contrasting views choose instead to discuss them in a civilized fashion.
Tony, I stand by my position with regard to climate change. I prefer to focus on issues we can actually hope to do something about. As I wrote, the interventionist actions we are most likely to take with regard to climate change are likely to be counter productive. Economic depression, which is set to happen anyway no matter what we do, is far more likely to have a beneficial effect on climate than any conscious action we might take, although there is uncertainty in this respect also, given the contrasting timeframes for CO2 and global dimming. If collapse does help then it will do so without our active intervention. If it does not in fact help, then there is nothing we can do that will make any positive difference.
There are many potentially catastrophic things we cannot change, such as the possibility that Yellowstone might erupt or the polarity of the earth’s magnetic field might change, but losing sleep over them is not going to help. It just disempowers us and makes us less inclined to change the things which are within our power. I see no point in focusing activist attention on such issues, although they are of intellectual interest as manifestations of complexity (always inherently interesting). I will not be changing my focus, as I feel it maximizes my potential to be effective. Plenty of people are addressing climate and ignoring more proximate issues, which to me feels like a large missed opportunity.
Please realize that I am not discounting the importance of environmental issues at all. I come from an environmental science background myself. Of course we need to be concerned with soil fertility, toxins, GMOs, habitat loss, desertification etc etc. These are things we can, and should, be doing a great deal about. Things things we can do that could, in the aggregate, be beneficial for climate are all things we should be doing anyway for other reasons, and those other reasons are far more effective motivators of behavioural change.
Of course the existing system an “organized enactment of force and violence”, but it has already been given enough rope to hang itself and will do exactly that sooner rather than later. There is no need to push it over the edge when it stands teetering on the brink already. Better do prepare the ground for what comes next, so that it might be more successful once given the opportunity to flourish. If your efforts are directed at bringing down the existing system, they are not directed at building the next one. That is a missed opportunity.
Thanks Doubled. My Mac is fine at this point, thankfully, but I do have a habit of switching off with the power button and now I’ll know not to do that.
Financialization has led to the development of a whole virtual world, from which the real world hangs suspended. An intricate web of socioeconomic dependencies has been created, along with a hugely complex network of real things moving all over the world, and the information technology to mange it all. This is our operating system. When it crashes, so will our supply chains, and with those our access to goods and services. This is why we need to build local resilience as a huge priority, and at the same time get used to the idea that we won’t have a fraction of what we do now.
All the talk of nano tech and genomic medicine is never going to amount to anything if we can’t sustain our current level of socioeconomic complexity. We simply won’t have the capacity to do any of these things. We typically have no idea the degree of our dependence on high energy profit ratio energy sources. We tend to think energy is energy wherever it comes from, but we don’t look at what energy or complex technology it took to get it, or to concentrate it enough to do useful work (in the case of renewables). All these manifestations of high tech are just an extension of the conventional fossil fuel era, and they will die with it. Then we’ll see how clever humans really are – when they have to solve problems without just being able to throw cheap energy at everything.
The Toby Hemenway link is here, but I didn’t mention his name:
“Permaculture, with its emphasis on soil regeneration, is the best possible way (click for video) to do this. If we are ever to approximate, at least temporarily, an Earth Steward scenario (in the distant future, once the dust has settled), this is the path we must take.”
I have no problem at all with you drawing more attention to it. It’s a great lecture and deserves all the attention it can get.
Here an article from today on geo-engineering. I share their concern.
Plan to avert global warming by cooling planet artificially ‘could cause climate chaos’
Skepticism about a crunch is at its greatest in the final run up to one. The economic foundations have been crumbling for a long time, and at some point they will give way, as will the belief in repayment that is all that sustains the value of financial assets. Social fabric is already very strained in many places where relentless tightening has become the norm. Other places are moving in that direction, being nickeled-and-dimed to death even before a crunch hits. This wears people down over time, leaving them with less capacity to deal with a sharp fall when it comes. It is profoundly sad.
We are still gong to see that enormous fall. This is not going to play out as a slow squeeze when the final limit is reached. The complacency we see is simply characteristic of a top. It means people have gone back to sleep again and that in itself is a dangerous indicator. The market does not have rocket fuel behind it for the future. QE provided for asset bubbles for a while, but that is almost over now, and the market cannot hold up without it. The housing ‘recovery’ has been an illusion as well. It wouldn’t have happened without the taxpayers being on the hook for all the risk. We are at a very precarious point, perched on the edge of a precipice, but fewer and fewer people see the risk. Extreme complacency, a desire to throw caution to the wind and the insiders selling everything that isn’t nailed down are not signs of health and future prosperity. They are signs of a top, from which the only way is down.
There’s no risk of loss of confidence in the dollar any time soon. Eventually yes, but years away. People will seek dollars to pay down dollar denominated debt, and on a flight to safety into the reserve currency. The dollar has a sharp upward move ahead of it. Inflation is not a risk at all, unless you live in somewhere like Greece where the combined risks of sovereign debt default and currency reissue change the picture. There is still deflation, but the gap between deflation and loss of confidence in their new currency (once it comes to that) could be really short. The gap in countries like the US, UK etc will be years long.
NJ Parkin, in theory central banks could do that, as Steve Keen suggests. I just don’t think they will. Bailouts are never for the masses. Even if they did allow some debt to be written down, asset prices still have much further to fall. People given mortgage relief will just find themselves in negative equity again when that happens. Central banks would have to keep providing debt relief over many years and I can’t see that happening. Deflation can happen very quickly as confidence in debt instruments is lost, and therefore asset values can fall sharply as well. Financial asset values are the most vulnerable to drastic repricing, but even real assets are set to fall substantially, just over a longer period of time.
Of course instability (to put it mildly) in the larger system will constrain what is possible with a local currency. All they can offer is the potential to improve matters over what they would otherwise have been. Resource constraints and skills shortages will still be limiting factors.
Local currencies that already operate in relatively good times are making a difference today in terms of advance preparation. For instance, one of the examples in our DVD is of the Hands currency in Golden Bay, New Zealand, which has been going for 25 years. When funding for adult education was cut nationally, Golden bay continued to run theirs on local currency. This is a way to directly address skills shortage, as well as to build very useful community cohesion in the process.
Governments cannot outrun deflation, It’s a psychological phenomenon – the loss of confidence in the value credit instruments – and it can happen very quickly. No government can outprint deflation. It is not inflation we face. We have already had the inflation during our period of credit hyper-expansion. Credit expansions are always followed be deflation.
I don’t see a debt jublilee like this happening, but I do think it’s something that should be tried. I’m very cynical about governments in general and find they tend to make a bad situation worse as expensively (and stupidly) as possible. Perhaps some places will make an attempt do follow this route. It makes me wonder how long any heads of state who tried this would last in power though before having an accident of some kind. After all, the goal is to diminish the financial sector, but Big Capital writes the rules of the game and would not appreciate attempts to put them in their place. Those who benefit from the status quo can be expected to defend it, even at huge cost to everyone else (and ultimately to themselves as well, but that outcome lies beyond their greed horizon).
I think this is the best interview I’ve ever seen him do, and I agree with him that this is the way we should deal with the debt crisis. Nothing is guaranteed to succeed, but what we do now is guaranteed to fail, so we have nothing to lose.
I don’t see the outcome being a ‘balanced society’ though. There’s no such thing as a steady state economy that finds the happy medium and stays there. We always embark on positive feedback loops in one direction or the other, so the pendulum continually swings. Also, if we were able to buy our financial system some time (which I’m not convinced we could do anyway), we would hit non-negotiable resources limits instead. This is much more than just a financial crisis. There are limits to growth everywhere you look.
The world is a complex place but most of the commentary is two dimensional at best and highly over-simplified. We can’t learn any lessons if we only look at cartoons and caricatures rather than reality. Unfortunately an awful lot of people seem to find complexity off-putting and ignorance preferable. That’s why those who do learn the lessons of history are doomed to watch everyone else repeat them.
All the wheat needs to go to see the benefits. I didn’t find it hard (once the withdrawl period was over at least). I never touch the stuff. Davis’ book is a must real IMO. Check out David Perlmutter’s book Grain Brain as well.
At some point I want to film a presentation on nutrition and metabolism (ie why low carb/paleo works when mainstream approaches don’t). I already lecture about this in permaculture courses (as zone zero) and I already have a slide deck formulated. I just need to find a filmaker and some funding. I’m always happy to do interviews too.
