Dr. Jason Bradford is an organic farmer, and manager of Confluence Farms near Corvallis, Oregon. He has been affiliated with the Post Carbon Institute since 2004, initially as a Fellow. He is currently Board President and a co-host of the Crazy Town podcast. In 2019, he authored The Future is Rural: Food System Adaptations to the Great Simplification. Prior to his switch to agriculture, he was a research biologist studying evolution, ecology, and global change.
Crazy Town: Episode 105. Who Can Fix the Housing Crisis – NYT Pundits, German Shepherds, or Bilbo Baggins?
Jason, Rob, and Asher are taking out a huge, unaffordable mortgage on the housing crisis. What’s behind the shortage in housing? Why is it that no one, except canine Tik Tok influencers with billion-dollar bank accounts, can afford to own a home??
June 4, 2025
Growing the Shire, Not the ‘Burb: Facing the Housing Crisis with Ecological Sanity
By putting this idea out there – that we can respond wisely to the polycrisis by building ecologically savvy agrarian villages – I hope to capture the imagination and fruitful energy of some of you.
May 27, 2025
Crazy Town: Episode 104. Bunkers, Bazookas, and Bespoke Moats: How to Be Safe in an Unsafe World
The world has gone bunking mad. The bespoke security industry is burying bunkers stocked with arsenals of automatic rifles and surrounded by flaming moats. Is there a better way to prepare for the polycrisis, the zombie apocalypse, or whatever hard times are on the horizon?
May 21, 2025
Crazy Town 103: It Was Never Your Democracy Anyway: Thomas Linzey on Rethinking the Constitution
Democracy and environmental protection have two things in common: (1) they’re both supposed to be enshrined in the laws of the United States and (2) they’re both under severe attack right now. Asher speaks with Thomas Linzey of the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights to uncover how the source code of the U.S. Constitution and the body of environmental laws that follow it are actually designed to allow corporations to override the will of the people.
May 7, 2025
Crazy Town 102: Going #2: The Dueling Rules of Nature That Every Good Earthling Needs to Know
After dropping the kids off at the pool, Asher, Rob, and Jason cover the interplay of entropy and self-organization and contemplate how to manage the inevitability of entropy with elegance (beyond morphing into a lizard person).
April 22, 2025
Urban Legend: The Harebrained Myth of Urban Sustainability and Why You Should Bet on the Country Tortoise
So yeah, let us rewild half (or I’d say almost all) the Earth, with people integrated into ecologically functional landscapes. There is much to be anxious about in the future, but I hope the prospect of people becoming Indigenous to a place again motivates us to work on this more gracious possibility.
April 15, 2025