Rob Avis

“There’s a lot to worry about out there in the world right now – climate change, GMOs, the financial system, debt, terrorism, disease, water insecurity, a fragile food system. What if you could insure yourself against some of these worries?

Imagine if there was a corporation or co-operative that you could own shares in. The purpose of this corporation would be to hedge against certain classes of black swans.

When a system contains extreme outliers that are hundreds, thousands, or millions of times further from the mean than expected, they can cause massive amounts of destruction and change the course of history.

This is a three-part series based on an idea I recently had around the subjects of farming, black swans, and creating a product that can help insure against risk.

Recently I had a chance to chat with Diego Footer from Creative Destruction, formally known as Permaculture Voices, on a podcast series featuring “honest, hard conversations about farming, business, and life with those trying to make a living doing something that they love and dealing with life in the process.”

As an engineer and permaculture designer living in a cold-climate, I am particularly fascinated with the interplay between thermodynamics and design and with capturing “waste” energy and finding novel, inexpensive and efficient ways to store and/or recapture and re-use it. One of these such systems, is geothermal storage.