After being raised by activist parents in a patch of kudzu in Sylva, NC, Zev Friedman fell madly in love with life and slipped off the deep end, emerging as a wild food vagabond with a B.S. in Human Ecology from UNCA. He now owns Urban Paradise Gardening, a permaculture design and installation business. The business focuses on whole system design of water savvy landscapes that yield valuable foods and medicines and provide for other human needs with a minimum of external inputs. Zev grows, gathers, processes, and cooks much of his own food in tandem with a group of similarly obsessed friends. He makes shoes, baskets, nets, bags, tools, cook pots, furniture (and wants to learn to build bicycles!) from wildcrafted and cultivated materials, and he likes all kinds of stories. Within permaculture, Zev specializes in forest agriculture and useful fungi, and spends his spare time writing, teaching, making up stories, playing banjo and brewing beer.