Shop
publications
Healing Earth
An Ecologist's Journey of Innovation and Environmental Stewardship
A true pioneer and respected elder in ecological recovery and sustainability shares effective solutions he has designed and implemented. A stand-out from the sea of despairing messages about climate change, well-known sustainability elder John Todd, who has taught, mentored, and inspired such well-known names in the field as Janine Benyus, Bill McKibben, and Paul Hawken, chronicles the different ecological interventions he has created over the course of his career. Each chapter offers a workable engineering solution to an existing environmental problem: healing the aftermath of mountain-top removal and valley-fill coal mining in Appalachia, using windmills and injections of bacteria to restore the health of a polluted New England pond, working with community members in a South African village to protect an important river. A mix of both success stories and concrete suggestions for solutions to tackle as yet unresolved issues, Todd's narrative provides an important addition to the conversation about specific ways we can address the planetary crisis. Eighty-five color photos and images illustrate Todd's concepts. This is a refreshingly hopeful, proactive book and also a personal story that covers a known practitioner's groundbreaking career.REVIEWS
“This remarkable book embodies The Great Work. Inspirational, uplifting and wise, John Todd’s richly illustrated memoir reviews the life lessons of a specialist adept at identifying and harnessing the functionality in nature’s designs. An eco-designer extraordinaire, Todd taps into a hidden meta-intelligence with engineered systems that cleanse water, create soil, stabilize climate, sequester carbon and nourish those who build his living machines. At long last¬, we have operating instructions for how to heal our imperiled habitat by “connecting life to life”.
Featuring numerous examples of still-evolving best practices, marvel here at the dedication, creativity and applied genius reflected in a life devoted to crafting bio-linked catalysts and field-tested recipes for repairing the world. This seasoned guide shows a practical path forward to become stewards, teachers and catalysts for change. Replicable, often scalable applications feature the ultimate in Cool Tool technologies: lake restorers, bio-digesters, oasis eco-machines and other micro solutions to address our macro problems and reverse today’s troubling trends.
Like the Elders of a bygone era, John and his collaborator wife, Nancy Jack Todd, point to the possibilities of what can be achieved by learning from and working with the ancient wisdom of nature. Buy multiple copies of this helpful and hopeful book to present as gifts to friends, colleagues and anyone daunted by the scale of the challenge we face.” - Jeff Gates
“In this book, he provides a pattern language, the human grammar for that design vocabulary, a baker’s dozen of design principles for constructing living technologies and eco-machines based upon his decades of experience with projects that treat sewage, septage, petroleum wastes and other toxics, producing improved water quality at both household and community scales.
Todd considers such individual projects as First Order Ecological Design, techniques and technologies applied to the landscape. Second Order Design is the linking together of processes and practices into new associations and entities, industrial ecologies and agricultural eco-parks for example. Third Order Ecological Design addresses larger economic and social structures and their evolution over time. He writes, "It is my belief that durable and sustainable economies, in an age of resource limits and information richness, can replace the extractive and environmentally destructive technologies and infrastructures of today.” For an example of a Third Order Ecological Design see John Todd’s ecological plan for Appalachia, the winner of the first Buckminster Fuller Challenge Award.
In Healing Earth, John Todd has given us practical, working examples of how to think like nature itself, in ever expanding systems which repair the damage we homo sap (the sap) have already done. We must learn to live in our ecological niche or risk extinction. John Todd’s report of his lifetime of observation and experimentation teaches us not only how to live within that niche but expand it.” - George Mokray
From Eco-Cities to Living Machines: Principles of Ecological Design
principles of ecological design
From Eco-cities to Living Machines presents the ecologically-based working designs and prototypes of biologist John Todd and writer and environmental activist Nancy Todd. Since 1969 with the founding of New Alchemy Institute on Cape Cod, the Todds have become known world-wide for their leadership in the restoration of pure water, bioremediation of wild aquatic environments, food production, and urban design. In this new book, the Todds further develop the idea of Eco-cities, designs for integrating agriculture and flowing pure water into green urban settings and introduce Living Machines, a family of technologies for purifying wastewaters to tertiary quality effluent without chemicals. Provocative and grounded firmly in the principles of biodiversity, the Todds' work encompasses site-specific technological interventions and systems-wide ecological planners and designers, environmental economists, and systems-based engineers working to change the way we utilize production, technology, water and energy.
A Safe and Sustainable World
The Promise Of Ecological Design
In the late sixties, as the world was waking to a need for Earth Day, a pioneering group founded a small non-profit research and education organization they called the New Alchemy Institute. Their aim was to explore the ways a safer and more sustainable world could be created. In the ensuing years, along with scientists, agriculturists, and a host of enthusiastic amateurs and friends, they set out to discover new ways that basic human needs--in the form of food, shelter, and energy--could be met. A Safe and Sustainable World is the story of that journey, as it was and as it continues to be. The dynamics and the resilience of the living world were the Institute's model and the inspiration for their research. Central to their efforts then and now is, along with science, a spiritual quest for a more harmonious human role in our planet's future. The results of this work have now entered mainstream science through the emerging discipline of ecological design.