John Todd For Nobel Laureate

This is the young John Todd, the genius behind the New Alchemy Institute. One of the smartest things the world could do would be to give him the Nobel Peace Prize.

Tomorrow Is (Still) Our Permanent Address

A painting I did in the late-eighties. John Todd is one of my heroes. Donella Meadows expresses the same sentiment as Todd in her essay, Places to Intervene in a System, with a certain how-to exposition. Scroll past the editor's note. He gets the name of the source publication wrong, and he's afraid of scaring libertarian cranks.

John Todd: Making The World Safe For Itself

John Todd came to me via the Whole Earth Catalog, and its subsequent incarnations. In 1969, Todd, his wife Nancy Jack, and other colleagues like Bill McLarney founded the New Alchemy Institute on Cape Cod, and that organization catalyzed my hippie fantasies.

I believed that madness like segregation and the war in Viet Nam happened because we lived wrong, and what we needed was experiments in how we might live so as to avoid war and oppression. These people were living my dream! They were collaborating with like-minded people to turn waste into food. They had gardens, wind turbines, passive solar heat, methane generators, and they were recycling garden wastes through these big, interesting-looking fiberglass tanks full of fish. They were ending the war by creating wealth.

Like a lot of hippies, I was wondering, “Why aren’t we doing something like that here.” I wasted a lot of time waiting for New Alchemy-Midwest to materialize.

Todd went on to design systems for cleaning polluted bodies of water, living machines which turned the sewerage in small towns and ski resorts into salable bait fish and decorative plants, and an Ocean-Going Pickup, an inexpensively manufactured small sailboat for third world fishermen. Todd won the 2008 Buckminster Fuller Challenge grant for his proposal, “Comprehensive Design for a Carbon Neutral World: The Challenge of Appalachia.”

Challenge of Appalachia is a plan for repairing existing damage from coal mining, managing ecological succession to reforest the area, and building ecologically sensitive industries and other institutions to afford citizens comfortable and self-reliant livelihoods for generations to come. The idea is that this would spread, and in his proposal, Todd says they have a similar project in operation in Cost Rica.

I was at a permaculture discussion once, in which somebody said, “If John Todd doesn’t get a Nobel Peace Prize, there’s something wrong.” You can quibble about theories and strategies, but peace prosperity and stability are only going to come to stay where people have learned to live as part of the planetary ecosystem. John Todd is somebody who has spent forty years building reproducible examples of how that can be done.

Studying The Farmer's Market

It was a farmer’s market weekend, and tiring. Saturday, New Hope, a second-ring, western suburb, and Uptown, a younger, urban neighborhood on Sunday. It’s interesting that very light work, really just playing with people, can be so tiring. Barbara says it’s the standing.

I think I agree. It’s on pavement, with no real opportunity to move around.

Each market has a different style. The same kinds of people show up at each venue, but in different proportions. Uptown is younger, of course, and whiter, also more bohemian and gayer. New Hope is more Scandinavian and Baltic, local stock of long standing, with more African Americans, too. Midtown is more of a mixture, white people of more southerly or westerly extraction, with more East Africans and fewer African-Americans than New Hope. Midtown seems closest to being a party.

Saturday, at New Hope, rain threatened all morning, but never materialized. At one point, a Met-Life blimp flew over, wallowing in the turbulence. I watched it with the guy from the Hmong vegetable stand on our left. I told him it would make me seasick. Either that or it would be more fun than any roller coaster ride I've been on.

Across from us, the woman selling Verti-Gro vertical hydroponic systems seemed to be having a good time talking about her product. I talked to her and her husband, Meredith and Keith Henderson, after the market. They are both enthusiasts, and have a large system in their yard.

The basic system stacks four perlite-filled Styrofoam tubs above a nutrient tank, with a pipe rising through the center of the column to keep everybody’s roots damp. The kit on display was pretty lush with strawberries. There’s a 16-pot kit, and a 16-pot extension you can add to that. Watching the Verti-Gro booth all day got me thinking. A kid with with the space and the energy could use a Verti-Gro system to model one of John Todd’s “living machines” as a Science Fair project.

Todd designs systems that process sewerage or aquaculture runoff using plants, basically ecological microcosms.

Here’s what the kid would do. She’d filter the aquarium water with the hydroponics, her first iteration being a concept demonstration, sacrificing an unfiltered tank as control. Subsequent experiments and research would include sizing, pH buffering, food production (both fish and vegetable), and safety (particularly regarding coliform bacteria). For the right student, this project could continue through college and grad school. Increasingly, human welfare will depend upon economics’ congruence with ecology, and a food-production system which runs one cycle with another's waste is how we’re going to make it.

Sunday we borrowed Tom and Kim’s van for the Uptown market. (That’s their monarda/bee balm and Earth flag.) Barbara opened the Kingfield market, and Jason relieved her. Using the van made it possible for me to have a vehicle loaded and ready when Barbara swung back to help me set up at Uptown. That market opens later, to accommodate its patrons’ somewhat more laid back Sunday mornings. Using a van was luxury. It’s possible to pack everything for a farm stand into a subcompact, but it’s a puzzle. Having all that space made loading quicker as well as physically and mentally easier.

I Can't Read Our Permanent Address

The text lettered on this painting is the last paragraph in this post.

I painted this around 1990. I’ve tried to pin the date down by remembering where I got the canvas. It’s a piece of muslin, with a crude print in green and white of an elephant and foliage. You can still see a ghost of the design from behind. It was an employer’s cast-off, but I can’t remember whose, and I changed jobs about the time I painted it.

The picture of the dome-dwellin’ hippies who have just converted a VW Bug into a horse-drawn buggy does a pretty good job of illustrating the quote, taken from the writings of a biologist and inventor named John Todd. When I started painting, I wasn’t thinking of putting words in. I tried a couple of things to fill the foreground around the car. They didn’t work. I’d been researching John Todd a year or so earlier, and lifted an appropriate passage. My sloganeering reminded Barbara and me, both, of a bunch of semi-trailers we used to see in Lamoille, Illinois (just a little north of where US 34 crosses I-80). Some put-upon soul was using them as billboards in his public relations war with the county. There were a couple hundred words of argument, and we’d see them after a few hours of driving and just before we were due at Barbara’s father’s, so we never stopped, and we never learned what the megillah was about.

(No responsible horse owners would ever allow that fencepost with the loose bobwire in their pasture. I liked the way it kept my eyes from leaking off the canvas, though, so I left it.)

I entered the painting in a group show, back in April. It was the occasion of a couple of conversations with other, more painterly and less “anecdotal”, artists. The conversation that I remember most, though, was with a friend who dropped in to support me. Mark thought the quote was incomprehensible, and probably thought the reason was ostentatious vocabulary. I’ve tried since then to rewrite it, but I haven’t been able to keep its meaning, and make it more accessible, without making it longer.

Maybe somebody else could take a stab at it.

“Tomorrow is our permanent address. It is the structure or morphology of a system that determines its behavior and subsequently its fate. The coefficients or parameters within a system
determine only rates and relative dominance. This distinction is significant since current attempts to adapt technological society to changing conditions are focused on coefficients which are not fate-determining.”