Following nature's operating instructions
John Todd allies with nature to create “eco–machines.”
Salazar: What is an eco–machine?
Todd: Eco–machines are designed like ecosystems, and they’re connected like ecosystems normally connect. They can be designed and engineered to generate fuels, to grow food, to treat waste, to restore damaged environments, or to regulate climate in houses or buildings.
Eco–machines borrow from the intelligence of the natural world and millions of years of evolution. An eco–machine has all of the major kingdoms of life in it, including vertebrates. You would look down, say, into a sewage treatment plant, and there you would see fishes, and clams, and snails, and shrimp.
What characterizes an eco–machine is that it’s made up of “cells”, or units that are completely ecological. They’re designed the way that nature is designed, with all of the classes of life working together in concert.
Salazar: What does an eco–machine look like?
Todd: I think that one of the first things that you’d notice if you saw them is that they’re very beautiful.
I’m going to give you a mental picture. Walking into an eco–machine would be like walking into a greenhouse. The eco–machine is filled with vats of bright trees and shrubs and flowers. You look down into a vat, and it’s like looking into a pond. You see fishes, and clams, and all kinds of things down in there. And each of the “cells” is a complete ecological world, and they’re connected to each other.
Or here’s an idea of what an eco–machine waste treatment facility would look like. Imagine that you’re in a beautiful garden, with the sound of running water and the smell of citrus and ginger. The food webs would be directed towards human food. They would not be treating human sewage. Maybe they would maybe be converting waste from a brewery to foods.
In all of the eco–machines, you have a very powerful aesthetic. It’s like walking in a rain forest, or a meadow in flower, or the woods in spring after the first leafing has come out. That’s the kind of experience you have, even when they’re inside a building. They have a very verdant diversity. Some “cells” may look like marshes, other “cells” look like ponds, and other “cells” look like rivers. We’re trying to simulate all of those different systems as we design our living technology. It’s very exciting.
Salazar: I understand that this “powerful aesthetic” resonates with people outside of the U.S., and that recently the Chinese city of Fuzhou hired you to clean a heavily populated canal district.
Todd: Fuzhou is typical of many rapidly growing cities in China. It has a lot of canals, in its case, 70 kilometers of canals. It has high–rise apartments everywhere. And all of them are dumping their raw sewage into the canal. So if you walked down to the side of the canal and peered over the side, not only is it filled with garbage, it’s filled with human sewage and smells appallingly bad.
What we did was design a kilometer–long eco–machine that floats on the canal. Under the floating area, we created different surface areas for beneficial life forms to live.
On the sides of the walkway are special racks, in which some 30,000 plants of 28 different species are growing. They’re specially supported, and their roots grow down into the canal. The saps that come out of their roots feed higher plants and beneficial organisms – bacteria, fungi, and protozoa. It’s a very strong symbiosis.
And the water is transformed. Now you can actually lower a glass down and pull it up, and it would look quite clear, like clean, pure water. The canals were pretty devoid of most higher life. But the canal that we have the restorer on, is now supporting thousands of the fishes that the Chinese like to culture.
Salazar: How did you come up with the idea of eco–machines?
Todd: I have an intuitive knack for understanding patterns and relationships. In other words, I think in whole systems.
It’s just the way I think. I always have. That’s why I always want to be an expanding generalist, rather than a specialist. But what I’ve collected along the way is natural history stories about plants, animals, bacteria, and protozoans that I keep in my head, because I see them as allies in problem solving.
I’ll give you a really crude example. In many aquarium shops, you can see an armored catfish, which is called a suckerhead catfish. If you watch them, you can see their mouths going along, eating attached algae that grow on the rocks. After watching one of them, I said, “This is a creature that I want in my eco–machine to graze the surfaces of algae in order to allow the sunlight to enter the clear sides and allow me to use less electrical energy to maintain the system.”
And there was a natural history story, one that I ran into in Central America by observing streams, that I was able to apply in the design of an eco–machine. It’s not one of the more subtle stories, but it gives you some idea of how there’s a living vacuum cleaner out there, and I found it.
I think that nature’s operating instructions are really important for us to follow. That’s because nature, in concert, has been experimenting, trial and error, and innovation for several billion years. We need to use that wisdom in designing the infrastructures of our society.
