Living
Machines:

Doing Good
Things in
Bad Places

by John Todd

 

John Todd, Ph.D., is a visionary biologist who designs "living machines," including simulated ecosystems to purify sewage, septage and wastewater, in greenhouses. At the nonproft Ocean Arks International, this "bard of biology" is pushing the leading edge of mimicking natural ecologies to revitalize the health of the world’s water. The following speech comes from his presentation at the Bioneers Conference [an annual conference where biological pioneers (thus the word "bioneers") come together to share their exciting developments toward restoring the earth.]My story is about an emerging technological revolution which has the potential to heal the rift between the human family and the rest of the planet....

 

From the study of lakes, one learns about nutrients, energy flows, chemistry and liquid dynamic movement. From the rainforest one learns about diversity, the portioning of light, the way different forms of life share a complex, quickly changing environment. Most important in the tropical rainforest are the pathways of decay and transformation. These communities are the bases for an understanding of life’s processes....

The more I learned of the various systems, the more I saw similarities. They all have the ability to self-design, to self-organize, to self-repair, and to self-replicate. They had more attributes in common than they had differences.

We can also see this quickly if we take a big jar and go to local pond or lake and fill it up with water and mud. Within a matter of days what we see inside these bottles exposed to sunlight are life forms, nature organizing itself at an extremely rapid rate. This is ecological design. Seeing these processes was like having the scale fall from my eyes. I began to realize these forces could be harnessed technologically. Human beings might be able to use these same forces to carry out the work necessary for us to stay alive, and more importantly, to stay alive without destroying our ecosystems.

So what is a living machine? A living machine is like any other machine. It accomplishes work. Living machines can be designed to generate fuels, produce foods, convert wastes, and undertake environmental repair. Living machines can be designed to regulate the climate and air quality in buildings. Living machines can be designed to allow us to create ecological industrial parks, where manufacturing and food production and other forms of human activity can be integrated into holistic systems.

So what makes the difference between a living machine and a regular machine? Well, the first and the fundamental difference is that a living machine operates from sunlight. That’s its basic engine. Like the coral reef or the rainforest, the living machine has the ability to self-organize, self-design, self-repair, and self-replicate, like the great ecosystems themselves.

In other words, it is possible for us to think about technologies that can last for hundreds and even thousands of years. Some of the mechanical components would undoubtedly need to be replaced, but the systems themselves, whether they were generating fuels or transforming waste, would continue to evolve and serve us as well as the planet.

One of the things I’ve learned over the last ten years, which I didn’t know before, is that it’s possible to do good things in bad places. I first learned about doing good things in a community not far from where I’m based on Cape Cod. This community had pits into which they threw their waste from septic tanks, small businesses, veterinary clinics and rest homes. When I looked into these pits, I discovered that they had most of the priority pollutants in them. These pits were on sand, were leaching out at a rapid rate, and were situated twenty feet above the drinking-water table of that bucolic little New England town.

I was absolutely horrified. All I could see were the faces of children in such devastated places. To see if something could be done, I placed twenty giant aquaria on the side of a hill, connected them to create a "river" into which I could pump this waste. Then, into these tanks I placed thousands of different forms of aquatic life from about half-a-dozen neighboring environments, including salt marshes. I asked the life-forms to see if they could organize themselves in the solar tanks and transform these wastes into pure water.

After a period of about twelve days the water was transformed. The toxins were 100 percent removed, all except one, which was 99.99 percent removed. The heavy metals were sequestered into algae at the very beginning of the process, and theoretically they could have been recycled. The human pathogens, which were off the Richter Scale, were transformed. Sunlight and these organisms, which had never occurred in these combination or communities before, coevolved with the waste to provide the solution.

That work was heard about by the people of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and I was asked to go there to take a look at Chattanooga Creek. Chattanooga Creek flows through the center of the city for five and a half miles, and on both sides bears the industrial legacy of pollution from the production of pesticides and other toxic materials. The people in the African-American neighborhoods along the creek were sick. The children had leukemia and the adults had cancer. It was a disaster, and the people had been told there was really no solution.

I put my arm in the water, and it immediately turned bright red from the toxicity. I took a small amount of sediments, designed a small living machine and tried to see if these compounds called PAH’s (they included things like DDT and aldrin) could be destroyed. The first thing I found was that most of the higher forms of life in the living machine died instantly. But some of the snails, other animals and microbes survived. As long as the snails laid eggs, I would continue to introduce the toxic water into the system, and when they stopped laying eggs, I would stop because I knew it was just too dangerous. In the end, the majority of the compounds, including DDT and aldrin, were destroyed by this wonderful little ecology. It’s really one of the most remarkable stories of the power of ecology to do great things in bad places. Unfortunately, the Superfund community and the EPA were not impressed by my work. They had another solution, which was dredging and burning at a cost of probably $100 million.

It’s important that the meaning of waste and waste treatment is redefined. The current system is wrong. Just take sewage treatment, for example. We use chemicals that are not necessarily regulated to alter the water so it meets the standards of regulation. We incompletely treat the water, meaning that many things still get out into the natural environment. Conventional waste treatment is expensive. It’s sophisticated, its engineering is powerful, but it’s symptomatic of a disconnected culture.

Why couldn’t waste be viewed simply as resources out of place? Why couldn’t they be used to enhance our environments and actually even become economic engines? I believe in the next five to ten years the waste treatment plants of the world will be economic focal points rather than costs for communities.

There are a number of examples of this new ecology working. One is a living machine just outside of Las Vegas at a candy factory. In the very early days we had built a prototype which was treating 10 percent of the waste of this factory. One day someone vandalized the operating computer. There is a public park area there, and the little living machine was swamped and took 100 percent of the waste for several days instead of the 10 percent it was designed to treat. The system was overwhelmed. The fish died. Many of the other creatures were harmed.

What happened, though, was that the operators of the plant said, "Let’s not think about it. Let’s just go home for the weekend and face the disaster on Monday morning." They came back on Monday, and the system had self-repaired over the weekend. Except for the loss of some of the animals, it was able to start to function as a waste-treatment plant again The same mechanisms that occur in the natural world were occurring in that system.

We’ve also managed to combine waste-treatment with the production of fuels in a factory in Wayong, Australia, that processes over 300 different food products. It produces enough power to provide about 50 percent of the energy needs for the factory. These really are "industrial ecology."

In Vermont, we designed a marvelous living machine just south of Burlington, which treats sewage. If you were to walk inside it, you would think you had walked into a botanical garden. It is taking sewage and making pure water in an extremely cold climate, and doing so while also producing commercial crops of flowers and other beneficial plants.

Increasingly we’re finding that living machines can be used to intervene between waste streams. For example, brewery by-products can be transformed and reintroduced into agricultural food chains. The first of these food-farm living machines that transform brewery wastes into new products, including fish, herbs, and flowers, is operating in the Burlington Intervale in Vermont.

These systems are exquisitely beautiful, and they don’t stink. There are living machines working in about nine different countries and 15 states within the United States. They’re really a testimonial to the intelligence the natural world has garnered over three and a half billion years of experimentation and invention. Our latest project is an agro-eco-industrial park: A 60,000 square-foot bio-shelter, a greenhouse-like structure, houses within it incubator sites for future farmers and green businesses. It is heated by waste heat from a power generating plant which burns wood chips through contracts with many tree farmers in northern New England.

It is safe to say that we can apply those forces that occur in the wild to the problems that all of us have to solve. These technological possibilities do exist. That’s a great cause of optimism. I’ve learned through observing the work of my friends and associates that, through ecological design at its most profound level, it is theoretically possible to reduce the human imprint on this planet by 90 percent and to restore degraded environments.

It would be an extraordinary world if we gave back to the wild the 90 percent of it that we’ve damaged in the ways that we have. To release this wildness should be the challenge and the opportunity of the 21st century. We have foundations and the pool of knowledge necessary to reverse the damage we’ve done to the planet and many of its human and nonhuman inhabitants, and to tackle the inequities, both biological and human, that permeate the world culture and the world economy. It will require a political and economic transformation that is also in its own right, profoundly ecological.

Let me give you a few examples of Living Machines now operating. On Lake Champlain in Burlington, Vermont, we decided to create a living technology that would transform sewage to very, very high standards, therefore putting back into the lake water as good as is possible to do. Because it’s a cold climate, this task required a greenhouse in order to make sure the biological activity could be active at the darkest, coldest times of the year. When you enter this building, it’s extraordinary. There are over 400 species of plants, all of which are being studied for their ability to contribute to the purification of water. Some are better than others. Some will do some things that others can’t do. Some kill human pathogens. Others take up heavy metals. Others sequester or break up nutrients. But always in concert with other organisms. There are actually three waste treatment plants inside that building in parallel. And the wastes go from cell to cell, from being raw sewage at one end to ultra-pure water at the other end in about 2-1/4 days. And along the way, they’re exposed to a wide variety of organisms, even koi and goldfish and snails consuming the dead and dying bacteria that produce sludge. Sludge is the stuff that our society puts on landfills and incinerates and creates problems. But to an ecological designer, heavy sludge just means that your design is incomplete. You’ve not done it right. So what we do with these things is move the sludges into animals that treat them as feeds. So the dead and dying bacteria produce thousands and thousands of fish. So now you have a biological by-product that has economic value. One of the things that we’re finding increasingly is that ecological design produces internal economies where none were visible before.

The examples I’ve discussed are on a small scale, but these systems can be layered like folds in a baklava, in creating designs of whole towns or villages. As a result of all my years working in ecological design, I am convinced that we can reduce the negative human footprint on the planet by 90% through intelligent design and the associated social changes that are necessary to make it happen. I think it’s possible to create a culture that is in harmony with the natural world, as many cultures have done before us. I also think it’s possible to create a culture where wilderness permeates nearly every locale. We have the instructions, the design principles, if we know how to look for them. Let’s work together to create a vibrant culture of Earth stewardship in the 21st century.

For more examples go to www.google.com and search for "living machines" or "John Todd" or "Ocean Arks International".....

© 2000 by John Todd. Reprinted with permission from the Voices of Bioneers. You can reach Bioneers by contacting the Collective Heritage Institute toll-free at 1-877-BIONEER; website: www.bioneers.org. Their 2001 Conference will be held October 19-21, 2001 at the Marin Center, San Rafael, CA.