SOUNYIE|A] DUAL] 0} SOPA}-O9F WO] coornworre sory rcwwn antic 00ks. From Eco-Cities - tides oe eer) and John Toddmune system for truly cultured ecologies, then we really will have a new age. We've glimpsed its science; now all we have to do is envision its appropriately symbiotic politics."—William Irwin Thompson From Eco-cities to Living Machines presents the ecologically-based working designs and prototypes of biologist John Todd and writer and environ- mental activist Nancy Todd, Since 1969 with the founding of New Alchemy Institute on Cape God, 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 agri- culture and flowing pure water into green urban settings and introduce Living Machines, a family of technologies for purifying wastewaters to ter- tiary 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 thinking. It has already influenced a new generation of ecological planners and design- ers, environmental economists, and systems-based engineers working to change the way we utilize production, technology, water, and energy. In praise of the work of John Toda: “He isa visionary, with an uncanny knack for ecology. He is as much an artist as a scientist, but his medium is biology.” —Donnella Meadows, Harowsmith Magazine “We recoguize his pioneering work in developing Solar Aquatics, an environ- mentally responsible family of technologies for wastewater purification and reclamation.” —William Reilley, Past Director of the Environmental Protection Agency, presenting the first Chico Mendes Memorial Award to John Todd i odd ve n honored with Biologist Dr, John Todd and writer Nancy Jack Todd have been r Ni the Threshold and Environmen- mnajor global environmental awards, including a pen: tal Programme ‘Award, Nancy Jack Todd publishes Annats af Farth for the Genser for dhe Restoration of Water at Ocean Arks International and writes widely abou international environmental affairs. | Us $19.95 / $25.95 CAN ISBN 678-1-58643-150-0 | North Atlantic Books | Berkeley, California | | 978 Ecological Design 995 | tll. 3556"433500" | ‘wnww.northatlanticbsoks.comFrom Eco-Cities to Living Machines Principles of Ecological DesignFrom Eco-Cities to Living Machines Principles of Ecological Design Naney Jack Todd & John Todd North Auantic Books Berkeley, CaliforniaCopyright © 1993 Nancy Jack Todd and John Todd. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other ‘wise —without the written permission of the publisher. For information contact the publisher. Published by North Atlantic Books P.O. Box 12327 Berkeley, California 94712 Cover photographs by by Katy Langstaff Top: Living Machine Sewage Treatment Facility, Providence, Rl, Bottom lt: Home Aquaculture Living Machine, Falmouth, MA, Bottom right: Solar Home with Aquaculture ‘System for Heat Retention, Air Purification, and Food Production, Falmouth, MA Cover and book design by Paula Morrison Printed in the United States of America From Eco-Cities to Living Machines is sponsored by The Society (or the Study of Native Arts and Sciences, a nonprofit educational corporation whose goals are to develop an educational and cross-cultural perspective linking various scientific, social, and artistic fields; to nurture a holis tic view of arts, sciences, humanities, and healing: and to publish and distribute literature on the relationship of mind, body, and nature. North Atlantic Books’ publications are available through most bookstores. For further infor- mation, visit our Web site at www.northatlanticbooks.com of call 800-733-3000. ISBN-13: 978-1-55643-150-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication Data Todd, Nancy. From ecocities to living inachines : precepts for ecological dlesign / Nancy Jack Todd and John Todd. pcm. Rev. ed. of: Bioshelter, ocean arks, city farming, 1984, Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-55643-150-3 L. Human ecology. 2. Bioengineering. 3. Architecture, Domestic— Environmental aspects. 4, Fish-culture, 5. Organic farming I. Todd, John, 1939- . IL. Todd, Nancy. Bioshelters, ocean arks, city farming. INL Title GFA.T62 1993 304.2—dc20 93-26499 cr 5 6789 DATA 14 13 12 U 10Table of Contents Preface: The Years Between . . Chapter One: New Alchemy: Where It All Began, Chapter Two: From Bioshelters to Solar Villages to Future Human Settlements Chapter Three: Emerging Precepts of Biological Design Precept One: The Living World is the Matrix for All Design. Precept Tuo: Design Should Foitow, not Oppose, the Laws of Life Precept Thee: Biological Equity Must Determine Design Precept Four: Design Must Reflect Bioregionality Precept Five: Projects Should be Based on Renewable Energy Sources : : Precept Six: Design Should Be Sustainable through the Integration of Living Systems. . Precept Seven: Design Should Be Coevohutionary with the Natural World Precept Bight: Building and Design Should Help Heal the Planet Precept Nine: Design Should Follow a Sacred Ecology Chapter Four: Redesigning Communities 1. History and Bioregion. re Purification and Recycling Soil Working with E ing Structures . oR Biology and Architecture: the New Synthesis 6. Growing Food in Communities . . 7. ‘Transportation, Power and New Shapes of Employment ul 19 19 22 32 44 4 75 79 93 93 - 98 i105 107 115. . 8 127Chapter Five: The Surrounding Landscape 1. Agriculture in the Past... 2. Agriculture Based on Stewardship 1 aC ~ 8, Bio-intensive Soil Management. - Intensive Planting Techniques Aquaculture Bioshelters Small Plot Grains Livestock and Poultry Agricultural Forestry . Wilderness and Technology . Chapter Six: The Transforming Energy Epilogue: Living Machines and the Years Ahead The Design of Living Machines . Notes and References Index 135 185 144 148 . 148 149 150 150 - 152 152 . 154 157 165 . 167 / 177 187For our parents: Mildred Ruth Todd, Robert Thomas Todd, Mary Evelyn Jack and Vaughn Ainsworth Jack.Illustrations by Elise Brewster With contributions from Dann Blackwood—photograplt of the “Edith Muma," p. 40. Santiago Calatrava—Cathedral Bioshelter, pp. 88 and 90. Keith Critchlow—Lindisfarne Hamlet, pp. 54-56. David Sellers—Cathedral Bioshelter, Original Design, p. 89. Paolo Soleri—Arcosanti, pp. 83-87. Christopher Swan—Sun Train Light Rail, p. 129. Jeff Zwinakis—Ocean Arks, pp. 34-35; Ocean Pickups, pp. 41-43.Acknowledgements As is obvious from the opening pages, the ideas presented in this book are based on the work of a number of people and, because of this, we see them as having contributed to it. Foremost among them were our friends and co-workers at New Alchemy. As we have said before, their ded- ication was the real alchemy and to them we shall continue to be indebted. We also mention the happy meeting of the minds that took place when we became involved with William Irwin Thompson and his colleagues at Lind- isfarne. Of our friends there Drs. Lyn Margulis and James Lovelock, Sim. Van der Ryn, Paolo Soleri, and Hunter and Amory Lovins have had a direct and important effect on our work. Architect Malcolm Wells has been an influential voice in persuading us that the design ideas that had arisen in the context of a solar village were universally applicable, and particularly so in an urban context. The Very Reverend James Parks Morton and Pamela Morton of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City have been invaluable allies in helping to dispense our ideas on ecological design and to embody them within the context of traditional Christianity. Our ability to express our ideas would have been seriously curtailed without those who helped us by portraying them visually. To Jeffrey Parkin as the principat illustrator we owe the translation of biological concepts into applied forms. The talent for conveying transition and succession, being and becoming, is a rare one. Jeff Zwinackis, Paolo Soleri, and David Sellers and his associates have been extremely generous with their illustrations. We are equally grateful to Dann Blackwood for his careful photography of many of the original drawings. To naval architects Richard Newick and Philip 8. Bol- ger we extend our thanks for lending their talents to our waterborn projects. In working directly on the book we wish to express enormous grati- tude to Lindy Hough and Richard Grossinger. Lindy has been a creative, exacting, and superb editor. In addition to the work involved in producing the book, Richard never allowed any of us to forget the larger vision that sustains it. Their hard work, faith in the ideas, and friendship have been instrumental to us. Heartfelt gratitude to the person who typed one’s manuscript is a traditional part of almost every author's roster of acknowledgements. In ouropinion, however, few typists have ever been the recipients of pages as ill- typed, corrected, revised, and rearranged as Cynthia Knapp accepted from us. Beyond translating occasionally close to indecipherable markings into immaculately typed manuscript, she gently questioned inconsistencies and redundancies, and generally made us respectable, More remarkable perhaps, she never lost her temper and has remained a valuable friend throughout Credit for the work described in the Prologue and Epilogue must be shared with our colleagues at the Center for the Restoration of Waters at Ocean Arks International. To them belongs acknowledgement for their courage in persisting in the face of the skepticism that marks the imple- mentation of any new idea. Several of them—Beth Josephson, Karen Schwalbe, Scott Sargert, and Jim Keane—have been the true stewards in terms of their management of unique and complex ecosystems. But they, like ourselves, could not function without the support of the office, pro- gram, and educational staff—Lesley lamele, Kerry Sullivan Hayes, Joan Wilder, Patrick Ryan, and Rebecca Todd. The contribution of new staff members Drs. Paul and julie Mankiewicz to the range and depth of our bio- logical research has been immeasurable. The design, engineering, and building of our various projects has been the charge of Michael Shaw of Living Technologies Incorporated, whose management skills and tireless dedication are fundamental to the work of the Center. For their availability as advisers and consultants for the workings of the biological systems we are continually indebted to Drs. Karl Ehrlich and Marie Claude Cantin of AquaResearch Lid, All of us have shared. the perils and rewards of living on the edge and we are grateful to this small, intrepid band. Ultimate credit for this edition of the book, however, belongs to Robin Grossinger. He not only has served as editor, consultant, and friend, he has completed the research and updating that make it contemporary. As a biol ogist and ecological designer himself, he has brought to it the perspective of a new generation, and with this, the relevance and the promise of con- tinuity we had hoped for it to achieve.The rule of no realm is mine, but all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care And for my part, I shall not wholly fail in my task ifanything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come. For [ too ama steward, Did you not know? JRR.Tolkeini Preface The Years Between This book was first published in 1984. The Reagan era was in full swing and, in terms of national priorities, the environmental crisis that had prompted our undertaking to write it had been relegated to somewhere well behind the back burner, The introduction of such unpleasant topics as environmental deterio- ration into the political agenda during that extraordinarily comatose interlude ‘was generally received like an embarrassing gaff ata dinner party; frowned upon at best, more likely ignored. But for all that, the environmental crisis did not obligingly go away. The hole in the ozone layer of the atmosphere grew larger, the global climate warmed, rain forests shrank, Chernobyl melted down, and the waters of Prince William Sound darkened with a record-setting oil spill. The litany of environmental woes listed in the original text continued to grow and the sit uation has become far more grave than at the time of first writing. ‘This, in combination with a dramatically changed global structure, is our reason for reissuing the book. If, prior to 1992, the collective human assault on the Earth's environment had failed to draw sufficient global attention, the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro in June of that year created a forum that brought environmental issues to the forefront of the news throughout the world. Ac that time, over thirty thou- sand heads of state and heads of corporations, diplomats, scientists, politicians, political activists and concerned individuals gathered to debate, exhort, and demand that appropriate action be taken to assure the future of humanity, Itwas the largest gathering of world leaders ever to take place. They met because of their shared alarm over both the state of the environment and the unacceptable conditions of human existence in so many parts of the world, As had been apparent before and became glaringly more so in Rio, the Catch 22 of the global dynamic most difficult to resolve is that it is hopelessly beyond the means of the billions of poverty-stricken human beings, who must do whatever necessity dictates merely to stay alive, to act to protect or restore the environ- ment. Equally evident is the unavoidable reality that the natural world cannot indefinitely withstand the onslaught of the current life styles of the industrialxiv From Eco-Cities ta Living Machines nations. Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute more recently predicted that if the world does not respond to environmental degradation soon, it will lead to economic distress that could prove politically unmanageable. Ironically in view of this, the single mode of collective behavior at once most urgently in need of change and readily within the grasp of many of us in the industrialized world remains our emphasis on material well-being and our massive consumerism, Now with the attention of people throughout the world at last focussed and the environmental crisis looming ever larger and more ominous, the think- ing underlying the ecologicai design precepts introduced in the book becomes more relevant and more timely than at the time of its earlier publication. It is now widely recognized that, with the exception of some indigenous peoples, the ways in which most of us have elected to live are not sustainable, The unhappy synergy of the economic systems and the consumerism of the industrial world, with its resultant impoverishment of the less developed countries, and the rapidly growing populations of the poorer countries is at once poisoning and obliterating the life support systems of the natural world—on which we are all ultimately dependent, In the postRio world this has become a given. Even the term sustainable economy, if based on traditional capitalist notions of contin- ually expanding growth, has been labeled an oxymoron. Having worked with such issues for more than twenty years, all the while engaged in applied research for alternative means for humanity to live more lightly on the planet, we think the time is ripe for a reintroduction of the think- ing underlying truly sustainable and equitable means for supporting the peo- ples of the world. In the years since the first publication of the book, although a few of the ideas it introduced have fallen, like the proverbial seeds of the Bible, on stony ground, others have found fertile soil, taken root, and flour- ished. They now are being assimilated into the culture, both intellectually and in practice, Still others, to use another analogy from biology, like spores with the ability to survive years of drought only to sprout again when conditions are right, await their moment to take hold. The years between the two editions have served to prove, however, that the original precepts underlying sustain- able ecological design ase not only valid but among the few promising episte- mologies for the human future, The precepts urge: # That the living world be the matrix for all design. * That design follow, not oppose, the laws of life. * That biological equity determine design. * That design reflect bioregionality. * That projects be based on renewable energy sources.Preface: The Years Betusen * That design be sustainable through the integration of living systems. © That design be coevolutionary with the natural world, © That building and design help in healing the planet. © That design follow a sacred ecology Since their formulation for the earlier edition, these precepts have been reflected, with varying degrees of emphasis, in all our projects. As recounted in the body of the text, subsequent to our years at New Alchemy, in 1982 we founded Ocean Arks International, a small non-profit institute created to disseminate tested and proven ideas of ecological sustainability throughout the world. It since has become the umbrella organization for our more recently established Center for the Restoration of Waters, as well as for our joint production, with the Lindisfarne Association, of Annals of Earth, a publication that not only chronicles our own work but offers comprehensive coverage of the technical, philosophical, and social dimensions of environ- mental issues. Originally, as a fledgling organization, Ocean Arks had a decidedly broad mandate, one that included the design and implementation of wind- powered, sea-going work vessels, alternative technology transfer, land and water restoration, and reforestation, But the alarming and worsening state of the waters from innumerable sources of human contamination necessi tated a narrowing of our focus In the United States, for example, Americans use one third of all the flowing water in the country every day—with concomitant depletion of this irreplaceable resource. Industry uses one hundred cubic miles of water each year, equivalent to thirty per cent of all the water of the rivers of the world Into formerly pure waters we have poured such toxins as fertilizer run-off, industrial, chemical, and human wastes. Springs, ponds, rivers, lakes, and oceans are increasingly polluted. In spite of the estimate that, so far, North America is stil! among the less damaged areas of the planet, many species of, fish here are becoming extinct—the aquatic portent of the canary in the mine. To date, more than three hundred and sixty four species of fish have been listed as threatened. The same holds true for frogs and other amphib- ians. Among the known reasons are pollution, habitat destruction, and the introduction of exotic species. Nor are frogs and amphibians the only species at risk. In spewing thousands of chemicals into the environment, we do so to have many of them return to us via the water into the food chains to become embodied in the cells of our bodies and those of our children. Life is not possible without water, Water is the life-giving element, the reason we inhabit a blue planet. The more we know about water, the more xvxvi Prom Eco-Cities to Living Machines mysterious it becomes. A single water molecule is tied together by billions of tiny bonds, yet no one has seen a water molecule. The formula HO is sim- ple, the reality complex. Recent studies indicate that the atoms in water are so intricately laced they resemble, in miniature, an entire riverbed from head- waters to the sea. Further, water is the only substance that occurs naturally in solid, liquid, and gaseous states. It can dissolve any other substance, Of its two abundant elements, hydrogen and oxygen, one burns, the other supports combustion. Together they quench our thirst and douse our fires. Asa substance water is something of a scientific freak, having the rare property of becoming denser as a liquid than itis a8 a solid. This behavioral property is the one of reasons life is possible here on Earth. If, like other sub- stances, the solid state were the denser, lakes would freeze from the bottom up, into great blocks of ice, and would never melt, The whole planet would be a ball of ice. The waters of the Earth maintain in balance all of the chem- ical elements of the planet and all its gasses. All land-bound life evolved from. this life-giving source. And we, all of us, are water. Approximately seventy per cent of the human body is comprised of water. Water is at once the blood of the Earth and the great regulator of climate. If, as the Russian biologist Vernadsky claimed, water is life, the quality of water, in many ways, determines the qual- ity of life. Yet, as author Kirkpatrick Sale has noted, the water of life rapidly is becoming the water of illness, debilitation, carcinoma, and death. For all these reasons and because existing methods of treating pol luted water are failing, water has become the major focus of our work in the years between the first edition of the book and this one. Currently, the waste- water treatment industry is itself'a major polluter. It can be faulted on at least three fronts.! Technically, it produces byproducts in the form of sludges that are difficult of dispose of and often toxic. Chemically, it uses hazardous com- pounds in the treatment process, all of which end up in the environment. Chlorine, for example, is widely used and can combine with organic matter to produce chloramines, which are known carcinogens. Aluminum salts, also frequently used to precipitate out sludge and phosphorus, have been impli cated in problems ranging from the weakening of the forests to Alzheimer's disease. Further, the treatment industry is simply not cost effective econom- ically. Advanced wastewater facilities cannot be built and operated without massive federal subsidies. Nor do conventional waste treatment technologies produce anything in the way of economic by-products to offset their operat- ing costs. Our focus on the state of the water has altered our thinking to such a degree that, when faced with complex decisions at the Center for the Restora-Proface: The Years Between xvii tion of Waters, our first point of reference is not the difficulty or even the cost of the task, but what course of action will best serve the needs of the body of water in question. Ideally, to protect the planet’s water, water should be treated at the source of the pollution. Water as pure as or of higher quality than that received should be discharged. And not only should soil and land degradation be prevented for the obvious reasons but also because healthy terrestrial ecosystems purify water For more than five years we have been working with a new ecological approach to advanced water treatment. Our technologies use what we have called living machines, self-contained networks of ecological systems powered by the sun and designed to accomplish specific purposes. Frequently they are housed inside greenhouse structures. Based on the precepts that waste is a resource out of place and that nature handles every form of waste by turn- ing it into a resource, our systems imitate the purifying and recycling abili- ties of natural aquatic ecosystems. They contain populations of bacteria, algae, microscopic animals, snails, fish, flowers, and trees. These living machines are capable of advanced water treatment without resorting to the hazardous chemicals used in most existing treatment plants and at less than traditional secondary treatment costs. Our first water treatment project in 1987 was, to mix a metaphor, a baptism by fire. We were faced with the daunting challenge of treating waste- water at a ski resort where the arrival of a large population of holiday skiers coincided with a time of year when the sun slipped behind the hills a little after two o'clock in the afternoon and average temperatures hovered around zero degrees Fahrenheit. These were far from ideal conditions as the living organisms essential to the overall functioning of the ecosystem were com- pletely dependent on solar energy to get the job done. But as James Love- lock once said, “Nature is a little bit like a Victorian grandmother, tougher than one would have thought.” The resort treatment plant wobbled a bit at first but eventually the range of food chains that fed upon the waste steam and produced fish, flowers, tree seedlings, and the ultimate goal, clean water, established themselves. In the end the ecosystem performed beyond our expectations and proved a dramatic first step in a series of projects that have justified our conviction that the natural world is the ultimate model for restruc- turing the means by which human populations maintain themselves. Another formidable gauntlet was hurled our way with the second pro- ject in waste treatment we tackled. We were challenged to determine whether we could create contained ecosystems that would treat septage, the highly concentrated sewage pumped from septic tanks. Septage, in some areas, is pumped into and held in open holding ponds or septage lagoons. To ourxviii From Eco-Cities to Living Machines knowledge septage had never been treated using aquatic ecosystems. And so, in the searing record heat of the summer of 1988, we found ourselves setting up an experimental treatment system at what is euphemisti- cally termed the ‘disposal area’ of the town of Harwich on Cape Cod. Along the rim of one of the fetid septage lagoons, a stone’s throw from the usual heaps of refuse, mounds of gravely landfill, blowing litter, and squadrons of rapacious seagulls found at such a locale, we set up our test sight. In stately procession we aligned twenty-one five-foot high, translucent cylinders, suc- cessors to the solar algae ponds of New Alchemy, each one a contained ecosys- tem and each one a successive part of a larger ecosystem. The tanks were aerated and connected by plastic tubing. Each one was topped with a raft of floating plants. The septage entered at the uphill end and passed through each tank in turn until it reached the last one, a process that took about ten days. At the halfway point, the flow was diverted to drain through a hundred and twenty foot long, waist-high wooden trough, which ran the entire length of the row of tanks, then was pumped back into the tanks. The trough was lined with plastic and contained a simulated marsh, an ecosystem made up of aquatic plants and animals, intended to do the final polishing or purify- ing of the septage In the latter half of the summer, laboratory test results of the effluent from the marsh outfall began to come in. As with those from the ski resort, they exceeded our expectations. The contained ecosystems had succeeded in producing clean water while treating septage and, in so doing, changed the rules for the treatment of concentrated liquid wastes. Not only were nine- y-nine percent of the ammonia and phosphorous removed from the efflu- ent, so also were heavy metals and fats and grease. The nitrate levels were reduced to a tenth of those considered safe for well water, When the fish res- ident in the downstream end of the system were analyzed for P.C.B.s, dioxin, and related toxic compounds, their livers and flesh were found to be free of contaminants. Fecal coliform bacteria were largely eliminated. That summer's experiment more than justified our long held convic~ tion that the natural world still has a lot to teach its human offspring. Ulti- mately, our long row of cylinders with their sun-powered, microbe-based ecosystems lined fortress-ike along the length of the septage lagoon, began to seem a more likely line of defense than the billions we still lavish on mili- tary hardware. This was later confirmed by the laboratory tests. Of fifteen volatile compounds listed as carcinogenic by the EPA contained in the sep- tage as it entered the first tank, fourteen had been completely removed by the aquatic ecosystem. The remaining substance was ninety-nine per cent removed. These results led to a watershed in our thinking. Whereas previPreface: The Years Besween ously we had hoped that such systems might vindicate our faith in a deliber- ate and consciously evolving partnership with the natural world, with those results in hand we became convinced that this was a viable path to human survival, The Harwich experiment was further characterized by an unusual and heartening human component. Half the construction costs for the research project were supported by the town’s taxpayers. As a result of the experi- mental work, a more permanent facility‘ was built by Ecological Engineering Associates and in 1992 after two years of successful operation, the treatment process was certified by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. From Harwich, the next leap forward came in July of 1989 with the opening of our flagship, a facility for the purification of wastewater in Provi- dence, Rhode Island. Once again the carefully selected and managed ecosys- tems have proved themselves. Since its early shakedown weeks of operation it has continuously been transforming sewage and industrial pollutants into clean water. Water samples were analyzed regularly for nutrients, solids, fecal coliform, and heavy metals and we are building a solid and unique data base. Early research on heavy metals in the systems, in plant tissue, and sediments has been completed. We have experimented with a number of tropical and semi-tropical plants to determine their suitability to the greenhouse environ- mentand their commercial potential. The facility also has become an impor- tant resource for information about this application of living technologies. Although the Providence plant remains our flagship, being to date the largest and the longest running, we have launched a number of other projects to treat many different kinds of waste and to prevent a range of pol- lutants from returning to natural bodies of water. We have treated boat wastes at Marion, Massachusetts and dairy wastes at the Ben and Jerry's ice cream factory in Vermont. In Canada, at the Boyne River Education Center near Toronto, we have installed a living machine for treating all the school’s sewage. In the same area we are also treating cosmetic manufacturing wastes from the Body Shop. As we go to press a number of larger scale projects are on the drawing boards. Restoring polluted water by channeling it through contained ecosys- tems marked our first efforts at water reclamation. The next step in the work has involved working in situ on natural bodies of water contaminated by human activity. Our first project along this line took place in a familiar set ting. Flax Pond is located in Harwich, several hundred yards from the lagoons where we made the breakthrough in septage treatment in 1988, The proximi- ty was not coincidental. In the late eighties, although still deceptively beau- tiful, Flax Pond had to be closed to swimming due to high levels of fecal xixxx From Eco-Cities to Living Machines coliform bacteria from sewage leachate and a number of toxic chemicals. In autumn, the eastern end of the pond turned an eerie, bright red from high concentrations of iron in the sediments. Our early samplings also indicated dangerously high levels of nitrogen and toxic ammonia. On the bottom of the pond there was a ten foot thick blanket of sludge-like sediments. The pond seemed almost comatose. The cranberry growers whose bogs surrounded the pond had com- plained that crops irrigated by pond water were not growing normally and that fruit set and maturation were poor. They had threatened to sue the town. Suspicious, we returned to the scene of our previous research and found that leachate from the septage lagoons had been seeping into the pond In order to learn more, in the spring of 1990 we set up seven sampling ns along the midline of the pond from east to west. We found the whole pond had been seriously altered by the pollutants. Only one station was free of the sludge-like layer of sediments. A population of hardy fish—grass pick- erel, perch, sunfish, shiners, and brown bullheads—had managed to survive in spite of this. We drew up a design that called for pockets of upwellings in the east- ern end of the pond. We installed three floating windmills, Savonius Rotors, to gently lift sediments into the water column. Then we began a procedure we called ecological augmentation which involved adding missing bacterial and mineral elements in the form of soil bacteria and dolomite limestone. ‘The response on the part of the pond was almost immediate. Quite literally, the pond woke up. Within weeks nitrification began, ammonia plummeted to non-toxic levels, and the total nitrogen in the sediments dropped by as much as sixty-seven percent. We were able to purify the pond ata rate greater than the recharge of new pollution. The next natural body of water with which we became involved was in the south eastern United States, Chattanooga Creek is a twenty-eight mile stream that begins in the Tennessee River watershed in western Georgia. It winds its way through several miles of farms through the outskirts of the city of Chattanooga, past carpet mills, foundries, and pesticide factories which lie scattered among the poor, mostly African American residential communities, The Creek has been called the “Love Canal of the South” and itis a legitimate appellation. It bears the legacy of a hundred and fifty years of indiscriminate dumping of toxic compounds. The chemicals in the sediments are extremely carcinogenic and the people who live along the creek suffer from abnormally high levels of respiratory problems, leukemia, and cancet There are forty-two known hazardous waste sites along the lower five miles of the creek, statiPreface: The Years Between Our initial involvement was to volunteer to carry out a bench test, using a living machine, to determine whether there was any hope of restor- ing the creek. We collected samples from the most toxic sites and brought them back to Cape Cod to be treated by a small living machine that was made up of a series of interconnected aquaria with sealed lids to contain the gases. An array of life forms—bacteria, algae, microscopic animals, higher plants, and, in one section, fish and crayfish—were introduced. A parallel test was run at the same time run by our colleague, Karl Ehrlich of AquaResearche in North Hatley in Canada Part of the living machine was kept perpetually dark to support the bacteria, Part was bathed in intense light around the clock in order to main tain the photosynthetic organisms. Samples from the creek were fed slowly into the dark system. After a week, water from the dark side was bled slowly into the light. Liquid wastes were pulsed back and forth like waters through a tidal marsh. The organisms were fed carefully to optimize their growth in the noxious environment of the sealed living machine. After a week, the bac- teria began to recognize the toxins and to produce enzymes that attacked their chemical bonds. Algae began to grow. Because we used their normal feeding behavior to signal the rates at which wastes were allowed to enter the stream, most of the animals survived, As a rule of thumb, as long as the snails were laying eggs, we added wastes. When they stopped laying, we slowed the process down, After two months of treatment the results of the bench tests of the treated water from Chattanooga Creek were sent to the Tennessee Valley Water Quality Laboratory for intensive chemical analysis. The water or liq- uid portion was pronounced pure, technically fit to drink, with only minute traces of pesticides. The TVA labs analyzed the remaining sediments, plants, and animals for contamination by the original material or their breakdown products. They found that twenty-one of the original thirty-three toxic com- pounds were almost entirely eliminated. The remaining nine, mostly break- down products of more toxic compounds, had increased, indicating that the process of biodegradation should have continued longer. Overall, the news from this project to date is further confirmation of the results of its predeces- sors. We are finding that, given the right conditions, purification cycles which are measured in centuries in the wild can be speeded up so that purification can be achieved in weeks and months, A number of years ago, when we began to see the results of our early research at New Alchemy, we became convinced that itis still within our reach to provide for the peoples of the Earth using advanced /ancient practices and ly xxiFrom Eco Cities to Living Machines technologies that are ecologically sustainable. From our more recent focus on the reclamation of water, we have become equally persuaded that, should we take the appropriate action soon enough, itis also possible to restore much of the natural world that we have despoiled, Suppose we were to begin, Suppose.@ Chapter One New Alchemy Where It All Began Suppose there were a clever global pollster, assigned to travel the world, questioning people in places as disparate as the far reaches of the Australian outback, or in downtown Detroit, on one of the Greek islands possibly, or in Brazil oron a rural Chinese commune. Suppose the object of the study was to learn what, if anything, is universal to the human experi- ence—what it is that matters to people ultimately. Would there be any com- monality of response? Would it be that, after relief from deprivation and suffering, most of us would name love, concern for our children and families, hopefulness, peace of the heart? Or would it more likely be pos- sessions, wealth, power? It seems possible, were we to answer truly, that we would most want those intangibles without which all other achievements eventually prove barren. Yet, as world events attest daily, asa species we be- have as though power and material objects alone were worth our striving. This isa book about ecological design. By this term we mean design for human settlements that incorporates principles inherent in the natural world in order to sustain human populations over a long span of time. This design adapts the wisdom and strategies of the natural world to human problems. Implicit in this study there is a larger question—what is the role of humanity in the greater destiny of the Earth? As scientific research con- tinues to discover, all of us who inhabit this planet share the same kind of genetic material. In terms of biochemical make-up and genetic structures, the similarities between the human being and the bacteria, for example, are greater than the differences. The illusive and pervasive issues of how human beings, as the only self-conscious species, are to live in the world is a logical outgrowth of our new biological knowledge, Even if the present path of industrial society held much promise of survival, which we feel it does not, it is a violent and unhappy world. A reevaluation of the way hu-From Eco-Cities to Living Machines mans place themselves in the larger world seems timely, if not overdue. In recent years people everywhere have been experiencing a reawak- ening of the Earth as a planet, alive and beautiful beyond words. Photographs from space have affirmed its incandescent uniqueness. Scientists, ecologists, and environmentalists are steadily increasing our knowledge of its com- plexity and vulnerability and are rapidly restructuring our understanding of it, Over much the same period our own research in applied biology and ecotechnology has led to an emerging synthesis of precepts by which the present human community could sustain itself indefinitely without destroy- ing its basis of living support systems. Itis a claim, we think, that could not by made for current industrial cultures. Co-evolutionary with a reawaken- ing sensitivity to the life of the planet there has developed a series of insights, methodologies, and technologies that make it possible to create a post- or meta-industrial society without violating fundamental ecological integrity. This ability is as unprecedented as it is timely. New Alchemy Our own work in ecological design began many years ago with the New Alchemy Institute, a research institute in Cape Cod, which we founded with the aquatic biologist and writer William O. McLarney in 1969, In the summer of 1998, its original goals fulfilled, the Institute closed. Although itis not within the province of this book to recount in detail the terrifying and all too proba- ble threats that imperiled the world then, and more so today, the litany of woes, headed by nuclear confrontation and widespread ecological disaster, that prompted us to take some sort of action at that time remains long and famil- iar. Barring cataclysmic events, we confront daily an unrelenting array of humanly created problems. Regional war, global proliferation of weapons, industrial and agricultural pollution, contamination of air, land, and water, nuclear meltdown, ozone depletion, acid rain, deforestation, desertification, famine, and home- essness are far from ephemeral spectres. They are directly and achingly real to many people in many parts of the world and indirectly affect everyone. Yet it is the same haunting threat of rapid or gradual extinction of much of life on Earth, at least in its larger forms, that has been a catalyst and context for many changes, some of them hopeful, which are beginning to take place. This threat was certainly instrumental to the birth of New Alchemy, and for the thinking and the work that we shall be discussing throughout the book In 1969, compounding the ongoing crises of the Vietnamese War and conflicting social issues of the late sixties, there was an unremitting flowNew Alchemy: Where It All Began of information about the destruction of the environment. The word ecol- ogy, which, like economy, is derived from the Greek O/KOS, meaning household or home, was being adapted into the general vocabulary. Unlike the term environment, which denotes one’s surroundings in an objectified sense, ecology by its very inclusiveness implies interconnectedness. This word's incorporation into daily language was some indication of a dawning realization of the complexity of the human interaction with the natural world About that same time we were fresh from a more directly experien- tial event that also had shaken us and given us a realistic sense of our own capabilities. Friends renting a small ranch in the hilly country west of San Diego in California and just north of the Mexican border had asked us for help in studying the ranch so that they could grow toward self-sufficiency in food and energy. Spending time in the dry, sun-drenched hills there, we came to realize that, given the lack of water and almost non-existent soils where only manzanita bushes seemed to Mourish in quantity, we had no idea how our friends should proceed. Academic credentials and training in biology were no help in redefining the human place in what had initially seemed a hospitable landscape, at least not within the framework of the ecological ethic. We decided then to undertake an intensive study of the land to examine as many of the aspects of the environment as we were able to. We collected, studied, and catalogued soil samples, soil animals, insects, plants, shrubs, and rocks, and noted trees, birds, animals, and other fauna. Very slowly, some relevant clues begam to emerge. Midway up a small gorge we found a plant, the roots of which are known to seek out moisture, indicating the presence of a hidden spring. Below, where the gorge began to flatten out, there was a live oak tree surrounded by an association of plants that included miner's lettuce which we learned required good soil With this discovery of a source of water and suitable soil, establishing a gar- den and a move toward food production became a possibility. If the spring were to be tapped as a source for irrigation and fish ponds, then gardens, poultry and other livestock, and eventually orchards could be integrated and an agricultural ecosystem could become an achievable goal. Our hope- ful prognosis for the ranch had an abrupt but unhappy end, however, for the rent on the land was raised unexpectedly to well beyond the means of our friends. Shortly afterwards bulldozers appeared on the crest of the hill and began levelling for a colony of weekend cottages. We emerged from the experience realizing the need for a more se- cure basis for research. This combined with a desire for the Hexibility and 3From Eco-ities to Living Machines freedom to begin to search for relevant knowledge, new and lost, led u outside established academic and scientific institutions to consider an orga nization of ur own. Our initial impulse was to become disseminators of in- formation, thinking, naively, that this would trigger the necessary reform We became involved in communication with other like-minded people— biologists, naturalists, students, environmentalists, parents, anyone simi- larly concerned. But even as we decried, privately and publicly, the waste- fulness and destructiveness of many of the practices of industrial societies we had little to suggest in the way of other possibilities. We began to ponder the possibilities for ecological analogues to the current, biologically insup- portable, industrial methods for sustaining the people of the world. We wondered whether humanity could ever hope to exist again in a mutually supportive and beneficial way within the biosphere. This question, once it had articulated itself, persisted. It gnawed at our minds and expanded to become the underlying intellectual paradigm on which we were to found New Alchemy, Accepting the likelihood that there were no existing institutes that would allow us the freedom of crossing disciplines, setting different values and priorities as the basis of our work, and looking at biology and agricul- ture ina larger social and cultural context, we created our own fledgling in- stitute, adopting as we did so a credo that may have appeared pretentious or absurdly quixotic. it was and remains utterly heartfelt. Our logo read “The New Alchemy Institute. To restore the land, protect the seas, and inform the Earth's stewards. Our approach to so large and amorphous a mandate was to translate it into research which would show how to affect a shift to a more ecological basis for the provision of basic human needs. This was the work we began when we, and soon afterwards Bill McLarney, crossed the country and rented a uwelve-acre farm in Massachusetts. New Alchemy settled in on its Cape Cod center in late 1971 There were only two paid staff members who did the administrative work when we first moved onto the farm, Everyone else then, the half dozen regulars we considered staff, including Bill McLarney and ourselves, had jobs at The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute or elsewhere. The rest of the work and the maintenance was done by volunteers and friends who gave what time they could. Perhaps by dint of the fact that it was exploring the potential of a new paradigm, New Alchemy, from the begin- ning, was difficult to fit into existing funding structures, It remained soNew Alchemy: Where It All Began through the years, as a core staff of about twenty developed a long record as an innovative research and education organization. Although several of the staff commanded large grants when they worked in established acade- mic and research institutions, New Alchemy consistently had to struggle to stay alive financially. Over the years the work was carried on by staff who might see months go by between paychecks, and by apprentices and volunteers. To investigate a question as large as an alternative means for pro- viding basic human needs, the research was divided into the tangible and more approachable areas of food, energy, and shelter. Starting quite liter- ally from the ground up, we discovered that to work in food production we had first to manufacture topsoil to augment the meagre layer already exist- ing on the sandy, glacial terminal morrain which forms Cape Cod. As we did so, we planted the organic vegetable gardens that were the focus of many years of experiments. Subsequently, the agriculture program expanded into research in many other areas including tree crops, a type of farming that is a logical adaptation to the natural state of Cape Cod. Young orchards were started, as well as stands of trees for timber, fuel, manufacture, and food for livestock. The other major branch of our research in intensive food produc tion was in the field of aquaculture, the culture of fish and aquatic animals. Aware of the growing protein deficiency in the diets of people in so much of the world, we began research into methods of producing protein resources that were both economically accessible and ecologically benign. In investi- gating possible alternatives to nuclear and fossil fuel energy, our work has been mainly with the renewable sources of the sun and wind. Windmills, looking, as one group put it, “like steeples of a solar age,” and small, sun- trapping domes dotted the New Alchemy landscape since its first summer. Our efforts proved encouraging in both agriculture and aquaculture within a relatively short time. We began to see a great improvement in the soil and good-to-excellent yields from the gardens and the sun and wind-powered fish ponds. We were emboldened to go on to the issue of shelter—to try to create an integrative form of architecture that would incorporate renew- able energies and biological systems in the form of growing areas for plants and fish From early on our work found unique direction in this harnessing of wind and solar energy to power biological systems. We built a number of variations of small translucent structures that were both greenhouse and aquaculture facilities, They were microcosms that absorbed and intensifiedFrom Eco-Cities to Living Machines the pulses of natural forces to provide food and an optimal environment for life forms ranging from soil animals, to plants, to fish, to people. As one design improved on another we evolved what was named the bioshelter, the structure at the core of much of the achievement of the Institute during its firstdecade. Beyond the Institute, it has been a major catalyst in exploring the fruitfulness of a marriage between biology and architecture. Itis at the core of most of the design concepts to be described throughout this book—a harbinger for new directions in public buildings, commercial greenhouses, private and aggregate housing, and year-round community gardens Whether it was timeliness or Fortune that smiled on us, New Al- chemy’s work was recognized in a shorter time and ona larger scale than we would have conceived possible in our first seasons. By 1976 we had de- signed and built two large bioshelters.' One was on Prince Edward Island in Canada, established in cooperation with Canadian Federal and Provincial authorities, as a part of conserver society policies. The other was on our farm on the Cape and designed in collaboration with Solsearch Architects. Although bioshelter has become a generic name for such structures, we chose, more poetically, to call them respectively the Prince Edward Island and Cape God Arks. As the cell is acknowledged as the basic building block in organic evolution, the bioshelter is likely one day to be seen as a basic building block in ecological design. The Ark in Canada was opened with considerable fanfare, attended by Prime Minister Trudeau and the then Premier of Prince Edward Island, Alex Campbell. The building remains well ahead of its time as an experiment in systemic design and in the incor- poration of biological elements into a structure that was greenhouse, aqua- culture facility, and residence for the people who worked in it. Seen in ret- rospect, what we were acknowledging at the opening of the Ark im Canada was a turning point in integrative architecture, After several years of our own research there, monitoring and testing the building, we turned it over to provincial authorities and it is now a commercial trout-raising facility and hatchery. After 1976, a great deal of research was done in both Arkson interior climate, energy requirements, soil, and vegetable and fish production as well as overall performance. In the Cape Cod Ark an elaborate monitoring system was installed with seventy-six sensors relaying information on the ongoing state of the building to a central computer. Both it and its Prince Edward Island counterpart weathered their first, unusually severe winters, without resorting to other than solar heat except for a woodstove in the liv- ing area of the Canadian Ark. Assessing and extrapolating the ongoing per-The Cape Cod Ark formance and productivity of the buildings, we were able to pronounce the Arks viable beyond our early hopes. They were independent of outside energy sources for heating and cooling and yielded well throughout the year, portending an economic base for future replicas. For almost all of the same period New Alchemy concepts were being researched and tested simultaneously in Costa Rica. In 1973 Bill McLarney founded ANAI(associacion de los nuevos alquimistas). It consists of a small farm located in the Atlantic lowlands, on the Caribbean coast, just north of the Panamanian border. ANAT is an integral part of the Gandoca commu- nity there. While maintaining a lifestyle absolutely consistent with that of his neighbors, Bill has been able to bring considerable financial aid and technical innovation into the area. For all that, ANAT remains a Costa Rican organization with in-country directors and local staff and apprentices. Its principal mission has been to integrate locally defined rural development and ecological conservation, which involves work in aquaculture, agricul- tural crop diversification, and local economic development. Although ANAI is completely independent, there has been considerable exchange between it and New Alchemy, and now Ocean Arks International, in terms of staff, apprentices, and information. On Cape Cod the Institute expanded so that, with the exception ofFrom Eco-Cities to Living Machines small public library and reading rooms, every inch of the farmhouse was crammed with desks and offices. The old dairy barn housed not only a work- shop and storage areas, but a lab, a computer facility, and a state of the art superinsulated energy education auditorium which still demonstrates some of the most advanced materials and concepts in conservation. From a start- ing point behind the house, a series of signs steered ten thousand visitors ayear through a self guided tour of the farm. The education and outreach program offered a number of guided tours as well. Beyond the lawn and the row of experimental bioshelters which dotted the hill overlooking the garden, sat an innovative pillow dome (so named because its translucent skin is divided into hundreds of tiny pillows) that was honored at its open- ing in 1982 by the presence and approval of the late Buckminster Fuller, Although the bioshelter research, because of its contained nature, lends itself well to description, the agricultural work on the farm also pro- duced encouraging results. Yields of organic vegetables on the steadily improving soil tripled Department of Agriculture averages. Some of the aquaculture in solar driven tanks rivals world production records. Farther back from the gardens, and away from the house, were extensive herb gar- dens and a growing orchard of young fruit and nut trees continually tested for adaptability to the Cape's climate and soil. The experiment continued behind the barn where many more trees, food-producing and nitrogen-fix- ing shrubs, and many different species of bamboo, were all patrolled reg- ularly by a vociferous gaggle of weeding geese. By the end of its first decade, pooling the promising results of New Alchemy’s research with that of others in related fields, we began to feel that we had achieved an affirmative answer to our original question. An alternative, ecological human support base was feasible.’ It was a sound idea to look to biology as a basis of design, We see this as an informed affirma- tion of the regenerative capabilities of the planet and of the human role as, stewards of the Earth. For those of us who accept its validity, it engenders a new and hopeful way of looking at the world. Unlike present industrial prac- tices, itis reversible. We can afford mistakes. Failures can be recycled into more useful forms and tried again, leaving open the possibilities for con- tinual choice. The thinking that underlies the ecological paradigm is less a linear Cartesian model but rather of the mode that can better be envisioned through chaos theory or by the hologram, embodying ceaseless mutual causality and interdependence. If information can be defined as a differ- ence that makes a difference, the work done at New Alchemy can be con- sidered to have helped to create a new piece of information, a variable inNew Alchemy: Where It AU Began the overall fund of human knowledge. It represents a new way of knowing. Ithas reinforced our own conviction that a smoggy guttering out of life is not inevitable, but becomes, through non-action, a choice. This conviction has found strength in the results of countless other like-minded groups around the world in agriculture, ecology, cybernetics, materials science, physics, and humanistic psychology, economics, and politics. Should the ecological paradigm become, as it could, a governing world view and trig- ger adaptive behavior in significant numbers of people, we would find our- selves with a renewed promise for the future.Chapter Two From Bioshelters to Solar Villages To Future Human Settlements The years with New Alchemy, culminating in the design and build- ing of the Arks, laid the foundation for our work in ecological design. It be- came rounded out for us intellectually as word of our research and its impli- cations for the workability of an ecological paradigm began to spread. New Alchemy’s credibility became established. We met a number of people who, through their writings, had been our mentors when we had been establish ing the underlying intellectual framework of the Institute. Among them were the economist E.F. Schumacher, author of Small is Beautiful, historian and social critic Murray Bookchin, cultural historian William Irwin Thomp- son, Whole Earth Catalog and Co-Evolution Quarterly editor Stewart Brand, Buckminster Fuller, anthropologist/ecologist Gregory Bateson,and anthro- pologist Margaret Mead. From all of them we received approval and en- couragement. Gregory Bateson made what was to us the most memorable and heartening statement of reinforcement when he pronounced what New Alchemy stood for—“an epistemology with a future.” For several years during this period in the mid-seventies, William Irwin Thompson had been urging people working in futuristic concepts to think in larger terms and to reconsider the nature of human settlement. He advocated a post- or meta-industrial village, which he called the deme, as the next unit for design. It was Margaret Mead, however, who was the most im- mediate catalyst for the next stage in our work. Shortly before her death she sent for us to explain that she thought that the time had come for New Alchemy’s work to be applied on a much broader scale. Her message, in es- sence, was that the creation of the bioshelter had been a good piece of work, useful and relevant, but at the level of the private structure or single family house it was limited, Most of the people in the world would neither be able12 From Eco-Cities to Living Machines to afford one nor have access to one. She felt we must begin to envision the sare kind of integrative architecture at the level of the block, the neighbor- hood, or the village. It was a challenging legacy. We could not, nor would we, have re- fused. It was a major next step conceptually—the question of how to take the idea of using biology as the model for design, which had proved work- able on a small scale in an experimental setting, and begin to apply it on a much broader scale. Our first response was to ask people from a range of disciplines to join us and the New Alchemists to meet together and ponder the question for several days. In April of the year following Dr. Mead’s death we convened a conference entitled, The Village as Solar Ecology: A Generic De- sign Conference’. We dedicated the conference and the report resulting from it to her memory. The working hypothesis for the meetings was given in the original proposal which stated: “The blending of architecture, solar, wind, biological and electronic technologies with housing, food production, and waste utilization within an ecological and cultural context will be the basis of creating a new design science for the post-petroleum era.” We were not so naive as to expect that we would emerge from the conference complete with a communicable and tangible epistemology for the design of sustainable communities of the future, To have done so would have been beyond the scope of any conference that did not goon for years, At that conference, however, and in subsequent years, a number of design precepts have emerged from our own and other organizations which are fundamental to the planning of existing and new communities If we are to continue to shelter and feed the people of the world in the com- ing centuries, we will have to design in a different way than we do now. Gradually, these precepts are being incorporated into existing or planned projects. In 1982 we took a further step toward the application of ecologi- cal technology when we created Ocean Arks International. It is a non-profit organization intended to disseminate the ideas and practice of ecotech- nology, or ecological engineering, and ecological sustainability throughout the world. Its first project was to design and build a high speed sailing ves- sel, the Ocean Pickup, for use by fishermen ‘That a revisioning of the way we live and think about the planet is crucial was reinforced unexpectedly for us not long after the Village Con-From Biashelters to Solar Villages to Future Hunan Setilements ference when a young woman from the Wampanoag tribe at Mashpee, Massachusetts visited us at New Alchemy. As always, when the weather is even faintly kind, we were sitting outside on the grass to talk. The general subject of our conversation was the differences in the ways of our respec- tive cultures—hers, the ancestral traditions of the Wampanoags and ours, at least in her eyes, those of an exploitative technological society. What she said to us in essence was, “My people don’t understand you or why you do the things you do. We don’t understand why you are still trying to take more of our land. Why must you own things. Why must you always have more.” Her eyes clouded for a moment as she searched for the right expla- nation, then she gestured toa neaby flower bed. “A seed, a flower, a tree un- folds according to the instructions it has been given. We have always tried to live by ours, We don’t understand yours. How you have been taught to live. What your instructions are.” It is possible that we have forgotten. What are our instructions, asa people, a culture? The observation of our Wampanoag friend was strangely evocative of the words of the poet Annie Dillard, when shesaysin “Teaching a Stone to Talk,” “I want to learn or remember, how to live.’ At the Solar Village Conference a few years earlier, architect and Royal Gol lege of Art Professor in London Keith Critchlow had spoken to us of an- cient concepts of design based on a sacred geometry of the Earth itself. The great circle arches, and the mathematical laws that govern the movements of the stars, have found expression in form structures, building and cul ture, These are the expression of the psyche of a people when the sacred is an underlying energizing force. Carl Gustav Jung spoke of sucha time as “a period in which man was still inked by myth with the world of the ancestors and thus with nature truly experienced.” It is a world view long gone from us now, but unlike our own governing mythologies of progress and iate- rial happiness, it held and satisfied minds and souls for untold ages and generations. As Giorgio de Santillana said in Hamlet’s Mill, “...it lived on and flowered and let the world live.” For longer than we can know, human- ity lived in a universe governed by fixed laws at once mysterious and pre dictable, the visible aspects of which were inhabited by innumerable un- seen gods, spirits, and forces. Spirit and matter, humanity and nature were one, an original seamless, undivided dynamic unity that encompassed and enclosed the interplay of all forces. But then a new cosmology became dominant in the Western world Ithas taken place in a brief period, in comparison to the preceeding eons. 1314 From Eco-Cities to Living Machines This new cosmology began with some of the philosophers of ancient Greece and evolved over the centuries to maturity in Europe during the Age of Enlightenment. What Louis Mumford has called the mechanical world order? came to be increasingly accepted. Reflecting the thinking, among others, of Johannes Kepler who, in 1605, wrote “My aim is to show that the celestial machine be likened not toa ‘divine organism’ but rather to. a.clockwork,” it became the basis of all scientific exploration. That knowl- edge which could be measured, quantified, charted, and ultimately objec- tified was seen as legitimate for study, Basing their thinking on the philosophy of René Descartes, who saw a fundamental division between the separate and independent realms of mind and matter, scientists began to treat matter, including the living world, as lifeless and apart from them- selves, leading to both the greatness and the folly of the idea of scientific ob- jectivity. The influence of Cartsian duality was to further lead Western cul- tures to think of the mind as divided from the body and from the uncon- scious mind. It remained for Isaac Newton to complete the intellectual domination of the mechanistic world view, by using it as the groundwork foundation for his construction of classical physics. The philosophy and scientific discovery of the Age of Enlightenment produced an explosion in knowledge and provided the basis for the ever-accelerating explorations of science. That science bred the technology that has changed the face of the Barth. Because that technology could not have been implemented without a world view that reflects our fundamental attitudes about life and mechanism, we are at once its benefactors and its victims. For a long time, certainly into our own childhood, the images of a clockwork universe and of the natural world as functioning mechanisti- cally, machine-like, removed and separate from ourselves held sway. It is still not broadly questioned, but signs of discomfort with itare becoming in- creasingly common. Feedback from the environment-scarred, denuded hillsides, dying lakes, air murky on the horizon, miles of scrapheaps and automobile graveyards, urban sprawl—has become impossible to ignore. The evidence has gained sufficient proportions that it does not take a philosopher or a specialist of any kind to wonder whether our treatment of the natural world as immune to abuse is the best or even a safe course. Gre- gory Bateson® compared our behavior to the situation in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland” where Alice found herself obliged to play croquet with a flamingo for a mallet and a hedgehog for a ball. Neither the flamingo nor the hedgehog behaved in a predictable manner, because they were alive,