Stepping into one of John Todd's living machines, as he calls them, is something like emerging from a time warp into a tropical forest. Or it seems that way on a January day in Vermont that threatens snow.
There's gurgling water. Cala lily blossoms explode in bundles of red. Warm moist air undulates the leaves of taro and elephant ear plants. "When I feel disconsolate, I sometimes come here to relax," says Todd, 59, a ruddy-faced bear of a man, as he extract snails from some plant roots to examine the tiny mollusks' health.
"Here" is the South Burlington, Vermont, Muncipal Sewage Treatment Plant, a greenhouse where sewage from 1,600 residences is treated to a level of cleanliness surpassing federal Environmental Protection Agency requirements. This is the way it works: raw sewage and air are pumped into a series of linked giant plastic tanks in which plants of 200 species are suspended in wire mesh containers. While the plants drink up nutrients in the sewage, countless bacteria and microbes roots break down pollutants. As the sewage proceeds from tank to tank, becoming progressively cleaner, fish and snails join in the feast. What comes out of the last tank is sparkling water, or at least clear enough for irrigation, toilet flushing or car washing. The plants produce enough flowers to delight any gardener and abundant material for compost.
Todd's "machines" cost about half as much to install as traditional treatment plants laden with concrete and plumbing. They don't smell, they are nice to look at, and they are educational. In a school near Toronto with a small facility that Todd designed, "kids flush the toilet and run around the corner to see what happens," he says.
His company, Living Technologies, has installed sixteen systems in the U.S. and eight other countries. Another handful are in the planning stages. Some treat municipal waste, others industrial. The largest, for a food processing plant in Australia, can handle 100,000 gallons of waste per day, about as much as a town of 2,000 people would produce.
These creations are just a one blueprint in a grand plan Todd has been designing and redesigning for more than 30 years to bring people and ecology together in a working relationship. "We have spent 99% of our history in the wild," he says "Sky, water, and trees are embedded in us. Sever that and we've severed what it is to be human." He wants us to embrace nature rather than ignore or overrun it.
The plan first took form, albeit vague, at Montreal's McGill University where the Canadian-born Todd studied agriculture and tropical medicine. After receiving a doctorate in fisheries and oceanography from the University of Michigan, he began shaping his ideas. But it was his wife, Nancy, Todd proudly acknowledges, who really got things going. He had just joined the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Woods Hole, Mass. as an assistant scientist in 1969. "Nancy said science needed a human face. She wondered if ecological concepts could serve people's needs." The result was the founding of the New Alchemy Institute in nearby Falmouth, a testing ground where he hoped to find the answer to the question posed by Nancy, who has guided much of his thinking over the years.
