‘Yoda’ for scientists: the outsider ecologist whose ideas from the 80s just might fix our future

John Todd remembers the moment he knew he was really on to something: “There was no question that it was at the Harwich dump in 1986,” he recalls. This was in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, close to where Todd still lives. Hidden away from the picturesque beaches was the town landfill, including lagoons of toxic waste from septic tanks, which was being left to seep into the groundwater below. So Todd, then a 45-year-old biologist, decided to design a solution. What he was “on to”, he came to realise, was not just a natural way of removing pollution from water, it was a holistic approach to environmental restoration that was way ahead of its time, and possibly still is.View image in fullscreenAn early eco-machine purifying toxic waste on Cape Cod in 1986. Photograph: John ToddTodd’s solution to the Harwich pollution problem was both beautifully simple and unfathomably complex. Next to the lagoons, he assembled a line of 15 clear-sided fiberglass tanks, each about the height of a person, and filled them with water containing all the different life forms he could find from local ponds, marshes and streams – plants, bugs, bacteria, fungi, general gunk. The water could be pumped from one tank to the next, and the living matter inside them soon organised itself into a series of different ecosystems. Todd found that he could put in polluted water from the lagoons at one end of the line of tanks and by the time it came out the other end, 10 days later, it was clean enough to drink.“To see that water, and to see all the organisms in the tanks, including fishes, looking and being so healthy, I was just amazed,” he says.Todd didn’t know exactly what was going on in those tanks – he would later discover that various microorganisms were finding uses for the toxins and heavy metals – but he didn’t need to, he says. “All I really knew going into it was all the kingdoms of life had to be in there. Nobody knew which ones could cope with what we had, but there’s probably no problem they haven’t solved in one way or another over the last three or four billion years.” Todd calls it “biological intelligence”.“The thing that separates myself and my colleagues is that we really do celebrate the living world for what it’s beginning to show us it can do,” he says.There’s just so many positive directions that are possible and economically feasibleJohn ToddTodd christened his invention the “eco-machine”, and spent the next four decades understanding and refining it, applying it to everything from treating wastewater to growing food to repairing damaged ecosystems. Now aged 85, he is still at work, inventing new solutions to a set of environmental problems that has only deepened.Todd’s latest proposal is his most ambitious yet, something he calls “the Fleet”. The idea is very simple, he says: a fleet of sailing vessels, each containing one of his eco-machines. These could be deployed to clean up coastal environmental disasters on site, wherever they are needed. Each sailing eco-machine, Todd says, is “an incubator of beneficial organisms into the environment surrounding it”. Each vessel would take polluted sea water and not only clean it but add helpful organisms and nutrients to it, such as diatoms, which he calls the “baby milk” of the marine food chain.View image in fullscreenA test sailing vessel with eco-machinesView image in fullscreenHow one of Todd’s sailing vessels containing an eco-machine might look. Illustration: John ToddIt sounds romantic, challenging, far-fetched even, but between his knowledge of ecological design and naval architecture, Todd seems to have figured it all out: the design of the sailing vessels (inspired by 19th-century Thames barges); how to keep the tanks full of liquid stable on board; energy and lighting; how much water these relatively small vessels could treat. Powered by wind and sun, the entire operation would be fossil fuel-free, he says, “and the fact that they’re going to be so beautiful, they’re going to be the sort of technology neighbourhoods are going to want to have in their back yards”.Maybe I should just slow down and let them catch up before I go galloping off with sailing eco-machines. But I can’t, I’m not young enoughJohn ToddTodd estimates a fleet of 30 such vessels could clean up maritime pollution for about a quarter of the cost of conventional processes. He would love to get two 40ft prototype vessels built and put them to work on nearby Waquoit Bay, which would cost about $20m (£15.5m), he says. Like many coastal areas, Cape Cod’s inshore waters are dying, largely as a result of pollution from domestic sewage. The sea-run brook trout, the shellfish and the eelgrass he saw in the 1960s are hardly to be found any more. Every summer, scores of Massachusettsbeaches closeafter heavy rains because of sewage pollution.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenTodd – and some of the books that inspire him – at his home in Falmouth. He says his machines are cheaper and more effective than industrial alternatives. Photographs: Simon Simard/the GuardianTodd knows how to fix it, and much more besides, he believes, but, as has been the case since the 1970s, his ideas are still too wide-ranging for the compartmentalised scientific world to fully understand, he says. Despite having won numerous awards and accolades, he has always been something of an outsider scientist. “Maybe I should just slow down, and let them catch up before I go galloping off with sailing eco-machines,” he says. “But I can’t, I’m not young enough.”Born in Ontario, Canada, Todd has always loved the water and boats. His father designed and built yachts as a hobby, and he has done the same. He studied agriculture and marine biology, but by the time he came to Cape Cod in 1969 and took a post at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, he was beginning to chafe against the strictures and compartmentalisation of academia. He was also becoming increasingly worried about the environment.View image in fullscreenA meeting at the New Alchemy Institute, with Todd sitting at the table on the far right. Photograph: New Alchemy staffView image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenTwo covers of the Journal of the New Alchemists, published by the New Alchemy InstituteIn 1969, Todd co-founded the New Alchemy Institute with his wife, Nancy, and a colleague, Bill McClarney – not quite a hippy commune, an alternative research institute (associates included visionary architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, economist EF Schumacher and Lynn Margulis, co-creator of the Gaia hypothesis). “I decided I wasn’t a doomwatch ecologist,” Todd says. “Doomwatch can be left to other people, I was more interested in solutions.”The 13-acre (five-hectare) New Alchemy site is a few minutes’ drive from where he and Nancy still live. Its mission was to explore joined-up, sustainable ways of living: energy, food, shelter, waste. They planted organic crops, farmed fish and built wind turbines and experimental architecture – all underpinned by a belief that the more systems they had working together, the stronger the whole would be, just like the organisms in one of his eco-machines.View image in fullscreenAn illustration of a geodesic dome from the Journal of the New AlchemistsThat first eco-machine, in Harwich, ought to have gained Todd national attention; instead it earned him a lawsuit from the state regulators. Apparently nobody was permitted to treat waste without a civil engineering degree. “I appeared on the front page of the Boston Globe, described with a word I’d never heard before, ‘scofflaw’,” he says, chuckling. “The head of the Environmental Protection Agency heard about my fight and sent one of his scientists up to review the data and what I was doing. He went back and he said, ‘He’s legitimate.’” The EPA subsequently honoured him with an award (indeed, anEPA study in 2002found Todd’s technology to be “typically cost competitive with more conventional wastewater treatment systems”).After the New Alchemy Institute wound down, Todd founded his own ecological consultancy,Ocean Arks International. It has designed and built more than 100 eco-machine systems to treat problems of pollution, wastewater and food production around the world, from the US to China, Australia, Brazil and Scotland. He has drawn up proposals for islands owned by Richard Branson, Marlon Brando and Leonardo DiCaprio (only Branson actually implemented them).Todd’s eco-machines are cheaper and more effective than industrial alternatives, he says, and are even capable of treating chemicals that have been impossible to break down using conventional methods, such as grades of crude oil and mining waste. They are also far more sustainable – powered almost entirely by sunlight.All of which begs the question: why aren’t they more widely used? One reason is prevailing attitudes, Todd suggests. “Civil engineering schools tend to eschew innovation and invention. Hardware is tinkered with and new components are added at a pretty slow pace. A 100-year-old waste water treatment plant looks pretty similar to a contemporary one.”At the same time, for all his scientific skills, Todd is the first to admit he has never been much of a businessman. His career is strewn with startups and partnerships that fell by the wayside for various reasons.However, many of his ideas have seeped into the mainstream and some of his ideas have been developed in a more commerical way, including by his son, Jonathan.View image in fullscreenThe Weather Makers’ eco-machine containing 12 water tanks under a geodesic dome. Photograph: Weather MakersView image in fullscreenFish in the Weather Makers’ eco-machine in the Netherlands. Photograph: Weather MakersIt is not just Todd who can vouch for their efficacy. Three years ago, under Todd’s guidance, the Dutch environmental restoration company the Weather Makers built their own eco-machine in Den Bosch, in the Netherlands, with 12 water tanks housed under a 50ft-diameter geodesic dome. They were seeking to process local water polluted by intensive farming into fertile, nutrient-rich water, and to desalinate marine sediments to use in their ecosystem regeneration projects in places such as the Sinai desert.Just as Todd did in Harwich, the Weather Makers’ co-founder Ties van der Hoeven found the results were “amazing”. “Everything he said was just spot on, and certain things really overtook our expectations,” says van der Hoeven. “Everything is growing like crazy.” Tomato plants growing inside the dome with the treated water are 20-30% bigger than ones grown with groundwater, he says.Like many others, he did not really understand Todd’s approach until he put it into practice. “Hopefully now, with this planetary craziness we’re entering into, we’re starting to recognise these kinds of holistic solutions better,” he says. He likens Todd to Yoda from the Star Wars movies – the keeper of an ecological wisdom born in the 1960s and 70s but forgotten, “a bit like the Renaissance being forgotten in the middle ages, and then now people are picking it up again”.View image in fullscreenThe first New Alchemy experiment in 1971, with the Todd’s youngest daughter, Susannah. Photograph: Todd EcologicalAs ever, Todd remains an optimist. “I feel we know how to fix the ocean, I feel we know how to fix the deserts, I feel we know how to fix the urban environment, and so we’ve just got to get the story moving,” he says. “There’s just so many positive directions that are possible and economically feasible. If we could get the larger public really excited about how nature can be made to clean up, then people would say, ‘we can do it. We’ve got a future.’”