For more than fifty years, biologist John Todd has been exploring a profoundly simple idea: instead of trying to engineer our way around nature, what if we learned how to work with it?

His 2019 book, Healing Earth: An Ecologist’s Journey of Innovation and Environmental Stewardship, is part memoir, part field report, and part handbook. Todd takes us through projects ranging from restoring polluted ponds and treating wastewater to repairing landscapes damaged by mining. The settings change, but his approach is consistent.

Begin by observing how a healthy living system works. Pay attention to relationships. Work with diversity rather than simplifying it. Let waste from one part of the system become nourishment for another. Design at a scale that allows adaptation. And, perhaps most importantly, trust life’s capacity to organize and repair itself when the right conditions are present.

Todd calls the systems that grew from this thinking Eco-Machines. To understand how radical the idea is, consider what happened in South Burlington, Vermont.

Beginning in 1995, the city diverted 80,000 gallons of sewage a day—the waste of roughly 1,200 people—from its conventional treatment plant into Todd’s Eco-Machine. Inside a greenhouse, the water moved through a series of living ecosystems populated by plants, microorganisms, and other aquatic life. By working together, these communities of organisms transformed sewage into clean water.

And this didn’t look like a sewage treatment plant. It looked more like a garden center. There was no offensive odor. Schoolchildren came to visit. Even through Vermont winters, the system treated the city’s wastewater to advanced standards.

This is what Todd means by biological design. Instead of building a machine to overpower a problem, he creates the conditions in which life itself can do much of the work.

What makes Healing Earth so useful is that Todd doesn’t leave these ideas at the level of ecological philosophy. He shows us what happened when he put them to work, including what he learned from particular places and problems. The result is hopeful. Nature is not merely something fragile that humans must protect. Given the chance, living systems possess enormous capacities for adaptation and renewal.

Our role is to learn how to participate. John Todd has spent a lifetime showing us what that can look like.

BOOK: Healing Earth‍

WEBSITE: John Todd Ecological Design

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