'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.
Todd’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.
Todd 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.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/apr/10/scientists-john-todd-eco-machines-pollution-technology-ships-oceans
Occam's Razor for the environment!
= new reply since forum marked as read
