3rd Eco Hero Award: An Evening with John & Nancy Jack Todd, Ecological Design Pioneers

Santa Barbara Permaculture Network Eco Hero Award
An Evening with John & Nancy Jack Todd, Ecological Design Pioneers

Friday, March 17, 6:30-9pm, 2023
TICKETS $10, $20, $40, & Friends of Eco Hero $100

Location: Lobero Theatre
33 E Canon Perdido St, Santa Barbara, CA 93101

Tickets on Sale Now: Lobero Ticket Office
805-963-0761, Lobero.com

Ecological design goes way beyond any other field of design. It taps deep into Nature’s operating instructions, organizing knowledge & ecosystems to serve human needs without despoiling the planet. John Todd
Please join Santa Barbara Permaculture Network as we celebrate our third annual Eco Hero Award honoring John & Nancy Jack Todd of Ocean Arks International, pioneers in the ecological design movement.

Beginning in the late 1960’s this unique and amazingly productive husband and wife team has shared a partnership journey over five decades committed to the emerging field of ecological design that uses human ingenuity to design a future in balance with nature, while healing broken ecosystems damaged historically, and by modern industrial society.

In 1969, John and Nancy Jack Todd founded New Alchemy, an innovative research institute on a twelve acre site in Cape Cod, MA, with the intention of “scientifically exploring strategies that could have evolutionary value to humanity and the planet’s future”. The New Alchemy Institute had an enthusiastic and talented young staff of scientists and innovators who pioneered among other things the Eco-Machine®, designed for biological waste water treatment using solar energy & living organisms. —- more here_– Also organic agriculture & aquaculture; and bioshelters that required minimal reliance on fossil fuels, while operating as a self-contained ecosystems.

With lessons learned from the New Alchemy Institute, they embarked on the Ark for Prince Edward Island, an ambitious project with support of the Canadian government, while in the midst of an energy crisis being felt around the world. The Ark was a bioshelter that generated its own electricity with wind generators, and used solar energy for space and water heating, tested purposely in Prince Edward Island’s cold northern climate. Despite the wintery weather with limited daylight, the Ark’s gardens and fruit trees provided food all winter long for its inhabitants.

Today John & Nancy operate Ocean Arks International, a nonprofit research and outreach organization founded in 1982. Ocean Ark’s stated mission is “to create planetary healing through promoting ecological literacy and the dissemination of vital eco-technologies”, with projects focused on the restoration of the worlds waters, using the tools of nature to heal toxic waste sites, oil spills, leaking landfills and severely damaged waterways. In order to provide consultancy services to communities and businesses John Todd Ecological Design was also formed with projects around the globe. Through the years, Nancy Jack Todd has been the chronicler of all their work, masterfully describing the scope of what they were attempting, while at times even predicting the revolutionary direction they were going. These publications remain potently relevant today.

Through the years they have collaborated & partnered with many other ecological design pioneers, including Bill Mclarney (sp?), Amory Lovins, Janine Beynus, Paul Hawkens, —– In there earliest days they were — of Margaret Mead. well-known sustainability elder John Todd has taught, mentored, and inspired such well-known names in the field as Janine Benyus, Bill McKibben, and Paul Hawken.

Recently the Todd’s have joined forces with the ambitious Greening the Sinai project, along with John D. Liu, Santa Barbara Permaculture Network’s 2019 Eco Hero Award recipient. Headed up by the Weather Makers, a widespread group of international engineers and scientists, this project proposes altering the climate cycle in one of the hottest, driest places on the planet—to a cooler, moister one—as was successfully done in a similar historically desertified region of the world, the Loess Plateau in China. Since fresh clean water is a precious and limited resource in the Sinai, Dr. John Todd’s Eco-Machine® is an especially valuable tool as a natural system for treating wastewaters, and remediation of existing degraded water bodies.

The Santa Barbara Permaculture Network Eco Hero Award honors those individuals who have committed themselves to work in service of the planet and its inhabitants for more than thirty years, with actual solutions and concrete ways forward that benefit many, often on a global scale, while demonstrating pathways forward for future generations. Audiences will learn what inspired John & Nancy, how they made their projects happen, and what challenges they faced along the way—with time for the audience to ask questions, especially encouraging youth attending to interact.

Past recipients include John D. Liu, Paul Stamets, and Louie Schwartzberg. We are honored to have John & Nancy Jack Todd join us in person as recipients for our 2023 Eco Hero Award. A reception follows in the Lobero courtyard for ticket holders.

The event takes place at the Lobero Theatre on Friday, March 17, from 6:30 pm – 9 pm, tickets on sale at the Lobero Ticket office (fees apply), 805-963-0761; Lobero.com. For more information, www.sbpermaculture.org.

A Community Event Hosted by Santa Barbara Permaculture Network
www.sbpermaculture.org

Cosponsors: Santa Barbara Permaculture Network, Blue Sky Biochar, Bamboo DNA, Teeccino, AH Juice, Community Environmental Council (CEC), SBCC Environmental Horticulture, Explore Ecology, Regenerative Landscape Alliance, Island Seed & Feed, Orella Ranch-Gaviota Givings, Santa Barbara Aquaponics, Sustainable World Radio, The Optimist Daily, Quail Springs Permaculture, Hour Books, Mesa Harmony Garden, Wingnut Mushroom Farm, Rincon-Vitova Insectaries, Ojai Center for Regenerative Agriculture (CRA), and the Santa Barbara Independent.

Bios:
Nancy Jack Todd is the author of A Safe and Sustainable World, and the long time editor of the Journal of the New Alchemist that chronicled their work for — years. Nancy & John are the cofounders of the New Alchemy Institute and Ocean Arks International. With John Todd, she has received many awards, including the Bioneers Lifetime Achievement Award, the Charles and Ann Morrow Lindbergh Award for technological innovation on behalf of the environment, and the United Nations FUNEP Award for contributions to the global environment.

John Todd is an internationally recognized biologist who is considered a global leader in the field of ecological water purification. Todd holds degrees covering the fields of agriculture, parasitology, tropical medicine, fisheries and ethology. In addition to new paradigms in an academic setting, he is the founder and president of Ocean Arks International, a non-profit research and education organization and co-founder of New Alchemy Institute. Developer of Eco Machines™, John Todd was named one of the twentieth centuries top thirty-five inventors by the Lemelson-MIT Program for Invention and Innovation. In 2008 he received the Buckminster Fuller Challenge Award for the “best idea and concept to help save the planet and humanity” . In 2007, he was named one of the top 100 visionaries of the 20th century by Resurgence & Ecologist magazine, and was profiled as one of top thirty-five figures “Inventing Modern America” in the “Genius Issue” of Esquire. Todd was named “Hero of the Earth” by Time magazine in 1999

Books co-authored by John & Nancy Jack Todd include

Learn More:
Video: Why Design Now: Eco-Machine at the Omega Center for Sustainable Living

Video: Ecological Design & Living Machines

Video: Eco-Machines/Living Machine examples: El Monte Sagrado Resort Taos, New Mexico; Eco Hood in Prescott, AZ

Interview: John Todd on Sustainable World Radio, Episode 131

John Todd Ecological Design

Ocean Arks International

New Alchemy Institute & The Green Center

Kathe Seidel, German Botanist, first to incorporate vegetation into wastewater treatment wetlands in the 1950’s

Greening the Sinai: John D. Liu’s trip to the Sinai: John’s journey to the Sinai – YouTube

John Todd
Eco Machines™, he was named one of the 20th century’s top 35 inventors by the Lemelson-MIT Program for Invention and Innovation, and a “Hero of the Earth” by Time magazine in 1999.

John Todd is cofounder of several foundations and companies with ecological missions, including the New Alchemy Institute (now called The Green Center, Inc.), Ocean Arks International, and John Todd Ecological Design, which uses principles of ecological design and environmental engineering to design and operate revolutionary treatment facilities known as Eco Machines™. With the largest number of completed projects in the field of ecological water purificaiton, John Todd Ecological Design’s goal is to create simple, cost effective, and aesthetically pleasing systems for the treatment and reclamation of water.

John Todd was the Buckminster Fuller Challenge Award winner in 2008 and received the Bioneers Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998. Todd and his wife, Nancy Jack Todd, received the Lindbergh Award in 1998, in recognition of their work in technology and the environment. In the late 1990s, Todd won two EPA awards in for his innovations with Eco Machines™.

Todd is author of more than 200 technical and popular articles on biology and planetary stewardship, and author of The Village as Solar Ecology; Tomorrow Is Our Permanent Address; Reinhabiting Cities and Towns: Designing for Sustainability; and From Eco-Cities to Living Machines. He is professor Emeritus at the University of Vermont and serves on a number of environmental and technical boards. Recently the Todd’s have joined forces with the ambitious Greening the Sinai project, along with John D. Liu, Santa Barbara Permaculture Network’s 2019 Eco Hero Award recipient

Nancy Jack Todd author of A Safe and Sustainable World, is cofounder of the New Alchemy Institute and Ocean Arks International. With John Todd, she has received many awards, including the Bioneers Lifetime Achievement Award, the Charles and Ann Morrow Lindbergh Award for technological innovation on behalf of the environment, and the United Nations FUNEP Award for contributions to the global environment.

Nancy Jack is Vice President of Ocean Arks International and editor of its journal Annals of Earth. She co-founded the New Alchemy Institute with John Todd, and is the author and co-author of many works, including From Eco-City to Living Machines, Bio-shelters, Ocean Arks and City Farming.
She also contributed all the introductory essays to People, Land, and Community: Collected E. F. Schumacher Society Lectures (Yale University Press).