John Todd's Living Machine.

Treasure Beach Forum: TB Runnin's: John Todd's Living Machine.
Top of pagePrevious messageNext messageBottom of page Link to this message  By turey on Thursday, December 03, 2009 - 03:34 pm: Edit Post

http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/08/06/living-machines-turning-wastewater-clean-wit h-plants/#more-13105


Top of pagePrevious messageNext messageBottom of page Link to this message  By ZED on Saturday, December 05, 2009 - 03:46 pm: Edit Post

UTOPIAN PRAGMATISTS TO THE CORE

Turey, thanks for reminding us of the environmental, scientific work and Eco-Art of the Todd's.

Many of the strategies that you referenced began to take shape at the Todd's homestead, near Falmouth, Massachusetts (Cape Cod).
John Todd had been an oceanographer /scientist at the nearby, highly respected Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

John and his muse/wife and writer, Nancy, called this experiment
in "good life" sustainability: The New Alchemy Institute.
I believe Nancy Todd coined the phrase: Science with a Human Face.

When we visited, at various times from the 1970's through the 1990's, you sensed a band of brothers and sisters creating mini-Arks to help one live independently, in "frugal indulgence", in crisis and in plentitude.

One was surrounded with miniature, self-perpetuating, eco- systems, including hydroponic gardens, of concentrated plant nutrients, utilizing very little water.
But the most memorable image of New Alchemy was their aqua-culture. Vast arrays of translucent, vertical cylinders (5' highx5' diameter) were essentially a closed loop fish pond raising fresh water tilapia, surviving on daily feedings of pellets representing 3% of their body weight.
Algae in the tank would grow to absorb waste and stray nutrients.

The annual yield per cylindrical pond was about 40 pounds of fish.

Imagine, scooping out your fresh seafood steps from your kitchen door.
(A recent Gleaner article offers some tempting preparations for tilapia)

www.jamaicagleaner.com/gleaner/20091203/cook/cook5.html

John Todd was voted by Time magazine back in 1999 as one of the Environmental Heroes of the Planet citing his "Living Machines" that Make Water out of Sewage.
Also cited by Link as another Hero of the Planet is architect, William McDonough, whose 2002 book with chemist, Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle, has become an eco-design bible.

To quote from the book's flyleaf:
"Reduce, reuse, recycle", urge environmentalists; in other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage...as pointed out in this provocative, visionary book, such an approach only perpetuates the one-way, "cradle to grave" manufacturing model, dating to the Industrial Revolution, that creates such fantastic amounts of waste and pollution in the first place. Why not challenge the belief that human industry must damage the natural world?...In fact, why not take Nature itself as our model for making things?...Bio-mimicry...A tree produces thousands of blossoms in order to create another tree, yet we consider its abundance not wasteful but safe, beautiful, and highly effective.

Waste equals food.

Guided by this principle, it is explained how products can be designed from the outset so that, after their useful lives, they will provide nourishment for something new. They can be conceived as "biological nutrients" that will easily re-enter the water and soil without depositing synthetic materials and toxins. Or they can be "technical nutrients" that will continuously circulate as pure and valuable materials within closed-loop industrial cycles. Drawing on their experience in (re)designing everything from carpeting to corporate campuses, the authors make an exciting and viable case for putting eco-effectiveness into practice, and show how anyone involved with making anything can begin to do so as well.


www.time.com/time/reports/environment/heroes/heroesgallery/0,2967,todd,00.html

As a closer, here is a Environmental Horror Story & Its Potential Antidote:

We've been hearing the story of the mythical emirate of Dubai, where the Luxuriant Tourist can get anything she wants...snow skiing with temperatures above 100 degrees, tennis courts floating off skyscrapers.
Dubai, without abundant oil wealth, was this Dreamville, where star architects & landscape designers could promote the Fantastic to their heavily leveraged patrons. Here's how the palms withered and died, and a sovereign country threatens to go bankrupt and into foreclosure.

Looking at the world through the lens of energy investing and peak oil, it's hard to imagine a starker contrast than Dubai World and Masdar City.

Both will rise out of a barren wasteland of sand in less than three decades, but only one was designed to survive the future.

Dubai World was built to serve up the ultimate in luxury and decadence: Indoor ski slopes in one of the hottest places in the world. Architecture straight out of a sci-fi novel on three artificial archipelagos built into the sea. Refrigerated beach sand. Floating tennis courts. The world's largest shopping mall, featuring luxury goods, and entertainment. The world's tallest building. Hotels featuring independently rotating floors, or underwater views, or rooms with eight attendants each. And so on, ad nauseam.

Suffice it to say there's a reason why after Never Land, Dubai was the one place in the world that Michael Jackson wanted to call home.

Lacking a significant endowment of oil, Dubai sought to be the financial hub and the Las Vegas of the Middle East. Its revenue is almost entirely derived from high-rent tourism and servicing the enormous flow of petroleum capital generated by its neighbors. But the gleaming glitter hides a dark underbelly. Those fantasy buildings were constructed on the back of slave labor from places like Ethiopia, Bangladesh, and the Philippines. While Western ex-pats live the high life drinking Moët on the beach and being waited on hand and foot, laborers do backbreaking work in the desert heat, making $5 a day... their passports confiscated, their liberty denied. Subsisting on meager rations and insufficiently desalinated water, they're forced to live in stinking, cramped, unventilated concrete ghettos an hour's bus ride away, conveniently out of sight of the rich patrons.

Convoys of trucks haul sewage out of Dubai every night because the sewer system cannot handle the load. Much of the excess gets dumped illegally into the sea, leading to unsafe, contaminated waters at the very beaches of its ultra-luxury hotels.In the long history of empire and the excesses of the rich, there is nothing unusual about any of that of course. All great empires were built on the backs of slaves at one time or another and all committed their eco-sins. My point here is the utter unsustainability of the strategy.

Predictably, the bursting of the global real estate and financial bubbles took the air out of Dubai as well. Dubai's new flagship hotel, the Atlantis, stands unfinished — its roof leaking and its rooms unwanted — on an enormously expensive artificial island. Its structured financial products, supposedly compliant with Shariah law forbidding the charging of interest, were discovered to be — surprise — not so clean. It's like an echo of the SEC's and rating agencies' complicity in enabling the subprime debacle.

Now Dubai faces sovereign default as collateral damage of the global hallucinated wealth meltdown. The news that Dubai had asked its creditors for a six-month freeze of interest payments on $26 billion in debt related to Dubai World ripped through the financial world, temporarily raising the specter of a domino effect. (The markets quickly shrugged off that fear however, realizing that the damage would be mostly contained and local.)

MASDAR: CITY OF THE FUTURE

Less than 100 miles away from the broken dream of Dubai World, a new city based on a very different dream is rising in Abu Dhabi. Masdar City aspires to be the world's first carbon-neutral, zero-waste city, a happy oasis six kilometers square with its own micro-climate, supporting 50,000 people in renewably powered harmony with nature. Built from the ground up with sustainable living in mind, it will bring together the best-of-breed clean technologies: building-integrated solar photovoltaics and solar glass, solar hot water systems, smart grid technology, electric transportation, power storage, sustainable agriculture and vertical farming, water recycling and desalination, low-energy HVAC, green building materials, waste-to-energy systems... essentially everything but wind energy.

The first phase of the project is already under way. Construction of the Masdar Institute, a higher learning institution that will explore new green technologies and shepherd the best ones into commercial development, is slated for completion next year; its courtship of the world's top cleantech companies and investors has commenced. The Institute aims to be a world-class research and development hub for the solutions of the future.

Ironically, Masdar City is the dream of Sheik Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan — the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, one of the most oil-rich emirates in the UAE. Abu Dhabi claims 92 billion barrels of oil reserves, and produces 2.7 million barrels per day of oil — 85% of the UAE's total output. That's a $1.5 billion-a-week revenue stream, and the reason why Abu Dhabi has the world's richest sovereign wealth fund, worth over $700 billion.

But rather than spend it on lavish amusements and trifles as its sister did, Abu Dhabi intends to use its vast oil wealth to invest in the future. The royal family knows better than most that the punch is running low, and the oil party will be over in 30-50 years. Accordingly, it has committed $14 billion — with another $8 billion expected from outside investors — to build Masdar City as part of a 20-30 year effort to transform itself into a high-tech industrial and knowledge economy.

While the world's oil addicts continue to line up for another hit of its dwindling stash, Abu Dhabi will be weaning itself off hydrocarbons, building a semiconductor industry and turning out some of the most advanced renewable and efficiency technologies in the world. In sha' Allah.

Of course there is no guarantee that Masdar City will prove economically viable, particularly amidst a real estate collapse. And there is an exceptionally high risk of technology failure. It could turn out to be a supersized 21st Century equivalent of the failed Biosphere project — mankind's last serious attempt at maintaining an artificial, zero-footprint environment.

Yet, it's almost unimportant whether Masdar City succeeds as the model city of a sustainable future or fails as an expensive boondoggle. As the world's first comprehensive experiment in integrating the whole spectrum of green technologies at a city scale, the results will be invaluably instructive to the reengineering of the rest of the world.

We'll have a much better idea of exactly what technology can (and can't) do. (Green Chip Review)


Top of pagePrevious messageNext messageBottom of page Link to this message  By turey on Saturday, December 05, 2009 - 09:16 pm: Edit Post

Yes ZED. I look forward to these and related technologies and arts being created and demonstrated in Ja.