The Next Transition at OAI

Knowledge Vital to an Age of Information

By John Todd

This year, 2005, is seeing a major transition at Ocean Arks. It is the most recent in a series of organizational adaptations.

We founded Ocean Arks International 25 years ago as a non-profit organization. In the beginning we set out to develop an ecological “hope ship” or “ocean ark” in the form a beautiful sailing vessel powered by the sun and the wind. Its mission was to provide life support for environmentally damaged coastal regions around the world. Our hope was that it would become a working symbol for an emerging ecological age. We first built and tested a 55 foot long one-fifth scale model. We went on to build a second working sailing craft that we called the Ocean Pickup and tested it in South and Central America. It enabled us to aid fishermen on three oceans. The full scale Ocean Ark, to be named after the anthropologist, our friend Margaret Mead, was never built. Petroleum was cheap and the ecological age still a distant dream. I would still love to build the Ocean Ark. It is most surely needed, but for the moment we are not in a position to garner the resources necessary for an undertaking on that scale. For Ocean Arks that stage will have to wait.

From the very beginning we wanted to communicate with the larger world. Towards that end, Nancy Jack Todd, created a publication for our membership entitled “Annals of Earth Stewardship” subsequently shortened to “Annals of Earth.” It first appeared in 1982 and has been published thrice yearly ever since. Her goal was to present a diversity of views and opinions relevant to ecologically conscious cultures.

Beginning in the mid eighties, concerned about the widespread deterioration of water quality, we turned to water purification. Over the next decade Ocean Arks developed, and in some cases patented, a number of ecological technologies for treating waste and for water remediation. These natural systems technologies were known as Solar Aquatics, Living Machines, Restorers, Ecological Fluidized Beds and Eco-Machines. All our technologies had attributes in common. They were ecologically designed and engineered. They employed a diversity of organisms. All five kingdoms of life forms were represented in their design and implementation. They borrowed their “architecture” from such representative ecological systems as marshes, ponds and streams. They were put to work in a wide variety of settings ranging from sewage treatment for a mountain resort, septic tank waste for a New England town, a factory in England, a toxic waste site in Tennessee, a food processing plant in Australia, and a slaughter house in Maryland. They were incorporated into three school buildings to treat sewage and to recycle water including the purified wastewater. The list is long and continues to grow. This story is told by Nancy in her new book with Island Press, A SAFE AND SUSTAINABLE WORLD: THE PROMISE OF ECOLOGICAL DESIGN.

In the midst of this creative phase a decade ago Ocean Arks was badly embezzled by our office manager and we had to struggle for several years to pay off our obligations. Eventually our former employee was found guilty and went to jail. Once we were back on our feet, Ocean Arks evolved into its next transition. I became a professor at the University of Vermont, teaching ecological design. Michael Shaw, a Scottish colleague, took over Ocean Arks as its executive director. With Michael at the helm OAI evolved into a project-based enterprise. He hired engineers, graphic/CAD people and support staff to expand the range and scope of Ocean Arks’ efforts on behalf of the waters of the world. During the following years our projects extended as far as one of the remotest islands in the Pacific Ocean to provide waste treatment for the Nature Conservancy. In China we undertook the remediation of a sewage-laden canal in the southern city of Fughou. At the same time we also designed major clean-up projects for Eastern Europe. It was a heady time as well as a scary time. In some cultures we were working without the necessary frames of reference. In China, for example, it was hard to communicate technical information to our local partners. Expensive mistakes were made and only slowly corrected. The effort seemed worth it, however. The sight of floating Restorer filled with flowers and plants and the canal running clear rather than excrement was both gratifying and reassuring.

Our beacon during this heyday was the Living Machine facility at South Burlington in Vermont. With support and oversight from the US Environmental Protection agency, between 1995 and 2000 it treated 80,000 gallons of sewage a day in a greenhouse near the shores of Lake Champlain. Its excellent performance was chronicled by myself, Erica Gaddis and Eric Wells in an article entitled Ecological Design Applied in the journal ECOLOGICAL ENGINEERING, Volume 20, pages 421-440, in 2003. In that facility we studied over four hundred species of higher plants to determine their effectiveness in wastewater treatment. We also experimented with a number of species of fishes, as well as freshwater clams and snails to understand their role in reducing the amount of sludge produced in waste treatment.

With the US EPA demonstration completed, the South Burlington facility took on another role. We used it to study how to farm brewery wastes for nutrients we could use to develop new economic products with commercial value. Our intent was to prove that ecological waste treatment could become an economic engine for a community. Several of my former students joined the “Food Group at Ocean Arks”. We created food webs that produced products that included fishes, freshwater shrimp, lettuce and greens, tomatoes, earthworms, soil amendments and mushrooms. This work was described in the technical article above, and in my chapter in NATURE’S OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS: THE TRUE BIOTECHNOLOGIES (2004), edited by Kenny Ausubel.

For several years the South Burlington facility was a cornucopia of activity. By late 2003 the original team had enough information to start their own businesses based on the same ideas. This was the best kind of proof that we were on the right track and that nutrient farming has a rich future.

During 2004 the South Burlington facility was used by a University of Vermont graduate student investigating the potential of Eco-Machines to remove harmful herbicides from contaminated surface waters. Last summer it was featured at the Sustainable Cities Conference sponsored by the City of Burlington. But by the fall of 2004 Ocean Arks could no longer afford to operate it during the long cold Vermont winters. I could not find a philanthropic partner, as I had the previous winter, to keep it going. I had to shut down the facility. It remains mothballed.

Meanwhile, at the beginning of 2004 our China prospects still looked promising. We had submitted proposals for millions worth of dollars of projects including one to clean up of the canals of Shanghai in time for the Olympics in 2008. Our project in Fughou continued to show excellent results. Our partners in China were optimistic and confident that contracts would soon come through. Michael Shaw kept on a full staff in readiness although we had to borrow money to keep afloat. But after interminable delays the contracts failed to materialize, leaving Ocean Arks at the end of a limb. In the end the limb snapped. Michael retired and went back to Scotland. The rest of the staff was laid off and went to work for allied organizations. There are still no new contracts in China. It may be because our Restorer reduced the sludge volume in the canals so effectively that local dredging companies went to the authorities to have our work stopped.

As of this writing, Ocean Arks is a shadow of its former self. Nancy and I are its volunteer staff with one young man helping us with the phone and e-mail. There are still debts to be paid. Ironically this Earth Day (2005) the US EPA singled out our Restorer project at the Four Seasons Resort in Hawaii for a major award. It was cited for combining the environmental restoration of a salt pond with the development of economic seafood production, consisting of edible fish, shrimp and oysters.

Nancy and I joke with our friends, saying we will have our tombstone engraved with “They HAVE Prospects”. Despite our financial difficulties, I feel the same way about Ocean Arks. Let me explain why.

I receive over one hundred e-mails every day. They come from all over the world. People are asking for help with water and wastes, green design, and environmental restoration. They want to know where to study and intern. It is difficult for me to keep up and to honor their requests. This spring I had a thought born out of an experience in India. Nancy and I and our colleague Ryan Case were teaching ecological design at Vandana Shiva’s organization Navdanya or Seeds of Freedom. We had expected to be teaching an international group of English speaking activists. Instead we found we were to work with Hindi speaking extension agents from different parts of rural India.

I had to struggle was to find a way of communicating that would have meaning to people with a lot of energy and creativity but very few resources. We had seen for ourselves that the surface waters throughout the country were dangerously polluted and in need of treatment if people there were to survive. I had to apply the universal principles of ecological design on the spot using local biota and whatever substitutes for capital and hardware were available. Together Ryan and I and the course participants designed and built an eco-machine for the Navdanya Organic Farm’s kitchen water. In the process I began to get a glimmer of how to translate Nature’s operating instructions into every day lives and problems.

This returned my thinking to all the e-mails and the requests for information. This led to the discovery of the next transition for Ocean Arks. We have decided to communicate through our web site and associated blog in a design conversation around issues people are confronting everywhere. That way I, in cooperation with a lifetime of associates, can educate and serve a much larger constituency than ever before. After working closely with natural systems for most of my life I understand what they can and cannot do in creating infrastructures for more sustainable societies.

Our goal is simple. I am recording the most frequently asked questions I receive on a daily basis and I have begun to write the answers. With my associates and former students I will then improve and modify the answers in response to site-specific queries. To finance this effort we will ask the users of the system to become new members of Ocean Arks International. We would hope they remain dues paying members as long as our information and ideas are of use to them. We invite all of you now reading this to become members as well in order to make this initiative happen. I ask that you also try to find others who might benefit from joining. If we can double the membership, now at about one thousand, by the end of the year we will be on our way. With growing membership we will be able to fund the interactive web site and blog and to upgrade our membership management software to better serve you. Nancy will continue to publish and edit ANNALS OF EARTH for those of you, like us, who still like to get their information from print on paper, preferably in a comfortable chair. Some of the ANNALS OF EARTH material will appear on the web site.

The pressing bills from the project era just ended still have to be paid. Our son Jonathan Todd heads a small company that handles commercial projects. The company is called John Todd Ecological Design, Inc. (www.toddecological.com). It is involved in designing and building natural systems based wastewater treatment and ecological watershed management. He has offered to donate 5 % of his revenue to Ocean Arks International. We will use the money to pay our debts.

Please join us both as a member and as a participant in the new Ocean Arks conversation. Together we can become agents for change and begin to “Restore the Lands, Protect the Seas and Inform the Earth’s Stewards”.