John Todd could be considered one of the founders of ecological design. For the past forty years or so, he has been building enclosed ecologies, first, for growing fish, John was one of the original growers of tilapia in the USA, and later for treating wastewater and reducing pollution. His most recent ecological systems design cleans heavy bunker oil, number 6 or Bunker C oil, from a canal in Grafton, MA, a site near where the first Industrial Revolution began in the United States.
You can see a video explanation of the process at
http://vimeo.com/54068694
I wrote about this project previously at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/07/21/1112491/-Ecological-Restoration-Cleaning-the-Fisherville-Mill-Canal and have been trying to convince John he should consider presenting at the newly created Harvard/MIT seminar on geoengineering. We need to stop thinking of technology as purely mechanical and begin thinking in systems, learning from healthy ecological communities how to rebuild what we have destroyed.
More video about John Todd’s work at
http://www.toddecological.com/news/youtube.php
More information about the Grafton, MA project at
http://toddecological.wordpress.com/2012/10/29/the-grafton-project-a-massachusetts-canal-contaminated-with-bunker-c-oil-gets-a-second-chance/
A good place to start learning about systems is Donella Meadow’s _Thinking in Systems_ which I wrote about at
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/04/23/723345/-Summary-of-Systems-Principles
John Todd was one of the founders of New Alchemy Institute whose work still leads the way toward a future we can start building today. Their archives can be accessed at http://www.thegreencenter.net
