“There is something infinitely healing,” declared Rachel Carson, “in the repeated refrains of nature, the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.” There is literally “something infinitely healing” in the dynamics of the natural world; perhaps in more dimensions than Rachel Carson implied in her book The Sense of Wonder. For more than thirty years a number of scientists and their colleagues have made the study of her “refrains of nature” in the form of ecosystems, great and small, the focus of their research. Their goal was to decode the processes that give rise to the resiliency and robustness of those systems and to ascertain their role in maintaining the continuity of life on Earth. Their hope in doing so was to learn whether and how the interrelationships among living organisms, ranging from microorganisms, to terrestrial and aquatic plants, to higher animals, might help us to solve the daunting environmental problems we confront in the early twenty-first century.
It soon became painfully clear that New Alchemy had outgrown its paper, legal legitimization, and household phases. What was sorely lacking was a physical center that would both consolidate and ground the ideas. We had not intended to establish a center on the Cape. Nor was it ideal for our purposes in many ways. For all its charm, it was far from rural. It was and is a woodsy suburbia, then rapidly developing and now sadly over the mark. Yet there we were. And by that time, in order to fully achieve legitimacy in our own eyes as much as those of our supporters -- and critics -- New Alchemy had to become a place where you could go and see for yourself how the ideas were being manifested, where you could ask questions, and get your hands dirty or your feet wet in a fish pond. All this prompted us to begin searching in earnest for land nearby. Word reached us of a possibility, an old dairy farm about seven miles from our house. The owners proved sympathetic to our ideas and were willing to rent it to us. Negotiations proceeded amicably. We signed a lease in the late fall of 1971.
As the wave of innovation in water remediation gathered momentum for Ocean Arks, John Todd felt it timely that we begin to define what he was coming to refer to as ecological design. Because, as a field of study, ecological design springs from a conscious, intimate partnering of human and evolutionary intelligence, to communicate this approach he undertook codifying the scientific information and methodologies we had accumulated to date. In writing about it John and I had defined ecological design as “design for human settlements and infrastructures that incorporates principles inherent in the natural world in order to sustain human populations over a long span of time; adapting the wisdom and strategies of the natural world to human problems.”
Through the work at Ocean Arks and that of thousands of others, we now know not only that we can create a sustainable world, we know how to do it. In terms of ecological design we may still be at the Model T stage but the potential is exponential. The thinking that guided the work at New Alchemy and Ocean Arks has begun to penetrate scientific, academic, and occasionally corporate fields. From time to time it finds a voice in the media. It is a strong part of the platform of the anti-globalization movement. Slowly it is informing the Earth's stewards.