Mastodawn

Janet Fraser Apr 27, 2025

Another genius Canadian you've never heard of, John Todd was born in Hamilton Ontario. Forty years ago he created an eco-machine to clean polluted water and now, at 80 years old, he's working on putting it on sailing vessels to clean up environmental disasters. There are no words to describe my gratitude.

In 1969, Todd co-founded the New Alchemy Institute with his wife, Nancy, and a colleague, Bill McClarney – not quite a hippy commune, an alternative research institute (associates included visionary architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, economist EF Schumacher and Lynn Margulis, co-creator of the Gaia hypothesis). “I decided I wasn’t a doomwatch ecologist,” Todd says. “Doomwatch can be left to other people, I was more interested in solutions.”

#johntodd #ecology #ecologicalprocesses #pollution #pollutioncleanup #canadianscientist #canadastrong

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/apr/10/scientists-john-todd-eco-machines-pollution-technology-ships-oceans?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

‘Yoda’ for scientists: the outsider ecologist whose ideas from the 80s just might fix our future

John Todd’s eco-machine stunned experts by using natural organisms to remove toxic waste from a Cape Cod lagoon. Forty years on, he wants to build a fleet of them to clean up the oceans

The Guardian