Quotes from A Safe and Sustainable World

by Nancy Jack Todd

     It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it ... And then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied ... and it is all one.
          - p 19

     To some people, the fact that I can safely leave home without elaborate preparations is one of the most remarkable advantages of my home.
          - p 16

     The ensuing discussions made it painfully clear that our lack of both data and compelling models for sustainable infrastructure was the most serious obstacle in convincing others of the workability of our ideas. Substantiated critique of the existing industrial paradigm was inadequate. No one was going to be converted by our theories. Alternatives had to be rendered visible and proved workable ... it was for New Alchemy to concentrate on a practical nuts and bolts focus--to be a place that convinced people that we could live both sustainably and well.
          - p 19-20

     All that is needed is people willing to tend the land and nurture the plants that in turn sustain them.
          - p 26

     What could not have been gleaned about our gardens from the various reports was their beauty and their role in bonding us to the land and to each other. If New Alchemy could have been said to have a soul, it was unquestionably the garden.
          - p 29

     ... what John Todd had called our moral obligation to substitute renewables for fossil fuel and nuclear energy.
          - p 55

     Energy production, agriculture, land-scapes, and communities must be tied together within individual research programs and each area should be considered as a unique entity worthy of study.
          - p 70

     To have enough food in a hungry world, to have access to land and to grow some of one's own food in a commercialized culture is to be privileged.
          - p 72

     I had a sudden inkling of how unknowable are the consequences of one's acts and how terrible is the responsibility to be honest.
          - p 76

     ... she had seen that ideas could be made real when there was true caring and true vision
          - p 81

     Evolution is continuous, dynamic and highly adaptive.
          - p 82

     Corporations should stop focusing only on how to make money, and start making sense.
          - p 96

     As we had come to realize from working on the Cape Cod Ark, the transformation from idea to actuality took prodigous effort.
          - p 99

     Drawing on the dynamics of natural ecosystems, we had also incorporated elements of advanced integration, redundancy, diversity, renewable energy sources, photosynthetically based food chains, microbial pathways for self-regulation, internal homeostasis, and mutually beneficial interphasing with adjacent ecosystems ...
          - p 104

     ... the scientific guidelines for sustainability ... which we hoped the Ark would manifest:
1) Engage in design and research on a micro level while maintaining a planetary perspective and a concern between levels of organization.
2) Emphasize food-producing and energy systems that do not require large amounts of capital.
3) Seek methods by which a gradual shift could be made from a hardware-intensive society to an informationally and biologically intensive one.
4) Emphasize participatory solutions, which could involve large segments of society.
5) Explore bioregional approaches to the future.
6) Seek methods for incorporating renewable energy sources and durable materials in lieu of finite substances.
          - p 104

     Those who are concerned about the future of mankind are haunted by three questions: will there be enough food, will we have enough energy, and can we produce both without destroying the environment?
          - p 110

     A bioshelter is a mythic construct as well as a practical, ecological one. It is a portal into the mind of Gaia, a rite of indentification with the processes of Earth, a symbol of how we may learn to think, not just about a planet, but as a planet.
          - p 114

     Is there a concept of economics that is consistent with an ecological worldview? If so, what is it?
          - p 119

     I'm saying that the holistic approach of the institute is realistic, practical, and approximates nature, but it is very disturbing to the scientist who thinks that if you break up a very complex and interrelated problem into its smaller isolated components, solve each, and then reconstitute the many solutions into one, the result will solve the original problem. Biotic systems just do not work that way.
          - p 124

     To apprentice is to first acknowledge that there is something bigger than yourself. It acknowledges one's position in a process and a tradition. It's a humbling and empowering experience. You apprentice yourself to something, not someone. I wasn't the gardener's apprentice. I was the garden's apprentice.
          - p 129

     Let ours be a time remembered for the awakening of a new reverence for life, the firm resolve to achieve sustainability, the quickening of the struggle for justice and peace, and the joyful celebration of life.
          - p 131

     ... had defined ecological design as design for human settlements and infrastructure 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.
          - p 161

     Students learn to think systemically, to see not only the interconnected reality of the living world, but the need to rethink and remake the human presence within that context.
          - p 181

     Humans must seek to reconnect themselves to the natural environment, foster stewardship, and embrace responsibility.
          - p 181

[note: page numbers from the Island Press edition - copyright 2005]


Notes From Windward - Index - Vol. 71