The New Alchemists: could the past hold the key to sustainable living?

In 1982, Richard Buckminster Fuller visited the New Alchemy Institute, in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to open a new geodesic dome. Frail of body but still sharp of mind, the 87-year-old architect was something of a countercultural guru by this stage, thanks to his “spaceship Earth” philosophy and his forward-looking designs, not least the dome.

Lightweight, efficient, simple to construct and futuristic, domes became a hippy cliche in the 70s, but the New Alchemists’ dome was a little different. Designed by Fuller’s disciple Jay Baldwin, it was the first “pillow dome”: made of triangular panels of transparent plastic inflated with argon gas, which improved its insulation properties (the same technology is behind Cornwall’s Eden Project).

Inside the pillow dome was a miniature forest of plants, tropical fish ponds and a ripening fig tree. Fuller nodded with approval. “He said, ‘She’s beautiful,’” recalls Nancy Jack Todd, co-founder of the New Alchemy Institute (NAI), along with her husband John. “He turned around and said to John with this happy smile: ‘This is what I’ve always wanted to see: my architecture with your biology.’ He called the work we were doing ‘the hope of the world’.”

Founded in 1969, the NAI set out to design a sustainable way of living from top to bottom: food, energy and shelter. This was the era of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, and the Whole Earth Catalog (of which Baldwin was an editor). It was the era of anti-nuclear and anti-Vietnam war movements; a time when huge numbers of people felt that modern society was on the wrong path, and better alternatives were possible. “I wouldn’t say we were on the same page as Bucky,” John Todd says, “but we came to the same conclusions. His basic message, about how to do more with less, really resonated with us.”

The New Alchemists’ alternative was a harmonious system of organic farming, renewable energy, sustainable architecture, waste treatment and ecosystem restoration. No pesticides or chemicals, no fossil fuels, no waste, no pollution, low impact, energy efficient. In other words, they were doing 50 years ago what we’re now realising we should have been doing all along.

Despite their long hair and countercultural leanings, the New Alchemists were not hippies; they were scientists. John Todd, the driving force behind the NAI, is a marine biologist by training; his wife Nancy is a writer and activist, and the third founding member, Bill McLarney, is a fish biologist. True, their large-format journals of the time have a quaint, radical vibe to them, with their intricate hand-drawn covers depicting unicorns and dragons. But alongside quotations from Tolkien and poems about mushrooms are reports on their experiments on the insect-resistance of certain cabbage varieties, diagrams of their low-tech wind turbines or progress reports on aquaculture techniques.

Nor was the NAI a “commune”. It was a research project, the Todds explain; people came there to work, not to play. At its peak, the NAI had around 30 members, aided by hundreds more temporary volunteers. Few actually lived on the site. There were no experiments in common ownership or free love. The Todds and their three young children lived in a small cottage a few miles away, where they still live today.

“Socially, we agreed, the three of us founders, that we wanted to lead private lives,” Nancy says. “We felt that there were too many revolutions underneath it already without trying to do a social one as well.” Besides, John adds, “Being somewhat reserved Canadians, there is not a lot of gossip or juicy stories.”

The catalyst for the NAI was frustration with academia, John says. In the late 60s, he and McLarney both began teaching at San Diego State University, where John was to head up a new department of environmental studies. He soon hit a wall of institutional inflexibility: “The idea of doing activities from various disciplines – energy, architecture, agriculture, waste water, you name it – was simply not possible within the university setting at that time. A number of people, who became very close friends, were coming to the same conclusion: that we had to find new institutional structures to go after a larger vision.”

The Todds and McLarney quit academia, found new jobs at an oceanographic institute in Cape Cod and started to put their New Alchemist ideas into practice on a 12-acre plot of land. The first objective was agriculture. They set about improving the soil quality and planting food crops. They began breeding rabbits and digging fish ponds. McLarney introduced the then-unheard-of tilapia, an easily farmable fish. Other friends and colleagues came to join them. A 1973 film made by the National Film Board of Canada portrays the NAI as an Arcadian utopia: a lush, green world of healthy, happy people tending healthy, happy crops. They build wind turbines out of car parts and oil drums, swim in the pond, gather for communal outdoor meals, scavenge at the local dump and play guitars together in the sunset. It almost looks like a parody.

The NAI’s approach was a combination of old-fashioned common sense and modern scientific method. Everything was monitored and recorded: weather conditions, soil chemistry, crop yields, numbers of midge larvae (used as fish food) growing in different qualities of water. Data was analysed, techniques were compared, processes were refined, until their organic yields exceeded those of industrial farms. But underpinning it all was John’s belief that natural systems could be duplicated, harnessed and harmoniously interlinked. The wind pumps the water, that waters the garden, that grows the carrots, that feed the rabbits, that fertilise the earthworms, that feed the fish, along with the carrot tops. And it all feeds the people. “Each time we make a connection, as in nature itself, the whole becomes more stable, more strong and more healthy,” John says in the film.

In one significant, typically low-tech breakthrough, John began to experiment with 5ft translucent cylindrical water tanks – filling them with pond water and observing the miniature ecosystems that formed inside. As the tanks received more sunlight than a pond would, algae and other life grew much quicker. They were perfect for cultivating fish in (tilapia eat the algae). You could link them together and water would become progressively cleaner as it flowed from one to the next. You could grow vegetables hydroponically on their surface. Most importantly, the water heated up in the sun, so the tanks became an effective store of solar energy – “thermal flywheel”, as John puts it.

All of this fed into the New Alchemists’ approach to more complex architecture. Where Le Corbusier famously decreed that a house is a “machine for living”, the New Alchemists believed it should be more like a “living machine” – a combination of architecture and biology. “Our first little experiment used a geodesic structure to literally create a miniature world,” John says, explaining a 1971 forerunner of the pillow dome, which they built over a fish pond. “Inside the structure, the air was the atmosphere; the water was analogous to the 70% oceans the Earth needs to maintain a stable climate; the remaining 30% was a quite complex ecosystem, considering the size of the project. So we were already using the Earth as a model for design.”

The New Alchemists’ most ambitious structures were what they called “arks” – two experiments into the “shelter” aspect of their mission. Two young architects from Yale University, David Bergmark and Ole Hammarlund, led the design: one ark in Cape Cod and another on Prince Edward Island, Canada, thanks to a commission from the Canadian government.

The Prince Edward Island ark, on a windblown promontory surrounded by the sea on three sides, was the New Alchemists’ architectural high point. We would recognise it today as a show-home for “off-grid” living, employing sustainable design principles that are now common practice but were nascent, untested technologies at the time. Aligned east-west, the Prince Edward Island ark was partly sunken into the earth on its north side, with sloping glazing along its south facade to capture maximum solar radiation. The south facade also featured a row of vertically aligned solar collectors (heating water rather than generating electricity – photovoltaic technology was nowhere near advanced enough yet). A prototype hydraulic wind turbine nearby covered the building’s electricity needs.

The dominant space inside was a high-ceilinged greenhouse containing plant beds for growing vegetables, herbs, flowers and tree saplings. Lizards, newts, ladybirds and even a resident snake controlled insect populations. The ark also contained 32 of Todd’s “solar-algae tanks” – primarily for fish cultivation, but the tanks proved so effective at storing heat that the building’s other experimental climate systems became redundant. “We were growing bananas in January,” says Todd. When a winter storm caused a three-day power cut and buried the landscape in snow, the ark remained a stable temperature inside.

About one-third of the ark was a home, where the Todds’ New Alchemist friend Nancy Willis and her family lived happily for a time, growing their own produce and managing the “living machine”. Though light and spacious, the ark was not the stuff of high-end design aesthetically, but it represented a potential new way of living – sustainable, self-sufficient, integrated with nature on an intimate scale. Shelter, food, energy. Perhaps a social revolution after all.

The Prince Edward Island ark was opened in September 1976 by Canadian prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau (father of current PM Justin), who arrived by helicopter with much fanfare to find a bunch of dirty, exhausted New Alchemists who had completed the build hours before. Trudeau gave a stirring speech about how the ark was “the birth of the new philosophy” and told the Todds he would like to have a similar house for his own family. “Very close by was a nuclear plant,” Nancy recalls, “so I said to him, ‘All of this makes nuclear energy completely unnecessary, doesn’t it?’” Trudeau’s answer was noncommittal.

The fate of the Prince Edward Island ark mirrors that of not only the NAI itself, but the whole sustainability movement of the 70s. Functionally, the building exceeded expectations. The hydraulic wind turbine proved to be a failure and the solar collectors leaked, but the “living machine” was alive and well, drawing visitors, spreading the sustainability gospel and growing enough vegetables and fish to sell surplus to local restaurants. But politically, the winds were changing. By 1981, their Canadian government allies were no longer in office and financial support dried up. After numerous rescue attempts, the ark was converted into a small hotel and restaurant in the early 80s. Around 2000, it was demolished.

A similar change of sentiment hobbled the NAI in Cape Cod. During the 70s, it had been funded by a series of grants from the US government and private foundations. But as the Reagan era set in, those funds became harder to access. The sentiment became more “me” than “we”. The hippies cut their hair, abandoned their geodesic domes and found proper jobs. The NAI survived Reaganism, but much of its energy through the 80s went into merely staying afloat, rather than “pushing the vision”, as John puts it. It eventually dissolved in 1991.

But the New Alchemists found other ways to push their vision. McLarney founded an offshoot of the institute in Costa Rica, named ANAI, which has transformed the country’s southern Caribbean coast and become a model for conservation and sustainable development. Architects Bergmark and Ole remained in the Prince Edward Island region practising sustainable design. The New Alchemists’ Cape Cod plot was turned into a co-housing project, complete with a refurbished ark.

John Todd retreated from architecture and returned to his first love: water. Those experiments with solar-algae tanks put him on a path of environmental restoration, using natural systems to improve water quality and remove pollution. He realised a long time ago what the world is just beginning to realise now: that ecosystem restoration is key to stabilising the climate, and nature itself can help provide the answers. In 1982 the Todds founded a new initiative, Ocean Arks International, researching and applying this knowledge in multiple situations, from natural wastewater treatment to ocean-going eco-repair vessels to an ambitious project to re-green the Sinai desert (it even involves geodesic domes). It is a continuation of what the New Alchemists began, John says: “Doing good things in bad places.”

Rather than feeling bleak about the future, he is surprisingly optimistic. He recently published a book called Healing Earth, part-autobiography, part-manual on how to save the world. Its opening line reads: “I am writing this book based on the belief that humanity will soon become involved in a deep and abiding worldwide partnership with nature.” Yes, the planet is in crisis, but rather than what the New Alchemists called “doomwatch science” – monitoring environmental decline – John Todd has always been focused on practical solutions. “The more we weave together the knowledge that’s been accumulated in the last 100 years, the more we can do things that we never dreamed of,” he says. “We don’t have to invent anything; we just have to pay attention to what’s been learned.”

A Safe and Sustainable World: The Promise Of Ecological Design by Nancy Jack Todd is available now (£25, Island Press).

Living Lightly on the Earth: Building an Ark for Prince Edward Island 1974‑76 by Steven Mannell is available now (£30, Dalhousie Architectural)