Remember the New Alchemy Institute? Perhaps you heard of it. It was a thinktank/do-tank on Cape Cod where baby boomer idealists gathered to model the green future, with experiments in fish farming, using composting to warm a greenhouse, and so forth. That was mostly in the 1970s. When I journeyed there in 1989, it was pretty quiet. One finding of the aquaculture (fish farming) tanks was that adding floating plants helped clean the water by transforming nitrogen from fish poop into plants like basil, water hyacinth, and watercress. That observation inspired my co-author David Del Porto to note that this applied to the wastewater field. The observation was converted by John Todd into his now-famous Living Machines wastewater treatment system. The fate of that will be the topic of a future blog post.
There experiments took place in New Alchemy’s big greenhouse, dubbed “The Ark.” The Ark is now attached to the home of Hilde Maingay and Earle Barnhart, the organizers of Saturday’s “Eco-Toilet Summit” in Falmouth. Above are some photos from a walk around the outside of the home of Hilde and Earle’s delightful home (which uses composting toilets) and its grounds. One wonders if New Alchemy, which ran out of grant funding in the 1990s, is now better served as Hilde and Earle’s home, where they hatch ideas like The Eco-Toilet Summit.
