[P2P-F] Fwd: Book Review: "Healing Earth"

Thu Nov 29 15:07:48 CET 2018

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Hazel Henderson <hazel.henderson at ethicalmarkets.com>
Date: Tue, Nov 27, 2018 at 6:30 PM
Subject: Book Review: "Healing Earth"
To: Ethical Markets <gogreen at ethicalmarkets.com>

In these trying times we hope that this review of our Advisory Board
Member, John Todd’s, “Healing Earth” will give you a joyous up lift in
spirit.

~Hazel Henderson, LaRae Long and the Ethical Markets Team.

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[image: Hazel Henderson]
<https://seekingalpha.com/author/hazel-henderson/instablogs>

Hazel Henderson's Blog
<https://seekingalpha.com/author/hazel-henderson/instablogs>

Nov. 26, 2018 1:07 PM ET

*Book Review  "HEALING EARTH" By John Todd, North Atlantic Books, USA, 2018*

Curling up on a quiet Sunday to read Healing Earth was deeply pleasurable.
Author and pioneer biologist/ecologist Dr. John Todd has been one of my
teachers over many years, along with Janine Benyus, who wrote the Foreword
and is the inventor and author of “Biomimicry“ (1997).

We at Ethical Markets are proud to have both of them on our global Advisory
Board, along with other innovative ecologists Wes Jackson of the famed Land
Institute, Allan Savory, author of “Holistic Management“(1988) and Fritjof
Capra, author of “The Systems View of Life”
<http://www.ethicalmarkets.com/review-of-the-systems-view-of-life-a-unifying-vision-by-capra-and-luisi-book-review/>
(2014).

Reading “Healing Earth“ also reminded me of the intellectual debts so many
of us owe to meta-historian William Irwin Thompson, author of the
much-awarded “At The Edge of History” (1972) and many other books, who
shepherded our iconoclasms with his Lindisfarne Association. Through this
fellowship since 1972, I learned from John Todd and Nancy Jack Todd, his
life partner; Wes Jackson; chaos mathematician Ralph Abraham; poet Wendell
Berry; biologists Lynn Margolis and James Lovelock, founders of the Gaia
theory of planetary self-regulation; Stewart Brand, of Whole Earth Catalog
fame; energy guru, Amory Lovins; ecologist Gregory Bateson, author of
“Steps to an Ecology of Mind" (1985); anthropologist Catherine Bateson;
ecologist David Orr; economist Brian Arthur, Santa Fe Institute; Michaela
Walsh, founder of Women's World Banking; Governor Jerry Brown of California
in his “Moonbeam” phase; Hunter Lovins, lead author of "A Finer Future"
<http://www.ethicalmarkets.com/book-reviews-21-lessons-for-the-21st-century-and-a-finer-future/>
(2018) and among other luminaries, Maurice Strong, UN Secretary-General of
the Earth Summits in Stockholm,1972 and Rio de Janeiro, 1992, both of which
I attended. In a memoir of the Lindisfarne Association "Thinking Together
At The Edge of History", (2016) William Irwin Thompson chronicles our times
together from 1972 until 2012, replete with many picture of us all when we
were younger and prettier.

John and Nancy Todd taught our Lindisfarne fellows so much with their
amazing ecological designs at their famous New Alchemy Institute, founded
in 1969 in Massachusetts “To Restore the Land, Protect the Seas and Inform
the Earth’s Stewards“. We were enthralled to see their Living Machines,
which took raw sewage, fed it through a maze of translucent tanks and
pipes, carefully populated with various living organisms and ecosystems,
until sparkling drinkable water gushed out of these marvelous artistic
contraptions.

Since then, John Todd’s creativity has helped clean up lakes, rivers and
polluted canals from Massachusetts and in the Caribbean to South Africa and
China. The book is full of colored illustrations of all these innovative
systems, as well as ships he has designed powered only with wind and solar
panels, as well as of Appalachian fields of coal mine waste Todd has
restored to greenery. Throughout his career, Todd has given his time and
energy to projects pro bono when funds have been unavailable. I was happy,
as a judge on the Buckminster Fuller Challenge
<https://www.bfi.org/challenge>to add my vote to John Todd’s winning
designs.

Reading this book will let you in on all these proven methods for
re-designing public infrastructure, parks, restoring lakes and rivers. All
use Todd’s First, Second and Third Levels of Ecological Design: First the
building blocks composed of intelligent living “parent“ species which
undertake the basic tasks of generating fuels, growing food, treating and
recycling wastes, detoxifying dangerous organic compounds and repairing
damaged ecosystems. Second: how these building blocks provide frameworks
for the Third: spans of time, economics (mostly based on cooperative
enterprises), institutional and social structures. Way beyond the idiocies
of left and right politics, this book is a basic real world roadmap for
regenerating our damaged planetary ecosystems, fostering human ingenuity
and motivation while helping stabilize the Earth’s climate.

I read this book in one sitting, absorbed and energized while remembering
my many connections with John and Nancy Todd, as well as our shared
discovery of the ground-breaking analysis of Howard T. Odum, author of
Environment Power & Society (1972), with whom I had studied at the
University of Florida.

I was also happy to see that John Todd also references the importance of
carbon farming to sequester ambient CO2 safely in the soils, as well as the
need to add salt-loving halophyte food plants, such as quinoa, to human
diets. Todd describes the work of Dr. Carl Hodges and his partner Dr.
Elizabeth Hodges, with whom we work closely and are proud to also have on
our global Advisory Board. This creative approach to saltwater agriculture
is based at the University of Arizona with many experiments worldwide.
These other members of Earth's plant kingdom have been ignored by our
agro-chemical industrial complex and are now necessary additions to our
global food systems as I point out in "Global Transition to Halophyte
Agriculture May Be Inevitable"
<http://www.ethicalmarkets.com/hazel-henderson-global-transition-to-halophyte-agriculture-may-be-inevitable-interview-by-green-money-journal/>,
Green Money Journal, March 2018 and in our Green Transition Scoreboard
2018: “Capturing CO2 While improving Human Nutrition & Health“
<http://4a5qvh23tbek30e0mg42uq87.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/GTS-2018-Full-Report-1.pdf>and
our companion TV shows on this subject, "Investing In Desert Greening"
<http://ethicalmarkets.tv/video-show/?v=2140> (2014), "Investing in
Saltwater Agriculture: The Next Big Thing"
<http://ethicalmarkets.tv/video-show/?v=2218> (2018).

With all the bad news from the IPCC <http://ipcc.ch/report/sr15/> on the
urgency of shifting from fossil fuels to cleaner greener, knowledge-richer
economies worldwide and the Congressional-mandated report
<https://www.noaa.gov/news/new-federal-climate-assessment-for-us-released>on
how climate change’s already damaging effects in the USA, now evident in
recent fires, floods, hurricanes and droughts --- reading Healing Earth
will restore your spirits and help keep hope alive!

Published in 11/26/2018

[image: A sunset in the background Description automatically generated]

"Healing Earth" Review by Hazel Henderson
<http://www.ethicalmarkets.com/book-review-by-hazel-henderson-healing-earth-john-todd-author/>

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