What is a living machine? A living machine is like any other machine. It does work. Living machines can be designed to generate fuels, produce foods, convert wastes, and undertake environmental repair. Living machines can be designed to regulate the climate and air quality in buildings. Living machines can be designed to allow us to create ecological industrial parks, where manufacturing and food production and other forms of human activity can be integrated into holistic, comprehensive systems.

   So what makes the difference between a living machine and a regular machine? Well, the first and the fundamental difference is that a living machine operates from sunlight. That's its basic engine. Like the coral reef or the rainforest, the living machine has the ability to self-organize, to self-design, to self-repair, and to self-replicate, like the great ecologies themselves.

   In other words, it is possible for us to think about technologies that can last for hundreds and even thousands of years. Some of the mechanical components would undoubtedly need to be replaced, but the ecologies themselves, whether they were generating fuels or transforming waste, would continue to evolve and serve us as well as the planet.

   One of the things I've learned over the last ten years, which I didn't know before, is that it's possible to do good things in bad places. I first learned about doing good things in a community not far from where I'm based on Cape Cod. This community had pits into which they threw their waste from septic tanks, small businesses, veterinary clinics and rest homes. They had most of the priority pollutants in them. These pits were on sand, leaching out at a very rapid rate, and they were situated twenty feet above the drinking water table of that bucolic little New England town.

   To see if something could be done, I placed twenty giant aquaria on the side of a hill, connected them together to create a "river" into which I could pump this waste. Then, into these tanks I placed literally thousands of different forms of aquatic life from about half a dozen neighboring environments, including salt marshes. I asked the life-forms to see if they could organize themselves in the solar tanks and transform these wastes into pure water.

   After a period of about twelve days the water was transformed. The toxins were 100 percent removed, all except one, which was 99.99 percent removed. The heavy metals were sequestered into algae at the very beginning of the process, and theoretically they could have been recycled. The human pathogens, which were off the Richter Scale, were transformed. Sunlight and these organisms, which had never occurred in these combinations or communities before, co-evolved with the waste to provide a solution.

   It's important that the meaning of waste and waste treatment is redefined. Take sewage treatment, for example. We use chemicals that are not necessarily regulated to alter the water so it meets the standards of regulation. We incompletely treat the water, meaning that many things still get out into the natural environments. Conventional waste treatment is expensive. It's sophisticated, its engineering is powerful, but it's symptomatic of a disconnected culture. Why couldn't waste be viewed simply as resources out of place? Why couldn't they be used to enhance our environments and actually even become economic engines.

   There's a number of examples of this new ecology working. We've managed to combine waste-treatment with the production of fuels in a factory in Wayong, Australia that processes over 300 different food products. It produces enough power to provide about 50 percent of the energy needs for the factory. These really are "industrial ecologies."

   In Vermont, we designed a marvelous living machine just south of Burlington, which treats sewage. If you were to walk inside it, you would really think that you had walked into a botanical garden. It is taking sewage and making pure water in an extreme cold climate, and doing so while also producing commercial crops of flowers and other beneficial plants.

   Increasingly we're finding that living machines can be used to intervene between waste streams. For example, brewery by-products can be transformed and re-introduced into agricultural food chains. The first of these food-farm living machines that transform brewery wastes into new products, including fish, herbs, and flowers, is operating in the Burlington Intervale in Vermont.

   These systems are exquisitely beautiful and they don't stink. There are living machines working in about nine different countries and 15 states within the United States. They're really a testimonial to the intelligence the natural world has garnered over three and a half billion years of experimentation and invention. Our latest project is working on an agro-eco-industrial park: A 60,000 square-foot bio-shelter, a greenhouse-like structure, houses within it incubator sites for future farmers and green businesses. It is heated by waste heat from a power generating plant which burns wood chips through contracts with many tree farmers in northern New England.

   It is safe to say that we can apply those forces that occur in the wild to the problems that all of us have to solve. I've learned through observing the work of my friends and associates that, through ecological design at its most profound level, it is theoretically possible to reduce the human imprint on this planet by 90 percent and to restore degraded environments.

   Ultimately, of course, behind the technologies and the economies, we need to forge a culture of stewardship, where the highest calling is restoring the lands, protecting the seas, and informing the earth's stewards. Perhaps no one got it better than Tolkien through the words of Gandolf when he said, "The rule of no realm is mine. But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail in my task if anything that passes through this night can still grow fairer or bear fruit and flower again in days to come. For I too am a steward. Did you not know?"