Ark
To tangibly alter a situation which involves a large connected system, John and Nancy Todd along with William McLarney developed The New Alchemy Institute research center to investigate support systems at a manageable scale. The idea was to start with the doable and change the system from the roots. This meant the human subject is being brought into the picture as a single entity versus changing the society in one large group. “The assumption was that larger units of organization can be no stronger than the elements of which they are comprised, […].”1 This focus put their philosophy into the hands of the individual quite literally when it comes to changing the hardware driven society to the personal culturing of one’s food. The “hardware-driven society” which comes up is an important issue to note as, this is a time of crisis, where the future fossil fuels per capita is estimated to become substantially limited, which would halt any large production facilities and put emphasis of resource collection on the shoulders of the smallest unit to produce their own. This jump to reducing the world to a system no bigger than the average house lot in a city is an attempt by the institute to self-contain and autotomize localized living. They call these projects an “ark” where life is sustained by limiting the inputs from undesirable outside resources.