John Todd, the venerable systems ecologist best known for his work on environmental remediation. In 1969 Todd founded the New Alchemy Institute and began to design microecosystems, self-contained plant communities inside greenhouses. Using them as small-scale prototypes for larger real-world projects, he revolutionized how we approach solving

pharmaceuticals extracted from higher plants, and the production of biofuels from algae and higher plants.

Bamboo in various diameters could also serve the purpose quite well, and since it’s one of the toughest natural materials we know of,

industrial-quality water costs five cents a gallon (a conservative estimate),

In addition, there is residue to contend with after the anaerobic digestion process of composting comes to an end.

Things like green roofing, urban forestry, and wetland and estuary restoration are all important parts of the solution to those environmental challenges—and they provide great jobs for people who often have difficulty getting a job.

Almost all farming requires some form of irrigation, and on a global scale uses around 70 percent of the available freshwater to do so.

The production of ammonium nitrate–based fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides has been the mainstay of companies such as Dow Chemical, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Monsanto, the Mosaic Company, PotashCorp, and Agrium, Inc. The pesticide business is the most widely diversified of the three agrochemical industries. The National Pesticide

Biofuels are best defined as combustible by-products of plant metabolism, such as oils used in biodiesel products, or microbial