Nancy Jack is Vice President of Ocean Arks International and editor of its journal Annals of Earth. She co-founded the New Alchemy Institute with John Todd, and is the author and co-author of many works, including From Eco-City to Living Machines, Bio-shelters, Ocean Arks and City Farming. She also contributed all the introductory essays to People, Land, and Community: Collected E. F. Schumacher Society Lectures (Yale University Press).
In the late sixties, as the world was waking to a need for Earth Day, a pioneering group founded a small non-profit research and education organization they called the New Alchemy Institute. Their aim was to explore the ways a safer and more sustainable world could be created. In the ensuing years, along with scientists, agriculturists, and a host of enthusiastic amateurs and friends, they set out to discover new ways that basic human needs--in the form of food, shelter, and energy--could be met.