This is the final part of a 3-part series on Prince Edward Island’s 1970s turn to energy self-sufficiency, which peaked with two highly publicized events in 1976, Energy Days and the opening of the Ark. Part 1 is here, part 2 is here.
“Helicopters!”
Unlikely as it sounds, the financial manager of the New Alchemy Institute, Bob Angevine, was also a retired US Army Lt. Colonel who had been stationed in Vietnam, so he knew whereof he shouted. It was the morning of 20 September 1976 – 50 years ago this weekend – and of the hundreds gathered for the grand opening of the Ark in Spry Point, Prince Edward Island, Angevine was the first to spot the approach of twin helicopters bearing Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau from Ottawa.
The New Alchemists were an American environmental research group which had developed the concept of “arks”: self-contained greenhouse ecosystems using ecologically linked cycles to grow fish and vegetables.1 Their Canadian-born co-founder and spokesman, John Todd, had become friends with the PEI Premier’s right-hand-man, Andy Wells, and they had looked for ways to bring the model to the Island. Ultimately, the Canadian government gave the New Alchemists a contract, and the PEI government gave them a windswept parcel of coastal land, to build an Ark for PEI.2 It was to be the flagship project for Habitat, the UN Conference on Human Settlements that Canada would host in late 1976: “[L]ike the Biblical Ark, it will illustrate how food, shelter, and power needs of urban and rural families can be supplied in a single building.”3
The Ark’s two young architects were David Bergmark and Ole Hammarlund, who arrived up from Massachusetts in late 1975 to break ground on its construction. “We were terrified,” Bergmark told us recently, “that we could come up here to PEI – this, this ice box of Canada – and we could build this project and it wouldn’t actually even stay above freezing. I mean, we were terrified – and having a great time at the same time.”
The provincial government pointed the architects to the Island’s largest construction firm – which, likely taking for granted deep government pockets, quoted them a price that was twice their budget. So Bergmark and Hammarlund knew they would have to manage the construction themselves. They hired a small local firm, the Cheverie brothers out of Souris, and broke ground.
The Ark was framed and closed in for the winter, but the majority of its complicated construction – the billboard of thirty-six solar panels, the Hydrowind windmill, the 1900 square foot greenhouse, the thirty 500-gallon fish tanks, the Clivus Multrum composting system – would be the work of the summer of 1976.4 With the grand opening swiftly approaching, the New Alchemists called on supportive locals and American friends to help out. Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand arrived by sailboat from Cape Breton. Appropriate technology figure J. Baldwin showed up barely a week before Trudeau’s scheduled visit and would later write of being “frankly appalled” at how much work was still to be done. The final week was a mad frenzy – “like a kicked-over anthill” – all under the direction of Ole and David (“last names we never did learn,” Baldwin wrote).5 In the middle of the night before the opening, a crew of twenty was still laying the floor in the Ark’s living space. Hammarlund recalls: “Literally like every three feet there would be a guy nailing in, and three feet behind that there’d be someone sanding the floor, and three feet further behind somebody would be putting the finish on the floor.” The final task was for a local farmer with a tractor to bury the huge pile of construction junk. Everything was ready for the grand opening, with hours to spare.
New Alchemist Hilda Maingay took the following series of photos of the Ark’s opening.6
John Todd speaking to crowd at opening of PEI Ark, 1976 09 20. Photo courtesy of Hilda Maingay. 
Prime Minister PE Trudeau’s 2 Huey helicopters, at opening of PEI Ark, 1976 09 20. 
Crowd greeting Prime Minister PE Trudeau’s arrival by helicopter, at opening of PEI Ark, 1976 09 20. Photo courtesy of Hilda Maingay. 
PEI Premier Alex Campbell, John Todd, Nancy Jack Todd, & Prime Minister PE Trudeau, & crowd at opening of the PEI Ark, 1976 09 20. Photo courtesy of Hilda Maingay. 
New Alchemy Institute director John Todd touring Prime Minister PE Trudeau around the PEI Ark, 1970 09 20. Photo courtesy of Hilda Maingay.
When the two Huey helicopters landed, Prime Minister Trudeau and PEI Premier Alex Campbell alighted. There were hundreds to greet them – locals and New Alchemists, professional builders and volunteer helpers and their children. John Todd toured Trudeau through the Ark.
And there were speeches, of course. (We have attached them here.) Trudeau said,
“Those who are concerned about the future of mankind are haunted by three questions: will there be enough food, will we have enough energy, and can we produce both without destroying the environment; without making the earth a place which is not good to live upon? The Ark – which I have the pleasure of declaring officially open this morning – is answering “Yes!” to those three questions.”
But it was Premier Campbell who recognized that the Ark was built more on hope than on certainty. He reminded the crowd that when searching for dry land after the flood, Noah’s dove
“found no rest for the sole of her foot.” I thought those words might be appropriate for this occasion because the Ark represents a challenge – not only to the New Alchemists and the people of this community and province, but to governments and people throughout the world – to find no rest for the sole of their feet in our search for self-sustaining life for Earth or Mankind.”
Trudeau flew off – the gathered kids gleefully knocked down by his helicopters’ rotor blasts – and the party went on into the night.7
The spirit of ‘76 continued on for a time, too – but it barely saw the year out. At first, there was enthusiastic coverage of the PEI experiment everywhere from Chatelaine to the New York Times, and 15,000 people flocked to the Ark in the summer of 1977, where Bergmark and his family now lived. They soon moved out, however, unable to cope with the mass of visitors day and night. The New Alchemists squabbled with the province about the Ark’s budget and ultimately walked away from their bioshelter in 1978, leaving it in the hands of PEI’s Institute of Man and Resources. The Ark closed in 1981, while the Institute limped through the 1980s before folding. There were attempts to resurrect the Ark – first as a fish hatchery, then as an inn and restaurant – but it was torn down for good in 1999.
Much of the disappointment and disillusionment that followed the heady days of 1976 was the product of what happened at the societal level. Put simply, the oil crisis did not have the revolutionary impact that had been initially expected: there was no wholesale turn away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy and self-sufficiency. As Amory Lovins states in our conversation with him, “The [transition to] renewables, particularly in the United States, got delayed at least 20 years, maybe 30, by largely hostile policies under Reagan and others.”
Yet Lovins makes the case that at least we began travelling a soft energy path in becoming much more energy efficient. Thanks to improved construction standards – such as 2×6 studs, weatherstripping, and better insulation – we use less residential heating energy than he had been modelling for us in 1976. Bergmark and Hammarlund make much the same case: weatherstripping would never be as sexy as the Ark, but it was projects like the Ark that got people thinking and acting about weatherstripping. The move away from fossil fuels is coming much later than those in the 1970s expected, let alone desired, but at least we got more efficient about using the ones we did. And renewables, Lovins says, “are now, I think, unstoppable.”
And as for PEI, while its attempt to be a model for sustainability was not sustained, it had one major accomplishment: it attracted an influx of environmentally minded people to the Island. Hippies, back-to-the-landers, New Alchemists, alternative energy developers, environmental consultants, like-minded thinkers, etc etc. A back-to-the-lander said that she was drawn to the Island in part from hearing of the Ark, but once she moved to the Island she was so busy that she never ever got a chance to visit it, forty kilometres away.8 As for David Bergmark and Ole Hammarlund, they stayed, lived, and launched an innovative and successful architectural firm on Prince Edward Island. Hammarlund was elected to the PEI legislature in 2019, a member of the first Green Party in Canada to form the Official Opposition.
PEI’s environmental turn didn’t so much reinvigorate the province as invigorate it. It is difficult to imagine the Island’s arts scene, or organic food scene, or political scene existing as it does today without that 1970s injection of energy.
[1] See director Dorothy Todd Hénaut’s The New Alchemists (National Film Board, 1974). Unsaid in the film is that Todd Hénaut was the sister of the New Alchemists’ co-founder, John Todd.
[2] For the full history of the Ark, see Steven Mannell, ‘Living Lightly on the Earth’: Building an Ark for Prince Edward Island, 1974-76(Dalhousie Architectural Press, 2018); and Alan MacEachern, The Institute of Man and Resources: An Environmental Fable (Island Studies Press, 2003).
[3] Charlottetown Evening Patriot, 15 April 1975.
[4] The finished Ark, and many of its components, can be seen in Dorothy Todd Hénaut’s, Sun, Wind, and Water (National Film Board, 1978), 4:30-on.
[5] On the opening of the Ark, see Mannell, 11-15 and 67-9; MacEachern, 35-6; J.Baldwin, “The New Alchemists are neither magicians nor geniuses. They are hard workers.” CoEvolution Quarterly (winter 1976-77), 104-11; and Nancy Jack Todd, “Opening the Arks,” The Journal of the New Alchemists vol.4 (1977), no pagination. Baldwin quotations from 105-6.
[6] Maingay, with her partner Earle Barnhart, had actually sketched the first designs for the Ark. A special thanks to Maingay and Barnhart for sharing these photos and their recollections of the PEI Ark.
[7] In our conversation, Bergmark recalls that Ethel, a carpenter’s wife, came to the opening in curlers and wore them throughout Trudeau’s visit, removing them in time for the party.
[8] Hedwig Koleszar interview with Alan MacEachern, 17 August 2003.
Alan MacEachern and Joshua MacFadyen
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