We want to let John’s subscribers know that his so-beloved wife, Nancy Jack Todd, died peacefully at home in the evening of May 30, in sunlight, with John and her grandson Max holding her hands.
Nancy’s life was epic. She was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, to Canadian parents just before the outbreak of World War 2. She and her parents sailed back to North America on the last ocean liner to cross the Atlantic without being sunk.
Her father worked for General Motors, and their family moved a lot over her childhood. Places they landed included Argentina, South Africa again, and Smoke Rise, New Jersey before they finally settled in London, Ontario, where she went to high school and met my dad. She then studied history at the University of Western Ontario while he went to McGill University. In the early years of their marriage they also moved around, as academic families do, from Montreal to Ann Arbor to San Diego, producing three children along the way. With all the moving she’d craved a lasting place to belong, and when she was finally able to settle on Cape Cod she put down the deepest of tap roots.
From the seventies onward she was an early and important documenter of the seminal environmental work of the New Alchemy Institute and Ocean Arks International. She carved out a role as the human face of that work, chronicling it through the books she wrote — most recently, in 2006, A Safe and Sustainable World ( https://islandpress.org/books/safe-and-sustainable-world#desc) — and through the journals she edited, The Journal of the New Alchemists and Annals of Earth.
She also loved to dance, she loved her house and garden, and she loved John more than anything.
As her oldest child, I first remember her as a fierce peace activist in Ann Arbor, Michigan during the Vietnam war before she and my dad founded New Alchemy with Bill McLarney in 1969. Some of my earliest memories are of peace marches she took me to. Joan Baez and Ian and Sylvia and Pete Seeger were the soundtracks of my early childhood (I was sure Pete Seeger lived in our speakers). Pete Seeger was a fan of hers in turn, and an enthusiastic subscriber to Annals of Earth. One day I came home to our house on Cape Cod and there was Pete Seeger on the porch.
Another big fan of hers was Margaret Mead, who took her and my dad to Bali, because Mead was so happy to see such a strong husband and wife team “in the business.”
And then there was the headline in the local paper, the Falmouth Enterprise, that read “She left Brando, Tahiti for Urgent Business Here.” The article said, “Mrs. Todd said that Mr. Brando wants to preserve the beauty of these South Sea islands by insuring that all development follows the principles of ‘ecological design’.” The urgent business was a local dance performance.
At the end of her life Nancy had lost mobility, her sight had receded, and her sense of time was altered. My dad was her constant caregiver and her whole world, and he was almost never out of her sight. He has managed to do the most creative work of his life in moments when she’s been sleeping, when he settled next to her in bed with his laptop. Now that he’s released from caregiving, he plans to focus ferociously on pushing the work forward to honour her memory.
We are taking time to mourn Nancy now. But stay tuned. John will be back with more writing and recordings and reports of his latest design projects in the coming months.
