In 1969, the John Doe Co. of Santa Monica, California, released the first in its line of “nature products”: Erosion Machine, a yellow, hi-tech-looking, microwave-size appliance. A switch on its exterior activates a pump inside one of its two chambers, and, under the rays of a black light, a pressurized stream of water wears down a “human rock”—a pile of natural sediment mixed with plastic chips—in an artificial simulation of water’s sculptural effects on a solid mass. According to the device’s inventor and the company’s founder, artist Carl Cheng, the idea behind this machine was to “model nature, its processes and effects for a future environment that may be completely made by humans.” In brochures of the time, John Doe Co. advertised a range of other products in development, from an Ecological Systems Comparator to a Table Model Specimen Viewer, and a 163 Early Warning System that responded to weather reports with an “integral dual projection … with audio synchronization.” Three years later, John Doe Co. debuted its venus flytrap cultivator, Supply & Demand (1972), a plexiglass-encased, humidity-regulated bed of earth with plants being fed insects through a tube; resembling a hi-fi stereo system, it sits on a pedestal topped with artificial grass.
When Cheng began producing these devices in the late 1960s, he was already aware of the many ways in which were inexorably transforming the Earth—from a growing human population to the invention of disposable plastics, nuclear energy, and the use of nitrogen fertilizer. At the time, new technologies were not seen as antithetical to environmentalism., for instance, which launched in 1968 with an image of the Earth seen from space on its cover, sold Hewlett Packard calculators alongside books on tantric art, organic gardening, solar energy, and ecological systems. It wasn’t until decades later, in 2000, that atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen would propose that the mid-20th century had marked the dawn of a new epoch in which traces of human civilization were permanently imprinted on the Earth—what Crutzen declared the Anthropocene. While many alternative dates have since been proposed for the beginning of the Anthropocene and what constitutes its hallmarks (from the changes in carbon-dioxide levels dating back to the 17th century, to the 19th-century industrial revolution and the 1945 Trinity Atomic Test), John Doe Co. was already producing machines for an era when the distinction between humans and nature had collapsed.
