Permaculture
I don’t know that much about permaculture, but what I have read intrigues me. We live in such a resource-intense world, and a lot of what we use is disposable. I like the idea of designing an agriculture system so that each sub-system’s output is another system’s input, and the loop is continuous, requiring far fewer inputs from the outside. After all, our world is a closed system (except for solar energy), and if outputs don’t get used as inputs for something else, the output becomes waste. As a future architect, though, I would like to apply this concept of interdependent systems to the built environment. Buildings require so many resources to be built, first, and then to be useful over their lifetime. While people have started using solar panels and occasionally collect rainwater, those solutions only help solve one input at a time - electricity or water. I would like to take a permaculture approach to the problem and analyze what the inputs and outputs of a building are and how one output can become the input for another system. There are some people on the web who seem to be doing that, so I’m not inventing any wheels here, but it would be nice to hear more about the study of total systems rather than just discussing the current ecological trend of the moment (ethanol, solar energy, eating locally).