P.S. Please share with other applicable fields. I can only connect so many topic tags to reach different disciplines. Also, I am also including gardening, microbial elements, or living with natural elements (i.e. lichen: safe for home environments?), health and safety regulations, energy conservation, etc. The list goes on. I will ask another question when I get a more specific topic to address. This is pretty general as of now just to get an idea of what to consider.

Fantastic topic for discussion!

Cities are built deserts, so yeah, inherently very biophobic designs.  Can't have critters messing with my sterile landscape now.  Thus it is required to work hard against that, if we intend to be biophilic at all.

I think, ultimately, you are talking about nutrient management of the whole human population.  We extract nutrients from our agricultural (well, all extractive) processes, and dump them into the land, rivers, and oceans as wastes.  By pretending the by-products are just that, we are happy to plunder without returning anything of value. 

If we are going to be good stewards, we have to follow the Daly Rules, or the NaturalStep approach, or any of the ilk that say, in one way or another, that we're all downstream of each other, so I can't make things that are going to pollute my downstream neighbour.

I think you want to make sure you are your own downstream neighbour - kudos!  Depending on the climate, that may be tricky - you may need a couple of acres of vegetation as your nutrient sink - thus hard to do in a city.  No reason not to try.

On a city scale, it means composting, and using the compost as soil conditioning.  It means that chemicals that are discharged to the sewage treatment plant must be able to be spread on the land without risk.  It means that sewage treatment must change to not render all nitrogen and carbon compounds to N2 and CO2 - they have to stay in a form that can be reused to grow things.  It means finding ways to not import chemistry from abroad, so we don't have to worry about it accumulating to unacceptable levels.  And it probably means shifting our economic model to consider Natural Services as either replaceable or non-replaceable.  The first would get an economic value higher than the replacement cost, and the second would be considered Sacred (sunlight, gravity, O2 production, etc).  And so forth.

Simpler to do rurally.  Check in with TheFarm.org, is this what you had in mind?  Other eco-villages will have thought this through more, too.

Eco villages are a big influence of my thoughts. I would like to make it into a blend of modern living and homesteading/stewardship. One may or may not be "off the grid," (one level of stewardship my future firm may address), but not necessarily isolated in that category. If homes were installed with a natural filtration that city sewage could benefit from anyways, then we are already making a cleaner environment for animal and neighbor alike. Granted, technology is slowly, maybe helping us evolve into that thinking but I feel like the best way to market it is to make it "automatically" part of the house, or "looks just like normal ones," or "costs the same/less for more or better." Maybe it is helping the people by making it all about them (our usual thinking in products and services) i.e. Leave out the good environment stuff and make it all about them. Thank you for those thoughts. I will have to look more into the resources you discussed.

I also just realized I have spelling and grammatical errors. I apologize.

Maybe I am mistaken, but being from architectural college you sound like you plan to create a new project of eco village or eco house. You can never do it alone. It will take a group of specialists to fulfill the project, not just our answers here.

Anna,

My program is Design Studies for Human Health. I actually have multiple disciplines and I do not plan to do this on my own. There is no way I can possibly gain all the knowledge needed to do what I have in mind. It will require the collaboration of multiple professionals and disciplines but as a designer, I still need to understand how things work to make it functional. Often people start a project and just work around problems rather than solving the problem. Much like the arguments that take place between the cabinetry people, painters, and tile and stone setters. Plumbing, wiring, etc. are all their own department but if I don't consider the problems that occur how can I design something that works? I am also not an architect nor am I pursuing an M.Arch, yet, but I am an advocate for the human element in the built environment. I am just curious as to what my ideas promote, the problems, and the solutions. An eco village would be awesome but that requires resources and money that will take years to gather. My start up in a firm would be to do single housing, renovations, house flipping, custom design, group residency homes, etc.

Then here are simple answers on some of your questions: hair biodegrades in around 50 years, so it needs special storage, but I don't know anyone to do that. Birds can use hair for nesting, but just occasionally. Human feces are bacteriologically dangerous, never use it as fertilizer. Urine is toxic for plants (depends on volume). Rain water usage in one personal house needs no special legal permission in my country, I think, in any country. Menstrual blood is easily biodegradable, but not tampons, Kleenex etc. I am not sure why you think of separating the garden from landscaping. And filters are a big topic, maybe you will need to read a lot about them if you want to really know them.

Those are very helpful. I was separating gardening from landscaping because I was thinking about perennials vs annuals, edible vs. pretty, air purification vs herbal, etc. Some plants we may not be touched or used and others may need constant care (especially if I am going to be eating off of it). I also would need to fertilize some plants more than others. I may not be disturbing the soil around a tree as much as I would nightshade plants (potatoes and tomatoes), thus a runoff between the two could be toxic if I am using bodily solids and fluids. There are eco villages that actually use human feces (but not until it has been decomposing and mixed with plant material for 10+ years, which is disgusting but people seem to have been living fine with it given the proper amount of time, otherwise you end up with food born illnesses.) People also like to use animal feces but we know well that urine from pets kills lawn grass.  My thoughts run in the idea that there may be some plants that can take more alkaline or acidic fertilization than others (diluting urine?) but what are the levels?

Assuming that all bodily solids and liquids are toxic and just not sustainable, there is the option designed by some engineers of a toilet that "burns," it to disposable ashes. There is also toilet tech revolving around bidets. Is that actually "healthier?"  I may have to ask a separate question regarding that subject.

Urine is toxic in the form it originally occurs, it can be chemically changed. And feces can be processed for destruction of all harmful microorganisms, helminth eggs, etc. Actual ash (of body liquids) must be safe. Feces of some animals can be as dangerous as those of humans, but some of them are relatively safe and widely used. A separate question on these technologies might help.

About separating the garden and landscape.

If it is a homestead, they usually keep kitchen-garden somewhere in the backyard and it can be relatively separated. But if the plot of land is not big, if it is a village, much more practical is to use the whole plot for the kitchen-garden, maybe adding some flowers around. We usually do that, and most trees provide different edible fruits too.

Tech solutions to natural problems tend to over complicate. '...all bodily solids and liquids are toxic and just not sustainable...' is the wrong assumption.  All bodily byproducts require some form of biological process prior to being considered 'safe', but the nutrients tied up in them will be reused, either where you want them used (ie growing flowers and trees) or not (turning our rivers green).  Don't burn them!  Let 'em rot.  Look up Humanure.  All forms of composting will render the output 'safe' - no pathogens can survive the process when done right.  Equally true for home scale and community scale.  I would argue that a backyard privy is the most sustainable form of human waste management.  Look up composting toilets, lots of options.

Urine isn't really toxic, it's just that at those concentration it isn't amicable to life.  But diluted to about 20:1 it makes fine fertilizer.  Too much oxygen is bad for us, too.

All great points to consider. I have read much on the media about alternative ways to manage waste but I will have to do more digging on the actual research. 

Buongiorno, I'm Vittorio Ingegnoli, DiSAA (Dept. of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, University of Milan. I suggest to study my last book:

Landscape Bionomics Biological-Integrated Landscape Ecology

Published by Springer, 2015,

ISBN 978-88-470-5225-3 ISBN 978-88-470-5226-0 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-88-470-5226-0

Springer Milan Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London

 e.g. in chapter 1.1.2 The Landscape as a Peculiar Biological Level

 Tab.  1.1. Hierarchical levels of biological organisation on the Earth

[.....]

Investigating the environment  at different scales,

it is easy to note (Fig.1.4 ) the present existence of

four parallel hierarchies, respectively based on

the biotic viewpoint, on the functional viewpoint,

on the spatial (configuration) viewpoint and on

the cultural (human) viewpoint, all recognising

only five levels (the “white rows” in the table).

But the real environment is constituted of six

levels. In fact, it is necessary to consider two

hierarchic levels in the middle “biological spectrum”:

(1) the ecobiota, composed of the community,

the ecosystem and the microchore (i.e.

the spatial contiguity characters, sensu

 Zonneveld [27 ]), which we will name

ecocoenotope , and (2) the landscape , formed by

a system of interacting ecocoenotopes (the

“green row”).

No doubt that some characters of community

and ecosystem are available also at landscape

level and even the inverse is true: it is only

reductionism which pretends to separate all the

characters related to each level. For example,

processes allowing the definition of life are

exportable  characters: each specific biological

level expresses a process in a proper  way,

depending on its scale, structure, functions,

amount of information and semiology. But we

can note that each biological level presents

exportable  characters and proper  ones [10 ]:

Table 1.1  shows a synthesis of them.

Observe that each system which owns proper

 characters is an entity , and we can find emergent

 properties characterising cell, organism, population,

ecocoenotope, landscape, ecoregion and

ecosphere. That is why these levels are six

types of concrete living entities, whose

investigation needs these criteria to be integrated,

better to be reconceived, remembering that any

ecological system  must include both a biological

element and its environment, plus its cultural/

information contents.

The first consequence is that we cannot

describe the behaviour of a landscape  scaling up

an ecological system of communities. Therefore,

the use of computer clustering landscape indicators

has to be very controlled and strictly limited .

Similarly, even if the use of the exportable

characters of a landscape, the chorological ones,

is useful in different branches of ecology,

because the spatial aspect may aid in studying

many levels of biological organisation, note that

landscape ecology focused the attention on scale

in ecology, but the landscape itself is not a concept

valid at any scale!

As underlined, the landscape presents diverse

intrinsic/proper characters, which cannot be found

and studied in any other biological levels, e.g.

• Ecotissue structure of the landscape

• Peculiar landscape element structure

• Urban regions multiple structures

• Context role of ecotopes

• Landscape apparatuses

• Landscape efficiency of vegetation

• Permeant animal populations

• Source–sink dynamics

• Context control of transformation processes

• Human habitat/biological territorial capacity

of vegetation function correlation

• Ecotope reproduction process

• Bionomic imprinting on culture

• Complex biodiversity metastability

• Landscape influence on genetics

• Landscape pathologies and their influence on

man, etc.

Obviously, these characters cannot be

explained in this paragraph: this book is written

just to study and understand all these concepts.

Let’s begin taking a step backward.

Hi, Vittorio!

Could you please explain this with some example:

"The first consequence is that we cannot

describe the behaviour of a landscape scaling up

an ecological system of communities. Therefore,

the use of computer clustering landscape indicators

has to be very controlled and strictly limited" .

Daikin has developed the "Circle of Life" Free Environmental Education Program on Biodiversity for Elementary School Children

http://www.daikin.com/csr/social/local_community/03.html