Endless Ecosystems : Designing a World Without Waste

Abstract

The widespread environmental damage caused by anthropogenic activities over the last century represents a direct threat to both humans and non-humans. While the ethical considerations of non-human conservation are frequently considered in modern discourse on environmental sustainability, the deterioration of non- human ecosystems poses an immediate crisis through the loss of irreplaceable ecosystem services such as the fixation of CO2 from the atmosphere, the production of oxygen, and the filtration of fresh water. Even if drastic measures are taken to curb climate change, there is no guarantee that this will prevent the decline of non-human species. This dissertation proposes that designers who specify the source of physical media are uniquely positioned to impact the actions of non-humans, and that they should seek to maximize the degree to which they leverage ecosystems. Counter to modern sustainability paradigms of net-zero initiatives and conservation through non-intervention, this work examines how non-human ecosystems have achieved immense levels of sustainable productivity with minimal waste for hundreds of millions of years and argues that human systems can achieve such sustainability by embedding themselves within non-human systems of material production and decomposition. Endless Ecosystems is a framework for sustainable design bounded by the synthesis and decomposition of matter by non-human ecosystems. A set of tools that enable this methodology are presented and applied across several case-studies in prototypical designs for technology in the built environment. The environmental impacts of these methods are quantified and explored through the application of life-cycle assessment and Emergy evaluation. Through these cases and their analyses, this framework is broadly applied as a strategy for sustainable design with the ability to empower ecosystem resource cycles rather than deplete them.