Editing Land lab (section)

== Sustainable societal solutions originating from land labs ==
Land labs are real-life environments by design.  The project-based environment encourages students, teachers, and community members to experiment with ecological solutions that can be implemented on a small scale.

Ideally, the solutions and systems implemented in a land lab are transferred beyond the land lab and into the surrounding community.  Composting, rainwater catchment, food-waste [[upcycling]] with methane digesters and [[Hermetia illucens|BSF]], local food production, harnessing of solar power, and other land lab systems can all be implemented throughout a community at various scales:  residential, schools, community gardens, and local businesses.

The purpose of a land lab is to allow students to develop, implement, and learn about practical, sustainable solutions for addressing the five basic physiological needs all humans have:

# The need for [[Drinking water|clean water]]
# The need for [[Food|healthy food]]
# The need for [[Green building|shelter]]
# The need for [[Sustainable energy|energy]]
# The need for [[sanitation]]

Our industrial systems of providing food, water, energy, shelter, and sanitation have inherent weaknesses to their centralized models.  Long supply chains, fossil-fuel dependance, environmental damage, and the fragmented production of goods are common traits to industrial models.  Land labs tie these 5 basic human needs together in integrated systems.

[[Permaculture]] is a concept of integrating these human needs into local, ecological, human-scale systems.  Land labs can be thought of as an education area for promoting creative solutions for meeting these needs, while ensuring the land and local ecology are being restored in the process.

Land labs provide students with real-world experiences to help change their behavior as consumers, and get them more involved with meeting their 5 physiological needs.

Land labs are focused on production rather than just consumption.  Western [[consumer culture]] makes the provision of our 5 basic physiological needs very abstract and far removed from the daily life of most people.

When these 5 basic needs are abstracted away from consumers, it is easier for the underlying systems providing these needs to operate without supervision to ensure they are ethical and sustainable.