Alien Planet: space colonies as a starting point for sustainable communities on Earth

This idea has floated around my brain for some time and the recent postings that Mark Ciotola has done has brought the idea more to the fore. Basically, I’m thinking about how we should design a sustainable community. We have the basic idea that we build around communities that the selves have a sustainable nature but I want to extend that a bit and think of communities as a colony on an alien plant.  Think Mars colony on Earth. The reason I’m thinking that has not only to do with such communities/colonies have to have a sustainable nature anyway but also with their enclosed nature. In a space colony food production and waste management has to take place within an enclosed system and this aspect I think should form the foundation for a sustainable community on Earth. We treat Earth like an alien plant and we build, as much as possible, self-contained communities.  

Of cause, we don’t live on Mars and we can step outside and breathe the atmosphere so I don’t mean we should build like we really live on an alien planet.  Instead we take the idea of a space colony as a starting point for our design. If we build from the ground up with sustainable communities then we can build a whole civilisation from these logo bricks.