This is just the start: applied ecology makes money and saves the planet. Grow "food forests", practice regenerative agriculture, make money. It's fun and feels great. You can start right where you are.

Reposting a comment I made a few weeks ago:

A brain dump:

I've been investigating a few systems of agriculture.

- There's Small Plot INtensive (SPIN) which is specialized for market
production, emphasizing minimizing labor and maximizing market crops.

https://spinfarming.com/ (Be aware that these folks are selling their
system as a course, and this is a sales site not an info site. You can
get the details from reading carefully and watching the videos that
practitioners have made.)

https://www.transitionculture.org/2011/09/05/spin-farming-ba...

Quitting Your Job To Farm on a Quarter Acre In Your Backyard?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJx1SPClg6A

Backyard Farming: 2 Year Market Garden Update of Nature's Always Right Farms
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpn1oGkQrrg

Profitable Farming and Designing for Farm Success by JEAN-MARTIN FORTIER
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92GDHGPSmeI
https://www.themarketgardener.com/

Neversink Farm in NY grosses $350,000 on farming 1.5 acres (area in production).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5IE6lYKXRw

- Then there's the "Grow Bioinstensive" method which is designed to
provide a complete diet in a small space while also building soil and
fertility. They have been dialing it in for forty years and now have a
turn-key system that is implemented and functioning all over the world.

http://growbiointensive.org/ (These folks are also selling their system,
but they also have e.g. manuals you can download for free. I find their
site curiously hard to use.)

- Permaculture (which could be called "applied ecology" with a kind of
hippie spin. I'm not a hippie but I'm sometimes mistaken for one.) and a
similar school (parallel evolution) called "Syntropic" Agriculture.

Both of these systems aim to mimic natural ecosystems to create "food
forests" that produce crops year-round without inputs (no fertilizer, no
irrigation.) The process takes 5-15 years or so but then is
self-sustaining and regenerative.

For Permaculture I find Toby Hemenway's (RIP) videos very good:

https://tobyhemenway.com/videos/how-permaculture-can-save-hu...

https://tobyhemenway.com/videos/redesigning-civilization-wit...

There's a very lively and civil forum at https://permies.com/forums

For Syntropic agriculture:
https://agendagotsch.com/en/what-is-syntropic-farming/

(FWIW, I find Gotsch's writing (in English) to be impenetrable, even
though I pretty much know what he's doing. Anyway, his results are
incontrovertable.)

I'm afraid I don't have a good link in re: Food Forests and eco-mimetic
agriculture yet. This "Plant Abundance" fellow's youtube channel might
be a good place to start, in any event it's a great example:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEFpzAuyFlLzshQR4_dkCsQ

- If you really wanted to maximize food production and aren't afraid of
building insfrastucture (like greenhouses and fish tanks) there's the
(sadly now defunct) Growing Power model:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growing_Power

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs7BG4lH3m4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV9CCxdkOng

They used an integrated greenhouse/aquaculture/compost system to produce
massive amounts of food right through Milwaukee winters.

- Then there is the whole field (no pun intended) of regenerative
agriculture, e.g.:

"Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets
of Soil Health" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A and "Symphony
Of The Soil" Official Trailer -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXRNF_1X2fU

This is very much non-hippie, very much grounded in (often cutting-edge)
science (ecology, microbiology, etc.) and ecologically and economically
superior to artificial methods (e.g. Brown makes money. It's actually
weird that more people aren't adopting these methods faster. You make
more money, have fewer expenses, and your topsoil builds up year-on-year
rather than washing away in erosion.)