Joan Safford is the Director of the John T. Lyle Center for Regenerative Studies at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. On May 22, 1999, the Center for Regenerative Studies was rededicated in honor of the late John T. Lyle, founder and first Director of the Center.

SHUMEI MAGAZINE: Can you tell us something of your training and background in agriculture and in sustainable and regenerative design?

JOAN SAFFORD: Well, I started out as a forester with the U. S. Forest Service because I decided I wanted to be a Forest Ranger when I was really young. I studied in Flagstaff because their program was interdisciplinary and you didn't learn just about timberland; I didn't want to be funneled into a specialty. I worked for the Forest service for quite a long time, but it got to the point when it was really clear that forestry wasn't broad enough for me. I started looking at landscape architecture programs because [in school] I had read a textbook by Ian McHarg, Design with Nature, about landscape architects. He . . . had started this trend . . . at Penn State where they look at students from non-design backgrounds and give them a year of design, and then the landscape architecture part was design at the regional scale. I realized it was a better fit for me so I started in graduate school with that, and ended up finishing here at Cal Poly.

I came to Cal Poly at just the time that the Land Lab, the planning for the landfill program, was starting. I had let it be known that I was interested in working in the area of recycling, and the very next day [Professor] John Lyle asked for students interested in recycling and in landfills, as he needed a graduate assistant on the committee. So, for most of the time that I was a grad student I worked on what to do with the landfill when it was closed, because a lot of it [the property] would be coming back to the campus, as part of the campus. So I ended up doing my master's thesis on the idea of the Center, on what some other places in the country were doing, on the design of the Center. Through this Land Lab Committee work . . . came the master plan for the development of this land, which became available out of the landfill. We would probably have rather been located nearer the campus or the community, but this land was available and I think John [Professor Lyle] seized the moment and we went ahead with the planning for this place.

I think that landscape architecture is a natural outgrowth of demand. It has always been very broad and multidisciplinary. It's good to have a grounding in science, but it doesn't integrate the human factor very much. In landscape architecture it's best to bring in human desires and needs. My own study has shown how people are affecting the earth. Especially in studying forestry for so long, finding out how many times that the continental United States has been logged - getting on like the third or fourth cutting - causing an enormous amount of change. Even the forestry companies and environmentalists don't fight over the fact that only one to three percent of the forests that were here when the pilgrims landed are still standing. But the effects of cutting three or four times, as a forester, I understand.

So in landscape architecture I have a tendency to look at things on a large scale. That's what landscape architecture is all about. It's about creativity, and artistic expression. It's also about creativity in problem solving, too, because forestry, for example, tends to work on the heavy cutting of trees; they don't value any of the other parts of the forest. And our economy doesn't always value those. It's also a creativity that comes down to fashion and solutions and trying to look at the future and get people to look together. So I think that as well as the drawing skills and the design skills it gave me, it also gave me a way of thinking about process. Creating things, carrying out ideas.

SM: Have you stayed here at Cal Poly since you completed your thesis?

JS: No, I had so much public sector experience that the advice I received was to obtain private sector, for-profit experience. So I did that, and it was really good for me. For a number of years I worked in Orange County during the building boom there. Then I worked as a landscape architect for the LA County Fire Department, working with the use of fire resistant plants, low water irrigation, reforestation and oak tree depletion, and I was teaching part-time. I came back to Cal Poly to teach in 1989. About a year ago, I began teaching courses up here at the Center for Regenerative Studies, and it was really good once again to be involved here.

SM: How do you envision John T. Lyle the man, the teacher, the visionary?

JS: Well, I think vision [such as his] is key to [creating] a place like this. It started getting people rallied around the idea of the center, getting structures in place. I'm forever grateful for his vision and his strength, which were so necessary for the Center to become a reality. I think the greatest loss is that we will never have from him the reflection that comes with time and age. The Center is so relatively young, and it would have been wonderful to have had him age and be able to look back and reflect, and we have been denied that perspective from him. His death has hit me the hardest in my wishing to be able to just call him on the phone and ask him this or that. He is a part of the spirit of this place. Right before he became very, very ill I went down the stairs and saw him sitting at a table adjacent to the Commons and that moment is etched in my memory. I think his spirit is still here.

The good thing about his work is that his work was very process-oriented, so it's easy to take his work into principles and apply them in another context besides this Center. That is one of the great things about his design book because it really tries to get at conceptual ideas, of which the Center is only one expression, one case study among many. I've seen an example of people trying to take Frank Lloyd Wright's architectural design out of Wisconsin and put it in Oregon. A place has to be grounded in its place. Even if you were to move this Center across the valley, you couldn't just move it and put it down there - it would need to be re-created in its new place. These places have to be created in the context and social fabric that is there. Of all the leaders I can think of, John's work will be the easiest to interpret that way.

[Note: John T. Lyle wrote two books, Design for Human Ecosystems and Design for Sustainable Development.]

SM: What is the next step in the evolution of the Center?

JS: A major focus of the Center will be our expansion, what we call Phase III. Actually, we are right in the midst of this right now. We really need to expand. Eighty people will provide for more hands to do the work, more input and output, and the other things that John [Professor Lyle] envisioned in a regenerative community. Right now, [with a partial complement of only twenty resident students] we are really limited in what we can do - we would like to do more, but can't because we only have twenty people; we'd like to do more research, but can't until we have more students. Phase III will be a really critical phase of this place. [Phase I consisted of the kitchen, commons, the downstairs offices and a few dorm rooms; Phase II consisted of upstairs offices, and classrooms.] Phase III will build out the rest of the storage facilities we need, and room for an additional sixty students.

I think we've done enough work up until now that we could cluster the Center a bit differently. I think there should be room for married student housing, maybe the potential for some children, rooms for visiting faculty - single suites, etc. I think all the human systems need to be rethought. The commons was really built for eighty students that is why it is so big. In the original conception of the Center one issue was, we had sixteen acres, so how many participants could the sixteen acres support in a regenerative way. So that helped set the number of people. An anthropologist and sociologist did some work, how big does a community get before it can't self-govern - sort of a tribe concept. If there are too many people then you don't get enough communication, too few people leads to too many interpersonal conflicts. So where is the right balance point between getting the input and output, in getting just the right number of participants that you get the work done, but you can still get the human community structure and operate, and have the right rituals and a high-level agreement on principles.

SM: In what way is the Center a model for future programs, a model for the future?

JS: Well, there are two ways we're investing in the future. One is that I am working with the Director of the Center for Geographic Information Systems, a computer-mapping program that is very powerful. We're starting off by doing a project called the "Regenerative Campus" where we are taking the regenerative principles and going to the campus level and not just saying, "Here's how the Center sits in the watershed", but saying, "Here's how the campus sits in the watershed." We [the Cal Poly campus] use a lot of tertiary treated water, reclaimed water. We use it here for agriculture. No one is really looking at when that water goes back down into the water table. It also comes with a little higher nitrogen content, which is actually good for the plants, but some of that nitrogen is carried back down into the water table. We are looking at [water] transportation issues, and really looking at being involved in the campus being more regenerative and saving money. When the landfill is closed, the campus will have to pay about $600,00 to have its garbage collected. The more we can recycle, the more we can keep our green waste on campus, and that will enable us to [generate] cost savings right up front.

We can also help keep those nutrients on campus, and explore changing over the vegetation on campus in order to use the water. It would create less green waste, because it doesn't have to be treated as often. It would "close the loops" on campus and allow us to go onto the next scale, which is the San Gabriel watershed issue, because there is a real flooding issue downstream. It's not just that we will be affecting the water here, but if we can put less water in it [the San Gabriel River watershed] and keep more water here on campus we will actually affect the flooding downstream.

That brings us to the regional scale. And we need to start by having these community outreach groups come in. We can start saying, "How do the principles of the Center affect the region?" We're already working with a private school in Pasadena, which wants to have a green school. And so we're on their Advisory Board to help them. That's when you start branching out and reaching kids and reaching the larger community to say, "This is how we're trying to make our you can make your community more regenerative." As we do that, we'll make the region more regenerative - it will be a model. This place needs to be a model to the region, to address ecological change on a very large scale. We are just, as a region, causing a lot of ecological change. We can alter that and go in a different direction to not be such a drain on the system. So, by being a model we can ultimately be a contribution for the entire region.

SM: All we have to do is look around us to see the blight and environmental devastation, a major portion of which appears to be especially concentrated in urban areas worldwide. What do you envision a program like CRS can do to affect a positive change? How can the Center offer practical solutions beyond the demonstration model?

JS: Our human numbers and our technology, which we've attempted to use without measuring change, have caused global level change. We affected it - we changed it one way, and we can now change it another way. [Historically] the earth has gone through huge changes. For example, in the Jurassic Period 95% of the plant life was buried because of geologic shifts. The earth just responds to things we do. It is all about . . . thinking in terms of change. [It is possible to become] paralyzed thinking [you] can't have an effect. That is the great thing about this place, you can have an effect.

[Students here] can measure how much less trash they send to the landfill, how much work it takes to grow their own food. There is an alternative for them. They can see this effect they are having, and they know they can change their behavior, and that they can influence other people to change their behavior. And that is the only place you can start - with each one of us. And [then] that needs to [be incorporated] into policy. It requires cooperation to get things done. [Also] there is an economic component because altering practices to be more regenerative can ultimately save a lot of money. The fact that this place is here and that it was built in a California state university attests to the vision of a fairly small group of faculty and students who could effect change like this that will effect change at a larger level, and yet a larger level.

[As to offering practical solutions] we have a lot of work to do there. I think this will be another immense phase, when we really start talking about how people can use this information and how can we make urban centers, because we will all live in urban centers as there will be no undeveloped area left. We will have to go to cities, and that is where the outreach program is doing more in working with other people and other cities and other facilities. Because this is a little different - not unique - but definitely different, working with college students, having a community garden where it's in a community, with community members, and integrating children, and there is an issue of security. Those are a different set of challenges. So I think we need to have a lot of these kinds of experiences, lots of different kinds of cultures, lots of different kinds of communities and we all need to share our vision.

SM: Are there other centers such as this?

JS: There are others, which is really encouraging. John [Lyle] worked to try and make it [the Center] strong enough to exist on its own. When you think about Nature as both context and model, you think about a system that has many, many contexts because Nature has redundancies built into it. You have a very strong network of communication and information and structure, so that if you lose part of it you don't lose the whole. I think about that all the time, not just from a physical standpoint but also from a community standpoint.

So that's what I think about a lot - that the regenerative principles apply to the community as well as its systems. This place was designed using an ecological model of a healthy ecosystem. This is how a healthy ecosystem works, then this is how a healthy human ecosystem should work. That was the concept the whole Center was designed on. It doesn't exclude the human community. John's [Professor Lyle's] writing can be used by students here to help them, to further them as a community, to help them measure whether they as a community are regenerative or not.

SM: The Center for Regenerative Studies is open to visitors and gives tours of its facilities, but are there any hands-on learning projects for the public and school children to promote sustainable and regenerative living, as designed by Professor John T. Lyle?

JS: Yes, we have the community outreach program. We are actively teaching two groups - our resident students [and campus students], and off-campus students from the community who wish to attend classes. We have opened our labs to the community. There are labs covering all of our systems here: Community, Shelter, Energy, Aquaculture, and Agriculture. Moreover, we have a faculty member, Paul Summers, who is responsible for community outreach. He is responsible for determining what the community wants to learn, tailoring specialized courses for groups. He has a degree specialization in nutrition, so we've added a nutritional component to our community outreach. He's very interested in educating the community not just in learning how to grow things, but also in growing those things that have high nutritional merit.

A lot of people come here and say, "I don't have sixteen acres. How do I do this in my own backyard?" And so the demonstration area in the village green in the front - the back part is really meant to intensively support the students' efforts to grow their own food, and we don't know yet how much food they will be able to grow - then the front part will be [developed into] a demonstration area at backyard scale, patio scale and container gardening scale. The front part of the village green plus the area in front of the commons is where we will have a self-guided tour start, even talk a little about John [Professor Lyle] and why the Center is named after him, and have students from on-campus - design students - help us design a setting which teaches people so that they see these demonstration areas and think, "I can do this" and "I can go home and do this", or "This is how I could incorporate these principles in my new (or old) house", and "This is how big a pond I'd need to grow some fish"

We're not reinventing, but re-learning things that worked in other cultures and other times, when it wasn't as easy to flip the air conditioner on.

We also have been undertaking research in sustainable agriculture. This is where we are hoping to have Shinji Shumeikai do some comparison plots in the main garden. New faculty will be undertaking coordination and direction of research, and the comparison plots will be an important part of this research. Also, in the demonstration garden that we will be planting, we'd like to have Shinji Shumeikai have a demonstration area. We'll be setting up interpretive signs and have a self-guided tour to explain more, so that people can actually walk around the site and get information. We're starting to lead so many tours here that we need to reorganize the entire tour structure.

One good example of our working with school children is our project with the Walden School in Pasadena. We aren't trying to design their school. They can design their own school. We are working with them to give them the process and framework of regenerative principles and the issues in sustainability to help the outcome of ideas and show how a regenerative school operates.

These kinds of efforts, along with the courses that we offer, are what we are excited about doing. We're trying to go out to advisory groups. It's group by group, and it spreads. That's a regenerative community.

I'll be glad when we have more outreach so that we can say, "You want to study about renewable energy systems or solar energy, come here and we can do that." Not just the agriculture, but also the aquaculture and how those systems integrate. The key here is integration. The thing that makes this place work is how the systems interact with each other and cooperate with one another.

SM: The Center and Shinji Shumeikai have been working together and sharing ideas about Organic and Natural agriculture. How do you see the Center's relationship with Shinji Shumeikai, especially for the future?

JS: I put a very high premium on community and healing and rapport. I think that no matter what we do in the physical realm, the most important part of the partnership is going to be the spiritual, healing dimension of it and what we learn from each other. I think that the Natural Agriculture techniques of Shinji Shumeikai and the other techniques of our researchers necessitate good communications, talking together as much as possible. I think that no matter how rocky or smooth the physical part of it is, I think the partnership is the people.

We will be featuring Natural Agriculture in our demonstration area, and in the future in comparison plots as part of our research activities. We will be getting the self-guided tour going so that the technique is interpreted for people - it needs to be interpreted. Natural Agriculture is different, and it looks different from the other agriculture. Kenji [Shinji Shumeikai resident representative Kenji Ban] has been writing [Natural Agriculture material] for me, and this will help in the interpretive work. In that way, Shinji Shumeikai's work will be understood by the public.

FROM SHUMEI MAGAZINE, VOL. 222. JULY/AUGUST, 1999