18 A Higher Order of Heroism
In the towns and cities across America, it is common to find a town
square with a large monument to one military hero or another. Seldom,
however, does one find the designers of those towns or town
squares similarly memorialized. A smarter and more durable society
would first acknowledge those with the foresight and dedication to
design our places well, not just those who defended them in times of
trouble.We need to recognize a higher order of heroism—those who
helped avoid conflict, harmonized human communities with their
surroundings, preserved soil and biological diversity, and created the
basis for a more permanent peace than that possible to forge by violence.
These are quiet heroes and heroines who work mostly out of
the light of publicity. The few who do receive public acclaim are
mostly reticent about the attention they get. Some like Frederick Law
Olmsted, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson develop a wide international
following. Most, however, labor in obscurity, content to do
their work for the satisfaction of doing things well. John Lyle, professor
of landscape architecture at California Polytechnic Institute, was
such a man.
I met John in the mid-1980s during a visit to Cal Poly. During the
two days we spent together, we talked about his concept of regenerative
design and his plans for the Center for Regenerative Studies, now
named the Lyle Center, and walked over the site—located between a
large landfill and the university. In subsequent years, John and I met at
conferences and sometimes collaborated on design projects, including
one located in a remote, hilly, southern rural community. Our first site
visit coincided with an ice storm the previous day that had covered
the region with an inch of ice. We got within a mile of the site in a
rental car, but had to make our way down a long, steep hill with a
sheer drop of several hundred feet on one side. For the final mile on
what passed for a dirt road in that part of the country, the rental car
was useless, so we began to slip, slide, and tumble our way down the
hill. Near the bottom, the road banked steeply to the right, but we
had to reach a trail on the left side. There was no way to walk across
that ice-covered dirt road to the other side, so we did what professionals
in our circumstances are trained to do: we crawled across the
ice on our hands and knees. Midway, hands bleeding, John turned to
me and said, “I don’t mind crawling this way, or even getting run over
by a pickup truck, but I sure hope no one sees us.”We both laughed so
hard that we lost our grip on the ice and slid backward into the ditch.
Later that day I learned that John had diabetes.
When I began the project described in chapter 14, John was the
first person I called to help organize the effort behind what later became
the Adam Joseph Lewis Center at Oberlin College. John’s dedication
to that project was legendary. Flying from California, he
would usually arrive in Oberlin about midnight, but would be ready
to work by 8 A.M. the next morning. On more than one occasion he
arrived in town too late to get a hotel room and spent the night in a
rental car or on whatever spare couch he could find, always without a
whisper of complaint. John was that kind of person—modest, diligent,
self-denying, creative, and supportive of those around him.
I talked with John in the spring of 1998 before I left on a trip to
Greece. He had a nagging cough and was scheduled for a checkup.On
my return I called to inquire how he was feeling. “They’ve given me
two weeks to live,” he replied. Stunned, I sat down to write a farewell
letter to a man I’d come to depend on as a valued colleague, friend,
and mentor. Words at times like that are utterly inadequate, but
they’re all we have. That letter read in part: “The Oberlin project
simply would not have happened without your dedication and quiet
competence from the very beginning. In more ways than I can recount,
you held things together. You were a rock throughout the entire
effort. For that and for all of the late-night trips to Oberlin, the
untold hours of work on the landscape design and on the entire project—
thank you, thank you, thank you.” When my mind goes back to
John Lyle, it is always with gratitude for the time spent with him and
for the example of his life. Before he died, Oberlin College named the
plaza in front of the Adam Joseph Lewis Center the John Lyle Plaza.
On the Cal Poly campus John Lyle’s legacy is the Center for Regenerative
Studies—the facility that he helped conceive and develop.
The center represents the manifestation of his thought about architecture,
integrated design, and the educational process, as well as an
utterly clear-headed view of the human predicament in the twentyfirst
century. John’s professional work, both written and built, is a
legacy in the form of a challenge to the conventional wisdom of our
time. Trained as an architect and landscape architect, John was a pioneer
in a new and more encompassing field of ecological design that
embraced virtually all of the liberal arts. He left behind a body of
ideas in two remarkable books and dozens of articles. That portion of
his legacy comes as a challenge to all of us, but especially to educational
institutions.
First, John Lyle challenged us to face the fact that “we have created
a world that is simultaneously growing out of control and progressively
destroying itself” (1997, 1). A world designed around linear
flows will, in due course, come to ruin. As a result, this generation of
students will live in a radically altered world. Sometime in 2001
world population passed 6 billion, and it may reach 8–10 billion
within the lifetime of a current university student. Given present
trends of species loss, these young people will live in a steadily more
biologically impoverished world. Estimates vary, but it is not inconceivable
that 15–20 percent of the species now extant will disappear
within the next 60 years, with consequences that we cannot know.
This will be the first generation ever to experience human-driven climatic
change and with it increased storms and storm damage, rising
sea levels, droughts, heat waves, spreading diseases, and political turmoil.
These and other trends will interact in ways we will not foresee.
All of this is to say that the rising generation will live in far more
volatile and stressful world than any previous generation. And none
has ever faced a more daunting agenda.
But Lyle’s legacy to us is not one of despair, denial, or wishful
thinking built on fantasies of heroic technologies or salvation by economic
growth. It is, rather, one of hope founded on more solid
ground. Lyle was an optimist who believed that “what humans designed
we can redesign and what humans built, we can rebuild” (Lyle
1997, 2). If we act wisely, the future would be better than that which
is now in prospect (Lyle 1994, 12). To act wisely means making our
actions conform to ecological realities. To that end Lyle proposed to
equip people to become ecologically competent by understanding
the physical processes, energy flows, landforms, and the biota of the
places where they lived.
Second, Lyle challenged us to deal with the structure of what ails
us, not merely the rates of change. “The problems,” he wrote, “are
manifestations of structural failure in the global infrastructure”
(1994, 9). In our circumstances, neither half-measures nor Band-Aid
solutions will do. The vast infrastructure of steel, chemicals, and concrete
characteristic of the modern world would have to be replaced
with, as he put it, “neotechnic” solutions that are regenerative. Regeneration
implies “replacing the present linear systems of throughput
flows with cyclical flows” and moving “to a [world] rooted in natural
processes” (ibid., 10–11). Regenerative systems would slow the velocity
of water and materials, replacing machines with landscape. In such
a world “mind and nature join in partnership” (ibid., 27).
Few have thought more deeply or more practically about what
such a partnership with nature would mean. Lyle’s vision of regenerative
design was founded on 12 principles:
• Let nature i.e. natural processes do the work for us.
• Use nature as the model for human enterprise.
• Aggregate functions and processes to create resilience.
• Strive for optimum levels, not maximum.
• Match technology to needs.
• Replace power with information.
• Provide multiple pathways.
• Solve many problems simultaneously.
• Manage storage as a key to sustainability.
• Shape form to guide flow.
• Shape form to manifest process.
• Prioritize for sustainability.
For Lyle, these were not simply abstract principles, but guidelines
for the development of the Center for Regenerative Studies and other
projects in which he was engaged. In a larger context, the principles of
regeneration were the blueprint for a society that would be powered
by sunshine and grounded in the facts of nature, not grand ideologies
or abstract economic theories. Consequently, society would operate
at a scale, speed, and elegance fitted to natural systems. For Lyle, a regenerative
society was not austere, but richer in experience, satisfaction,
and conviviality.
In Regenerative Design for Sustainable Development (1994), Lyle
described in great detail how a better and more sustainable society
could provision itself with energy, materials, food, shelter, and cycle
its waste. He did not stop with technical details but went on to the
harder issue of politics. The largest obstacle to sustainable development
was the “concentrat[ion] of power and resources among a very
small number of people” (ibid., 264). Because they are smaller in
scale, dispersed, and modular, regenerative technologies do not lend
themselves so easily to the concentration of power. Rather than rely
on the long-distance transport of energy, water, and materials, a regenerative
society would make “their life support systems . . . integral
parts of the local landscape” (ibid., 266). Power and wealth in that society
would be more dispersed.
How would a truly regenerative society come into existence?
“How do we educate the mind in nature?” (Lyle 1994, 269). The
crux of the matter is to change our manner of thinking, and this
means changing both the substance and process of education to join
art and science. The curriculum evolving at the Center for Regenerative
Studies draws from many sources, including the work of John
Dewey, but mostly Lyle thought it should emerge from the experience
of the enterprise itself. Education in a “paleotechnic” society,
Lyle wrote, “tends to focus on products, treating them as if they were
frozen in time.” But in an ecological perspective, “all that exists is
in process” (ibid., 270). Education appropriate to a neotechnic society
would begin with the basic facts of change and interconnectedness.
But how do we change educational institutions that have, as he
put it, “strong tendencies toward rejection” (ibid., 273) of new ideas
and integrative purposes? Lyle posed the question, but others will
have to answer it. His role was to initiate the Center for Regenerative
Studies in the faith that it would become part of a larger process
of educational regeneration grounded in place and aiming toward
permanence.
Lyle’s strategy was rendered visible in the development of the
Center for Regenerative Studies at Cal Poly, which he intended this to
be a working model for students, faculty, and administrators. The center
was to be more than an island sealed off within a larger structure.
Lyle intended, rather, to change the very DNA of the institution, altering
its evolution in order to engage the deep problems of our time.
The subsequent history of the effort is unsurprising except for the
fact that the vision has survived despite differences over administration
and purposes. These are not, I think, unusual. A worldview
rooted in the principles of regeneration is unavoidably at odds with
the extractive mindset of the industrial order. Similarly, a curriculum
that equips students for lives in a world that is ecologically durable
runs counter to one that aims to equip students for success in a failing
paleotechnic society. Implicit in Lyle’s work is the challenge to find
common ground between these two views in order to build a world
that is ecologically solvent while retaining the hard-won advantages
of an open and free society.
Lyle ended Regenerative Design by relating the potential for regenerating
larger systems, cities, regions, and entire economies. His
aim was to forge the links between locality and geographic regions
and between ecology and an ecologically robust economics. He recognized
that processes of degeneration were rooted in pre-ecological
theories of economics and in massive subsidies to extractive industries.
Regenerative solutions that worked with the ecology of specific
places seldom received federal subsidies or research funding. He recognized
the need for a larger revolution in the conduct of national
and international affairs built on a more honest accounting of the
costs of what we do.
Lyle’s legacy is that rarest of gifts: the example of an honest and
searching mind uncluttered by trivialities or intellectual fashion. His
scholarship gives testimony to his remarkable breadth of knowledge
and the clarity of his mind. But John Lyle was no pedant. He aimed,
rather, to harness knowledge and research to improve the human
prospect by grounding it in the ecological realities of particular places
and landscapes.
Lyle gave us a model of a better kind of education. He was an educator
in the best sense of the word. In my experience with him over
15 years in various projects and settings, he never imposed, but rather
quietly educed, which is to say, he brought forth ideas from his students
and colleagues. He had an ecological view of learning which focused
on process, interaction, and, above all, the power of good example.
Lyle challenged his students in the 606 design studio and all of
us to make something real of our ideas and to take responsibility for
how those ideas are used in the world.
Lyle helped develop a larger response to the world in what he
called environmental design, which is “where the earth and its
processes join with human culture and behavior to create form . . .
where people and nature meet where art and science join” (1994, ix).
Design, the art of making things that fit harmoniously in an ecological
context, is now beginning to inform architecture, landscape architecture,
urban planning, business, and economics. Lyle played a key role
in what, I believe, later generations will regard as the ecological enlightenment
that began in the final quarter of the twentieth century.
Finally, Lyle’s legacy to us includes the example of a life lived
with grace, stamina, and purpose. All of his colleagues, students, and
clients would agree. Lyle combined exemplary professional skill, personal
humility, kindness, and dogged determination. He joined style
and substance to do the right things in the right way. The power of his
TABLE 18.1. Conflicting Paradigms: Paleotechnic versus Neotechnic
Paleotechnic Neotechnic
Worldview Industrial Ecological
Scale Large Small
Scope Narrow Integrated
Power Concentrated Dispersed
Wealth Concentrated Dispersed
Energy Fossil fuels Sunlight
Planning Fragmented Integrated
Solutions Technological Ecological/community
Knowledge Concentrated Dispersed
Accounting Start-up costs Life cycle
work came from the synergy of steadiness and vision. He showed
everyone who knew him that largeness of vision could and should
come from largeness of spirit.
By all standards, John Lyle left behind a remarkable legacy. But
what will institutions of higher education make of it? One answer is
that it will be largely ignored in the same way that a body rejects a
transplanted organ by sealing it off. The Lyle Center for Regenerative
Studies would then be merely a museum of quaint ideas and technologies,
but not the start of something fundamentally regenerative.
On the other hand, the center could grow to be a transforming force
throughout higher education. Lyle challenged us to talk and listen
across the barriers of different intellectual perspectives and disciplines
and to transcend the routines of hierarchical management and
the pettiness that often pervades academic politics. He challenged us
to develop a curriculum that joins head, hands, and heart and thereby
make education an agent of regeneration in the world. But most important,
John Lyle left his example of a man responding to the challenges
of our time with good heart, imagination, professional skill,
and hope.