Regenerative Design - History

History

During the late 1970s, John T. Lyle (1934–1998), a landscape architecture professor, challenged graduate students to envision a community in which daily activities were based on the value of living within the limits of available renewable resources without environmental degradation. Over the next few decades an eclectic group of students, professors and experts from around the world and crossing many disciplines developed designs for an institute to be built at Cal Poly Pomona. In 1992 the Lyle Center for Regenerative Studies was built over two years and opened in 1994. In that same year Lyle's book Regenerative Design for Sustainable Development was published by Wiley. In 1995 Lyle worked with William McDonough at Oberlin College for the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies completed in 2000. In 2002 McDonough's book, the more popular and successful, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things was published reiterating the concepts developed by Lyle.

Lyle saw the connection between concepts developed by Bob Rodale of the Rodale Institute for regenerative agriculture and the opportunity to develop regenerative systems for all other aspects of the world. While regenerative agriculture focused solely on agriculture, Lyle expanded its concepts and use to all systems. With regenerative agriculture, the concepts are very straight forward and simple but Lyle understood that when developing for other types of systems, more complicated ideas such as entropy and emergy must be taken into consideration.

Swiss architect Walter R. Stahel developed approaches entirely similar to Lyle's also in the late 1970s but instead coined the term cradle-to-cradle design made popular by McDonough and Michael Braungart