COMMUNITY NEWS : Earth’s Environment Is His Life : Science: Cal Poly Pomona student is part of a community that will grow its own food, recycle all its waste and harness natural power sources.

Tilton Jones is not an extremist. He’s not even a vegetarian. But when he was offered a room in what will become one of America’s only self-sustaining, environmentally correct communities, he accepted the offer without hesitation.

What separates Jones from the rest of wasteful America is his attitude more than anything else, he said. “My lifestyle hasn’t changed that much. What’s changed is that I’m living with a group of pioneers trying to live a different (way).”

Jones’ new home is the Center for Regenerative Studies--sometimes called “Biosphere without a lid,” in a reference to the much-publicized $150-million Biosphere II in Arizona. On 16 acres surrounded by walnut trees atop a hill on the Cal Poly Pomona campus, 18 students, a resident manager and one visiting scholar live in several energy-efficient buildings, trying to build and sustain a community that will eventually recycle or reuse all its waste, grow its own food and stop using fossil fuel.

“We’re more realistic than Biosphere,” said Jones, 31, a mechanical engineering major from Hawthorne. “We don’t live in a bubble. We can come and go as we like. I’m a realistic environmentalist. I realize you just can’t take away people’s conveniences.”

Instead, Jones and the other center residents are creating energy-efficient alternatives they hope will be convenient enough for consumers to use. Eventually, 90 people will live in the center and research ways to waste fewer of the Earth’s expensive and exhaustible natural resources.

Jones expects to stay three years. By the time his stint is up, he hopes the community will waste nothing. The resident students--from a variety of disciplines--will have learned how to recycle human waste, build rooftop gardens and completely convert to solar power, among other things.

“We’ve been given the foundation, and we’re trying to make it grow from there,” Jones said. The center “wasn’t outfitted for recycling and solar energy. We have to put it together. We have to make it work. We’ve been given the dream and a few of the materials.’

The idea for the center was born in 1976. Prof. John Lyle, who teaches landscape architecture, said he thought, “We need to design an environment according to ecological principles so that civilization can survive.” Right now, he said, “the world’s not on the right track.”

Eventually, Lyle and others were able to secure $4 million in grants, with $2.7 million coming from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, to launch the center; an additional $6 million is needed to complete the development, he said. “What the center is trying to do is design the human environment in a way that is sustainable, that works with the natural processes rather than against them.”

Students, who must apply to live at the center, pay $225 per month, excluding food. They do research, keep journals that record their energy use, and are required to minor in regenerative studies.

“Tilton is particularly enthusiastic, and that impressed us,” Lyle said. “He has a good ability to adapt to conditions that can be difficult. And he is genuinely committed to the subject. He had been involved in (environmental work) before.”

The route Jones took to the center was circuitous. He grew up in Manhattan Beach, where he went to high school. After graduation, “I was a beach bum,” he said, working at various jobs, including tending bar. “It was just an everyday routine with no meaning. In order to find my niche, I had to go away.”

Jones went to a junior college in the Sierra Nevada, where he discovered “a more simple way of living. Up there, you could see the problems more. A Styrofoam cup in the river really stood out. Before, I’d go to the beach and there was trash all over, but I never noticed it because I was so used to it. So when I came back to the city, I started seeing things more. The sky wasn’t blue, and the water was so dirty.”

Jones entered Cal Poly Pomona with a goal: to begin a career as a solar engineer, committed to helping communities and individuals devise and use such renewable energy sources as the sun, water and wind.

The research Jones and others are doing at the center “is just one way to solve environmental problems in a more realistic way,” he said. “We don’t have all the immediate answers. What we have is a dream that we’re working toward. But we understand it’s going to take time.

“We’re going to have to change the way that people look at life. That’s the only way to change people. And this is one way to let them see another way of living.”