The average college campus includes thousands of students and hundreds of administrators, staff members and faculty. In some cases college campuses are huge businesses, in others they even qualify as small towns.

Because of that fact, the grassroots sustainability movements on college campuses across the U.S. are increasingly important. The average college campus includes thousands of students and hundreds of administrators, staff members and faculty. In some cases college campuses are huge businesses, in others they even qualify as small towns. The New York Times took note of that fact and covered a growing effort at Oberlin College, in Ohio.

A new house, along the lines of a sorority or other group house, has established itself on that campus: the SEED house, short for Student Experiment in Ecological Design. Members of the house, including junior economics student Lucas Brown, make it clear that the house is a practical experiment. They try hard to live green lives, but in such a way as to study, work and have fun at the same time.

The project grew out of a class project on environmental design that simply snowballed. Somewhere along the way, members of Dr. David Orr’s Spring 2007 class talked Oberlin College’s administrators into handing over the keys to a house on campus. The class made the house energy efficient, convinced the school to spend $40,000 to renovate the house and generally turned the house into a green habitat.

Students moved in last September and have been hammering out the details of living sustainably. They’ve minimized their energy usage wherever they can with tactics like dressing warmly in order to keep the thermostat low and studying in groups in order to turn on fewer lights.

Reading through the lifestyle changes these students have made, you can rapidly see that most of them are fairly minor adjustments. For instance, a few unplugged appliances only translate into remember to plug and unplug items, just as most people would remember to flip a switch on and off. And Brown and his roommates have found a fairly effective manner of implementing some of the harder-to-remember rules: competitiveness. Want to convince college kids to take shorter showers? Make them compare their times to everyone else around them. They’ll set themselves the goal of washing off in less time than it took the last guy — after all, Brown is down to a three-minute shower these days.

College campuses, such as Oberlin, can be an ideal place to implement new ideas (like sustainable housing or environmental management programs), if only because of the speed with which a new idea becomes tradition at a school. If the SEED house can last four years at Oberlin, students will start to see its environmental practices as something they’ve ‘always’ done — after all, it will have been that way since they were freshmen.

And, even better in the average administrator’s eyes, students are the ones doing most of the work in these situations. Internship programs still have a lot to learn from college campuses on just how much free labor and new ideas can be obtained from a student body.

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Photo courtesy of Oberlin College