Institute Will Give Students Hands-On Environmentalism : Cal Poly: Residents will live in a self-sufficient community, developing energy conservation guidelines and testing new technologies.

Imagine going into your bathroom for your morning shower only to have a computer monitor inform you that all your hot water credits have been used.

Desperate, you dash next door and offer to work your neighbor’s shift in the community garden in exchange for a couple of hot water credits. Rushing home with the credits, you punch a code into the computer and are rewarded with that long-awaited blast of hot water.

This is not just a starry-eyed view of the future. It could happen to any of the 90 students and scholars who will one day inhabit the Institute for Regenerative Studies, a $10-million experimental residential and academic complex that will soon be rising on the Cal Poly Pomona campus.

The institute, which will be built entirely with private donations on 16 acres on the south side of the campus, is conceived as an interdisciplinary project that will bring together students and professors with an interest in environmental issues.

Residents will conduct research in such fields as alternative energy sources, new techniques for energy conservation and methods for rehabilitating environmentally damaged land.

But the residents themselves are the subjects of the institute’s biggest experiment--a self-sufficient, environmentally correct community that will serve as a showcase for the technologies and methods being developed there.

More than $4 million has already been raised for the project from contributors that include the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Bank of America, and Simpson Paper Co.

An inaugural ceremony for the institute was held last Thursday for the first phase of the community, scheduled to be finished next summer. It will include a seminar facility, restroom/shower building, and separate dormitories for 16 students and professors. The residents will be chosen from various academic backgrounds to ensure that the community will have a diverse pool of expertise and experience.

“There is a need for communication between different specialties,” said Prof. Victor Wegrzyn, acting director of the institute. “Working with persons of differing academic and personal backgrounds will help people to look beyond the fences that separate them.” Wegrzyn also emphasized that the experimental community will not be isolated from campus life and will function as an alternative to living in a regular dormitory.

Residents will attend their regular classes, but they will also be responsible for cooking and growing their own food, maintaining the institute’s fisheries and power plants, and strictly adhering to energy conservation guidelines.

In exchange for their work, residents will receive additional academic credits and possible rebates on their rent.

The community, which is expected to grow to 90 people when it is finished in 1996, will eventually include an academic building with classrooms and research facilities, additional dormitories, and a waste reclamation plant.

Nothing in the community will go unused, Wegrzyn said, noting that in the fisheries, for example, residents will be responsible for collecting the fish manure that will serve as a natural fertilizer for the gardens.

In addition to full-time residents, a number of students who live off campus will participate in the daily running of the institute. All participants will share responsibility for deciding how the community’s energy resources will be allocated.

The first group of residents will be allowed to use whatever amount of energy is necessary, Wegrzyn explained, but it will be up to residents to discover ways to balance the needs of the community with conservation of the environment.

“We can’t afford to be too autocratic, because the whole point is to have students decide for themselves how to make the institute work,” said Wegrzyn.

Conservation will play a central role in minimizing the community’s energy use. Traditional methods such as placing structures on south-facing orientations will be used in conjunction with modern insulating techniques.

Prof. Ed Barnes, who participated in the institute’s planning, speculated that life in the community will be “a series of decisions and bartering based on energy use” and thinks that residents will probably create a system of energy credits that could be used or traded like money.

“People will recognize that they have a finite amount of energy available and that if they want to have more, they will either have to conserve more or create new sources of energy,” Wegrzyn noted.

“People should understand the work required to produce electricity,” Barnes said. “If the television is hooked up to a bike and you have to pedal to watch TV, you’ll constantly be aware of what that energy cost.”

Institute officials hope that the experience of the community’s residents will provide valuable insight into how both individual and social behavior changes when energy conservation becomes the dominant pressure in a community.

In addition to the experimental community, the institute will use a $500,000 grant from the Los Angeles County Department of Sanitation to research how to convert a former landfill to useful purposes.

The experiments, which will be performed on inactive portions of the county’s Spadra landfill next to the institute, will focus on creating plants that will grow well in a landfill’s soil. If the experiments succeed, Barnes said, he hopes to rehabilitate the landfill surrounding the institute to its original makeup of wild grasses and walnut trees.

“If we can do it right,” he predicted, “it will be impossible to distinguish the covered landfill from the natural terrain.”

Citing the successful conversion of several Southern California landfills into recreational areas, Barnes added that “it’s important to try to rehabilitate landfills, especially in dense urban areas where land is at a premium.”

But as important as the research may be, both Barnes and Wegrzyn agree that one of the most important functions of the institute is to disseminate that information to the general public.

“People aren’t going to conserve if they think they will have to drastically alter their lifestyles,” said Barnes. “We’re trying to help them understand that with some simple changes in their lifestyle, they can retain their comforts, save themselves some money, and help preserve the environment.”