Biosphere on a Budget : Environment: Cal Poly students begin moving into a self-sustaining living complex they believe is ‘the beginning of a whole new thing.’

Graduate student Devon Kohen rolls her eyes at jokes about her new campus home, a developing solar-powered, recycled waste-using complex at Cal Poly Pomona dubbed “Biosphere without a lid” and built next to a mountain of suburban garbage.

“It doesn’t feel like a commune, it doesn’t feel like hippie love,” said Kohen, 29, a landscape architecture major. “In a way, we’re in the beginning of a whole new thing.”

At the end of November, 10 students moved into the $10-million Center for Regenerative Studies, a 16-acre complex funded entirely by grants. By Jan. 3, a total of 18 students, a resident manager and one visiting scholar--an aquaculture expert from Hawaii--will live in the faculty-designed complex. Within the next few years, plans call for 90 people to do research and live in the mostly self-sustaining environment.

The center’s concept is similar to the $150-million Biosphere II in Oracle, Ariz., except that Cal Poly’s complex is simpler--sans the artificial rain forest and visitors cafe serving lobster bisque--and unsealed. Yet, researchers from as far away as Japan, Brazil and Italy have already requested tours, said Acting Director John T. Lyle, who created the original concept.

Agriculture Prof. Victor Wegrzyn, who worked on the center’s design, jokingly called the concept: “liberated, neoclassical, futuristic.”

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The center is tucked away on a secluded campus hilltop, surrounded by walnut trees, with a stunning view of the San Gabriel Mountains. Other hilltop residents are hawks, rabbits and coyotes. So far, little is in place except for four simple, cedar-sided buildings with dormitories and classrooms, an outdoor amphitheater, six ponds with no fish and a state-of-the-art solar generator that is one of only three in the world.

In January, students will begin slowly switching to solar power, raising fish and growing pesticide-free vegetables in rooftop planter boxes. Within the next three years, the center’s residents will rely completely on solar power, raise livestock such as cows and goats, and use their treated sewage water to irrigate crops. Other projects will include building a platform pen over a pond as an experiment to recycle chicken and pig manure through a watery ecosystem. The manure, which fish don’t eat, will fertilize the food chain with algae and microorganisms.

Meanwhile, the 10 students who recently moved in are monitoring their energy and water use on handwritten charts in preparation for rationing. Eventually, students will get energy “credits”; the amount will depend on how much solar energy they gather from the center’s solar panels and instruments. The students, two per room, will have to decide how to conserve credits, maybe by not watching TV or not blow-drying their hair. A digital box outside their doors will tally each person’s use.

On a recent morning, junior James Roberts flipped pancakes on a griddle in a makeshift kitchenette set up until the center’s kitchen is complete.

“I just found out how much juice this takes,” said Roberts, a 22-year-old geology major. “Fifteen hundred watts. Oh, my God! That’s way too much. We’ve got to figure out something else.”

In just a couple of weeks, Roberts’ attitude has changed from the days when his family in Diamond Bar used to run the dishwasher half full. Now he watches less TV, takes shorter showers and tries to walk instead of drive up the steep hill that leads to the complex.

“When you change your lifestyle,” he said, “you change the way you think.”

But the change won’t happen overnight. Roberts admitted that he probably will continue to grab an occasional fast-food hamburger.

“I’m going to get a good idea of how to evolve my lifestyle,” he said. “It’s trying to make you live with different needs and simpler means because you’re using less resources. By that, we begin to see exactly the practicality of learning to live like that.”

The center is on the campus’ south end, adjoining the university’s 339-acre LandLab research site, which includes the county’s active Spadra Landfill. LandLab researchers lead on-site studies on refuse recycling, composting and replanting wildlife habitats. Originally, the center was part of LandLab, but broke away about five years ago to concentrate on research involving the lifestyle aspects of regenerative technology.

Regenerative studies examine the use and reuse of natural resources, and the resulting environmental ethics. Acting Director Lyle, a landscape architecture professor, had conceived the center in 1976 as a project for his graduate students.

“I got into the question of how can we live in a way that doesn’t destroy ourselves,” he said.

Lyle, who was on the faculty committee to review LandLab, pitched the concept for an adjoining center on regenerative studies, and the idea caught on. Major foundations embraced the concept, including the W.K. Kellogg Foundation in Michigan, which kicked in $2.7 million.

“I think it takes Cal Poly into a new era,” said Lyle, 59, a Sierra Madre resident who won’t live at the center because he prefers not to move. “To me, with our crisis with environmental resources, when you really pursue them and all their implications, they’re going to change the world and the way it works, and the way we all work and the way we all live.”

The center is part of the College of Environmental Design but involves students and faculty members from all disciplines. The design team, for instance, included an anthropologist who gave advice on the social aspects of living regeneratively.

Thirty students applied to live there; 20 were selected through interviews, and two dropped out. The number of student residents will expand as funding becomes available. So far, the center has $4 million in grants and needs another $6 million to complete development, Lyle said.

Student residents must minor in regenerative studies and spend an undetermined number of hours each week on chores. Rent is $225 a month, slightly cheaper than dormitory rates, and everyone pitches in for food.

Resident Abby Heimerman, 19, said she heard about the center from a friend and applied because the concept intrigued her. Heimerman, a sophomore animal science major, always has been interested in the environment and conservation issues.

At orientations, faculty members called the students “pioneers” and urged them to keep journals, she said.

“It just really gave you the feeling that we’re really going to be part of something big.”