During the 2008 presidential elections, Eagle Rock's Occidental College certainly got a national boost from being associated with one of its most famous alumni, Barack Obama. But lately the well-regarded liberal arts college has been building a buzz—at least locally—for an entirely different reason: Its recent decision to take the campus green.

"When I first got here, I was surprised by how the students and the administration were so neutral about environmental issues," recalls college junior Eliza Dornbush, a Seattle native who has been a green activist since she was in high school. "There was this overall apathy to the environment."

But in the two years since Dornbush has been on campus, Oxy's green apathy has transformed into green advocacy as the college assertively joins the new millennium of educational institutions fighting for the environment.

Oxy has established innovative new environment-centric initiatives—from the simple, micro act of trying to do away with water-bottle usage to the visionary (and, yes, expensive) plan of erecting a solar array that, knock on wood, has the potential to produce 12 percent of the energy needed to run the college.

By far the most ambitious environmental project on the planning board at Oxy is the solar array, which consists of 5,000 solar panels spanning the entire campus. With a preliminary budget of about $8 million, it will be among the largest solar arrays in Los Angeles, not to mention a model for other large institutions that spend millions of dollars every year on their energy needs. (Interesting fact: UCLA saves more than $250,000 during a single week when the campus shuts down for the winter holidays and heating, ventilation and air conditioning are reduced in buildings that are largely unoccupied.)    

During a recent tour at Oxy, one stop was a coop full of plump chickens.

The hens rule a patch of triangular land that had once lain mostly dormant, called into use only occasionally when the faculty or administrators wanted to host an outdoor cocktail party or awards ceremony. But some 18 months ago, students who wanted to know the source of their food forced an issue: They wanted space to farm their own seasonal fruits and vegetables and reconnect with the Earth.

To Oxy's credit, the college handed over the land. Today the students not only tend to several raised-bed gardens overflowing with tomatoes, basil and melons, they also compost food waste from the dining hall and manure they've gathered from the Griffith Park stables, and collectively care for the chickens (who, incidentally, produce about a half-dozen eggs daily).

In a tree-shaded corner of the garden, a makeshift screen is tacked up on a tree. During warmer months, students gather here to watch outdoor movies, amid sugar snap peas you get to eat off the vine. The sweet cluck of hens punctuates the evening air. It's this mode of kinder, greener student living that makes the raucous, smoke-filled keggers of my brother's era seem like something out of the Stone Age.

Each season, after harvesting produce and gathering enough eggs, the Oxy cooking club, Well Fed, preps communal feasts. Everyone is welcome to dine gratis—the club's soft-sell method of enlightening other students about the pleasures and importance of eating local, seasonal fare. The farming group is now in talks with Eagle Rock's new organic restaurant Four Café to collaborate in various ways.

Asserting its nascent eco-conscious persona is one way in which Oxy is branding itself in the new millennium. "Increasingly, incoming students are expecting colleges to be models of sustainability," says Mark Vallianatos, an Oxy faculty member who teaches the Environmental Stewards class and heads the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute (UEPI), a campus-based community-oriented academic research and advocacy organization that has an office on Colorado Boulevard and which focuses on issues related to industry, transportation, community development, land use and the urban environment.

During his five years at the college, Vallianatos, a former lawyer, has helped students parlay their eco-ideas into action. Under his guidance, undergrads have brought the Zipcar—a membership-based car-sharing program—to campus, created a bicycle-share plan and built their own bicycle repair shop. They have also introduced reusable containers to the dining hall (in previous school years, students had been blowing through some 250,000 plastic clamshells—salad to go, anyone?). And they have improved the usability of campus recycling bins.

Thanks partly to the buzz about a greener Oxy, the stately Swan building, one of the college's oldest structures, is in the throes of major remodel. The goal is to transform an energy-guzzling white elephant of a building into a LEED-certified model of green efficiency that would be the first of its kind in Eagle Rock.

Some of the students' greening strategies are brilliant in their simplicity. When undergrads discovered they'd bought more than 150,000 bottles of water in the past year, they brainstormed a strategy that they hope will soon eradicate the use of all plastic water bottles. First, they raised the price of bottled water in the dining hall. Then they researched the cost of replacing traditional water fountain faucets with spigots that pour water directly into bottles—at an astonishingly cheap $120 per spigot. Each student was then given a metal thermos emblazoned with the school logo. Instantly, refilling bottles, as opposed to reaching for bottled water, became a money-saving, college morale-boosting no-brainer.

Perhaps the cleverest idea of all was instigating a yearly $20 sustainability fee, which each of Oxy's 2,000 students pay. This not only creates a $40,000 eco-budget to play with but also develops an emotional—and financial—investment in campus greening. The budget, for example, funded the bicycle-share program and allowed for the purchase of bike racks, lockers, helmets and tools that cost a total of $4,000. What's more, the bikes were mostly cast-offs from departing seniors.

But for all that, Oxy has a long way to go before an organization such as the Sierra Club honors the campus with its seal of approval. "We are not environmental extremists in any way," says Dornbush, with a sharp laugh. "We have a lot of potential to improve our image."

Dornbush has already seen student eco-consciousness shift distinctly during her two-plus years on campus. When she joined Oxy, says Dornbush, it was the kind of place that actually discouraged bicycling through campus—administrators generally believed that the grounds were just too tight to accommodate students and their bikes. Administrators were cautious about taking risks on new eco-initiatives, Dornbush says. "They didn't want to push really hard for something and have it fail."

Dornbush, for one, spearheaded the campaign to bring the Zipcar to Oxy, a program that has proven to be a modest success with previously car-less students and which is also open to the wider Eagle Rock community. "Students are reacting positively to things like the  Zipcar and bicycle-sharing," she says. "The school's administrators see that and now they're willing to take more risks. I think we're moving in the right direction."

Mike Woodard, a member of The Eagle Rock Association who volunteers to run the Eagle Rockdale Community Garden and Art Park, also thinks Oxy needs to work harder at transforming its Ivy Tower initiatives into real-world action. "Oxy has big guys with big clout who can make things happen in our community," he says, adding: "They've got to get better about mixing with us Townies."

Vallianatos, for one, sees off-campus outreach as one of the main priorities of the college's green movement. After discussing plans to build the college's solar ray on a previously empty hillside plot, his student committee raised the point that residents might object to seeing unsightly panels.

The group went back to the drawing board. It now hopes to create a solar ray that is equal parts energy generator and art installation, with panels that glow and change color at night, much like a James Turrell Sky-Scape would. An even more ambitious plan is to create a solar cluster in Northeast Los Angeles he adds, effectively creating a larger, greener community. "That way we can all take advantage of the sun," says Vallianatos.

UEPI is guiding its students to consider how every project can engage the larger community. Once the college masters the laborious process of applying for permits and rebates for its proposed solar ray, UEPI students will hold off-campus seminars for the surrounding community to teach them how to develop their own solar energy proposals as well.

"We want to partner with the community on as many of our projects as possible," says Vallianatos. "Our vision is not just to go green, but to inspire the people around us."