Brown's West House Strives for Sustainability

By DAVE FISHER/ecoRI News staff

Brown University sophomore Dan Sambor tends the garden at West House. (Dave Fisher/ecoRI News staff)PROVIDENCE — While growing up on a 6-acre farm an hour outside of Chicago, Dan Sambor was imbued with a passion for gardening that made him a bit reluctant to attend college in an urban setting. “I was so used to living in a rural environment," he said. "I really went back and forth on attending Brown.”

Finding a social niche when one begins his or her college career is difficult. For Sambor, there was no doubt in his mind where he should be in the social order at Brown University. While perusing the various extracurriculars at the campus activity fairs during his freshman year, he discovered West House, and knew immediately, “This is where I’m supposed to be.”

West House was begun by a group of Brown University students in 1985 as an exercise in sustainable living. Today, West House is home to 14 students, and 18 more participate in the house’s co-op meal and work program. The residents of West House cook all of their meals onsite, composting all of the food scraps from the house — hence removing them from the school's cafeterias’ waste stream — and share in all of the work when it comes to the upkeep and maintenance of the house.

Some of the more menial tasks around the house are assigned on a two-week rotating schedule — to prevent any one person getting stuck cleaning the bathrooms — while others are permanent positions that are assigned at the beginning of the school year. The permanent positions include coordinators for local food, living space, environmental news, archives and history, and bulk purchasing.

Sambor, now in his sophomore year as a mechanical engineering major, heads the gardening and composting at West House. Residents get about 10 percent of their food from the house's garden, and most of the other consumables are sourced through Farm Fresh Rhode Island’s Market Mobile, keeping the food local and the carbon footprint small. Sambor is able to stay ahead of his planting by starting seeds in the university’s greenhouses.

Sambor's passion for growing produce is evident as he guides an ecoRI News reporter through the small container garden at West House. As the growing season winds down, the garden is flush with peppers, swiss chard, okra, eggplant, all manner of herbs, and tomatoes grown in buckets. Sambor finds working in the garden cathartic.

“I can’t imagine not having this outlet," he said. "After sitting in class all day, I love getting out to the garden to do some real work. Manual labor is important.”

While back home on the outskirts of Chicago, Sambor helps keep the family’s farm humming.

He exhibits equal passion for math and science. He credits his future career path to finding out — at a very young age — about hydrogen fuel cells. “I actually did a fifth-grade project on hydrogen cells," Sambor said. "I really want to change the energy infrastructure. We just can’t continue to draw our energy sources from the earth using so many dangerous practices.”

No stranger to the impacts of urban sprawl, Sambor has seen increased development around his family’s farm during the past decade or so. “At one point, a developer offered my family a couple million dollars for just a portion of our land," he said.

Though the offer was tempting, Sambor eventually convinced his father not to sell. Since the economic collapse in 2008, the developer has since rescinded the offer — one benefit to the economic downturn.

So what’s on tap for Sambor and the other students residing at West House? Currently, the house is participating in the Real Food Challenge — auditing their food sources using the Real Food Calculator, seeking support from the school to possibly move West House residents for a short time to renovate the house, which was built in the 1890s — to make it more energy efficient.

Next year, Sambor is planning to grow some pumpkins and decorative gourds, installing some tiered containers to grow some flowers and screen plants and prevent erosion around the house, and a new three-bin compost system to facilitate an influx of more food scraps, which — much like another forward thinking group of Rhode Islanders — he hopes to collect at the university’s farmers’ markets.