“This is a generation that is watching the world come undone,” said David Orr, a professor of environmental studies at Oberlin. Projects like the Oberlin house, he said, are “helping them understand how to stitch the world together again.”

Dr. Orr’s course in ecological design became the incubator for the house when Mr. Brown and the two other founders of SEED, Kathleen Keating and Amanda Medress, enrolled in it last spring. They had done research on sustainability houses at Middlebury, Brown and Tufts, and had persuaded the college to turn over an aging, drafty two-story house. But before they could move in, they needed to make the house energy efficient.

The class studied water and energy use, insulation, heating and cooling, and financing. Nathan Engstrom, Oberlin’s sustainability coordinator  an essential position on many campuses these days  gave advice. John Petersen, the college’s environmental studies director, checked out the house’s wiring.

The college spent $40,000 to renovate the house over the summer, bringing it up to safety code. Mr. Brown used the carpentry skills he had learned from his father to pitch in on weatherizing.

The students moved in last September. “We sat down and had a meeting  ‘O.K., what next?’ ” Mr. Brown recalled. “We didn’t know what it meant to have a sustainable house.”

That first night, amid confusion about who was home and who was out, they left the lights on. “We said, ‘Oh, no, we just had a terrible first day,’ ” Mr. Brown said. “ ‘We’re leaving lights on everywhere.’ ”

Image A picture of John Edwards, whom one student said had strong global warming policies, encourages short showers. Credit... David Maxwell for the New York Times

All year they studied together in the living room at night so they would not have to turn on lights in the other rooms. They mastered worm composting, lowered the thermostat  keeping it at 60 degrees for most of the winter and piling on blankets  and unplugged appliances. There is no television, but no one seems to consider that a hardship.