Amanda Thiel-Setterberg sits cross-legged on reused carpet in a cramped dorm room amid glass and plastic containers brimming with teas and herbal remedies. She and her roommate Cori Kruger could be called green dormers.
"Green living — I don’t even know what that means; that’s such a term," said Thiel-Setterberg, a Fairhaven College student living in the dorms.
Dorm life limits how much Thiel-Setterberg and Kruger can do to curb their effect on the environment. People who rent rather than own face obstacles when trying to reduce their impact because leases impose limits to changes they are allowed to make to their rental properties.
Renters might think reducing the environmental footprint of a rental property is impossible. Although tenants have no control over the design and structure of their homes, they can reduce their impact on the environment by making choices such as purchasing eco-friendly products for home care and maintenance, reducing energy and water use, turning waste into a resource and using small spaces to grow food.
"It’s not that you have to devote your whole life to living sustainably; it’s just those small choices that you can incorporate," Thiel-Setterberg said. The green dormers use non-petroleum-based, biodegradable hand soap, dish soap and shampoo. They save plastic containers and try not to buy products with packaging. They also use compact fluorescent light bulbs.
"If you start by shutting off your lights when you’re not using them or conserving water or composting your food scraps or something small like that, you start being aware of these little things," Kruger said. "Eventually, that starts spreading to being conscious of what kind of food you’re buying at the grocery store and what kind of clothes you’re buying."
The students are changing their lifestyles to live green. To save money and resources, the green dormers bike, walk or bus wherever they go. They buy used appliances from the RE Store, and wear secondhand and organic clothing. They support local farmers at the Bellingham Farmers Market, buy organic food and grow food in the Outback, a community garden on Western Washington University’s south campus.
Food production
Renters with little space can use small areas to grow food. Potatoes, zucchini and cucumber plants produce abundant crops and grow well in vertical wire meshes, balcony greenhouses or portable pots.
Eric Conn is one of six volunteer coordinators for the Outback, at which he teaches an independent study program called Sustainable Food Systems. The home he rents is south of the Fairhaven residence halls and the Outback, hidden among apartment buildings on a dead-end street, tucked away at the end of a wooded trail. The three-story turquoise duplex with purple trim has a big yellow, turquoise and purple bus planted in its front yard and a pond that ducks frequent. Letters above the front door read "Oasis."
Conn has been working with his landlord to create a garden that doesn’t need tilling and uses limited fertilizer. The plants balance nutrients, such as nitrogen, to improve the quality of the soil.
"What we’re trying to do here is to show that you really can grow a lot of your own food, even in the city, even on a normal-sized city lot," he said.
Starting with fast-growing annuals and some perennials, Conn and his landlord turned the garden into an elaborate ecosystem with fruit and nut trees, berry bushes, herbs, roots, vines and vegetables. This year they’re in the process of densely infilling sections of their garden with more plants to use the maximum allotted space.
"Let’s say you have a 20-by-20 patch of wheat," Conn said. "You might get 10 or 20 pounds of wheat from that spot. But if you have in that space an apple tree, and then underneath the apple tree you have some black-currant bushes and some raspberry bushes, and then underneath that you’ve got some mint running and some lemon balm and maybe some rhubarb along the edge, and then underneath that you’ve got some salad greens like chickweed and mache and lettuce and chard, and then down in the ground you’ve got roots like beets, turnips, daikon radishes, salsify, ocra, things like that, and then you’ve got vines growing up through the whole thing, maybe hops or kiwis or grapes. In that same amount of space, you’ve got vegetables, you’ve got fruit, you’ve got roots, you’ve got herbs, you’ve got salad all in that space, and you might get a few hundred pounds of food."
Gardeners can produce their own food to save money on groceries while contributing to sustainability. "It’s a very ancient system.
It’s a very reliable and practical way of sustainable gardening that has been practiced for thousands and thousands of years by many cultures around the world," Conn said. "And it seems to be one of the best forms of sustainable food production."
For those with no space to grow food, Bellingham has community gardens that are open for anyone to grow or harvest food, Conn said. The Community Food Co-op Connections Building has a community garden downtown and Bellingham’s Parks and Recreation Department provides three, which are located in Fairhaven, the Happy Valley neighborhood and on the corner of Lakeway Drive and Woburn Street.
"It’s important to take advantage of resources as a group, like the Outback. Collectively, we can take our compost out there, and it’s a great place for people to grow or harvest food, as a group or individually," Kruger said.
Adam Roberts, a Western sophomore and Outback volunteer coordinator, helps people obtain garden plots and teaches an independent-study program on gardening.
"This is a hub where students and community members can interact and meet each other," Roberts said. "Gardeners with knowledge can teach novices."
Although he lives off campus, Roberts harvests most of his produce from the Outback and totes his peels and food scraps in a plastic bag to one of its three compost bins.
"The most sustainable thing you can actually do is keep all your organic matter in the garden instead of shipping it off," he said.
Even though many people think compost piles stink, they don’t if you do it right, Roberts said. A balanced compost pile has a carbon-to-nitrogen ratio of 30-to-1. Food scraps, which are moist and lower in carbon content, must be balanced with straw and higher carbon materials to prevent them from smelling bad.
Consumer choices
The main floor of Conn’s house is shared community space. Shelves of books line the walls of a bedroom-turned-library. Drums, flutes and guitars litter the living room floor. A wooden archway leads into the kitchen, remodeled with two stoves, two sinks and a bigger pantry. The pantry, constructed from old lumber scraps and used buckets from the RE Store, is filled with basic food staples such as brown rice, beans and wheat grains.
"One thing I would actively promote for people renting a place together and doing something to be sustainable is eating organic whole foods bought in bulk," Conn said.
Not having the space or climate to grow grain, the household members buy whole grains and grind them into fresh flour with an exercise-bike-powered mill.
"When people become more intimately aware of their food — when they are more involved in bringing it from its original state into something they can eat — I think their general awareness of what they eat and how that affects them and what’s around them becomes much more profound," Conn said.
Members of the house use 30-gallon barrels to catch rainwater. They use the rainwater on the garden during dry periods. They also run it through a filter rated for stagnant pond water. Conn said it tastes better than tap water. "We go as close to the source as we can," he said.
Researching green
Four blocks away from the Oasis, Nikkie Davis conserves energy, recycles rainwater and gardens at the house she rents. Before moving to Bellingham the previous fall to attend Western, Davis researched Bellingham grocery stores online and found the Community Food Co-op. She saw a flier on the co-op’s bulletin board advertising a home for rent that included compost piles for food and yard waste, and a garden in the backyard.
"Find the right place to live," Davis said. "If you’re renting from somebody, I would just lay down with them solidly: What can I do, what don’t you want me to do and what does it need to look like when I leave?"
The key to renting a space and remaining environmentally conscious is searching for a residence and lease that meet specific criteria. As more prospective renters base their criteria on double-paned windows, energy efficient appliances and compost piles in the back yard, more landlords will respond to the demands.
"You can live in the city and have all its benefits and still have a place to go get away from that and try and get in touch with the Earth," Roberts said.