St. Mary's: Our Stepping Stone
posted 2/23/09
We left Takoma Park, driving away from our apartment of two years. The rooms were now empty and the car packed full. Rain fell from a cold and gray sky, a normal day in DC in February. We were leaving home, but maybe we weren’t. America isn’t that far away, right?
Beltway traffic was as slow as to be expected during rush hour. I was ok with that, it gave me a chance to breathe. For weeks we’d been preparing to leave. We packed up our home, half of it going to the thrift store, another portion stored at our parents’ homes, and some given to friends. Now for five months we’ll live in a 2007 Honda Fit, a subcompact car with more room than you’d expect on the inside. We drove south. Suburbs dissolved into rolling rural southern Maryland. The bridge from Solomon’s Island to St. Mary’s county arched high over the water and familiar roads brought us back to a place where we feel at home. Turning a corner, the St. Mary’s River appeared on our right and we were at our first stop, St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
St. Mary’s is a small liberal arts college located in St. Mary’s City in St. Mary’s county in southern Maryland. The student population hovers around 2000 and the name St. Mary’s City is very misleading. It is an un-urban place and the college accounts for most of the city’s population. Other than that, there is Historic St. Mary’s, a historic re-creation of colonial St. Mary’s City, one of the oldest settlements of the US and a former capital of Maryland. All of this sits on the banks of the St. Mary’s River, where the sailing and crew teams practice.
We love this school and it tries us to stay away for too long. The college is another home and the river a familiar landscape. It is where we went to school, it’s where we met, and without it I don’t think we’d be doing something like this trip in the first place. Seeing it softened the anxiety of leaving a routine and community I had grown to love over the last couple of years. There are always friends at St. Mary’s, so maybe it was a good place to get this thing started.
While we visited this time, we stayed with our friends Elizabeth, Joanna, Bethany and B. They live in the Eco-House, a two-credit per semester arrangement. One credit counts for living sustainably and one for outreach. Fourteen people live in the three residences that make up Eco-house. We visited two of them, a couple of townhouses, side by side, that house eight people.
The residents of EcoHouse take sustainably seriously. Even now in February their thermostat is set to 55. To conserve heat, they wear warm clothes and reduce the time the doors are open. They also employ a system of passive solar heating by opening the window shades on the east side of the house in the morning and the west side in the evening. The curtains are always pulled on the opposite side of the house to provide insulation. Yang Yi and Flynn, in the townhouse next door, have also put plastic over their windows. Most other windows in the townhouses have draft blockers made from rolled sheets. Yang Yi also uses a gray water system. When others turn on the water for the shower and wait for it to get warm, a bucket sits underneath collecting what would normally be wasted. Later, he uses it to wash his hair. That way the still clean water does not go to waste. The residents recycle and compost. They eat local and bulk order foods and sometimes dumpster food as well. To conserve even more energy, they hang dry clothes to save on using energy-draining dryers.
For their other credit, Eco House reaches out to the campus community. They hosted us, even though they already had four other guests staying with them, speakers from out of town. That’s 10 people in one townhouse. Eco House also hosts Friday potlucks, a good way of building community and conserving the energy of meal making. Making one big meal instead of several small ones saves time and energy for everyone.
Elizabeth and Bethany are also the co-presidents of SEAC (Student Environmental Action Coalition), St. Mary’s version of an environmental club. With 50 to 500 members, SEAC has become a powerful force on campus. Right now, Elizabeth and Bethany are trying hard to get ready for Power Shift, a weekend long demonstration on Capitol Hill. The gathering of students from around the country will be protesting near a coal plant that powers the Hill and leading 2 days of workshops and panels. On
Monday, they will lobby and hold a rally on the Hill.
While in the past SEAC worked on campaigns locally and on campus, their work is now focused on larger national campaigns, like Power Shift. Power Shift attempts to hold leaders accountable to the promises they make during the campaign. It is associated with Power Vote, which organized people to vote for the candidates who will make decisions with the environment and climate change as one of their top priorities. Power Shift has grown from 6000 students in 2008 to 10,000 in 2009 with members from everywhere in the US and including Canada and Puerto Rico. St. Mary’s SEAC has already registered 82 people at no cost to the participants (that’s $35-40 per person, almost $3300). Power Shift recognizes that everything comes back to politics. It is in that arena where decisions and policies are made, where change can become largely effective (you know, hopefully).
The physical St. Mary’s grows and changes. Sometimes it seems like it’s a little out of hand, but I guess like every other institution, it is expected to expand. Since we graduated, new buildings like Goodpastor Hall and some residences were built using green standards. One of those buildings, St. John’s Archaeological Site, displays the findings from an archaeological excavation that has been being “processed”, since the seventies. When I first visited St. Mary’s, a corrugated plastic shed protected the dig. Now it’s a beautiful facility that displays the work and findings of the faculty and students that have worked on the site over the years.
We met Bill Schindler, an enthusiastic staff person working at St. John’s. He told us that the building is as green as it could be, though it did need some extra energy to keep the sensitive archaeological site at a certain temperature and humidity. It takes advantage passive heating and cooling, has tons of windows and skylights, and uses low-energy halogen light bulbs. Bill does his own form of energy saving too. As the site doesn't have that many visitors in the winter and summer seasons, he waits until he hears the door open and then turns on the lights and displays. On the day we visited, there was so much natural light that for the first few moments we didn’t even notice that the lights weren’t on. When they did turn on, I just thought that they were motion sensitive. If you are visiting St. Mary’s you should really go check it out. If you work there or attend, you should definitely go. It’s a beautiful building with interesting and interactive displays showing people the history of the land they tread.
So it seems that sustainability has become part of St. Mary’s infrastructure. Compost bins now dot the campus. Blue recycle bins sit behind the townhouses and big recycling dumpsters stand beside the regular dumpsters in each parking lot. A community garden enables students to grow some of their own food. The college also has plans run on all renewable energy, largely due to SEAC’s hard work in recent years. Two fellow graduates, former members of SEAC, now work at the college as sustainability fellows. A veggie co-op enables students to pursue a vegetarian, vegan, or alternative diet. There are already so many initiatives and there continue to be more, because, let’s face it, St. Mary’s is awesome and getting greener everyday.
No wonder we thought of doing this trip.
Wish us luck!