By Jonathan Hiskes | Illustration by Keith Negley
Amity Lumper鈥檚 great garbage epiphany came in Hill Hall, watching classmates dump unsorted papers and food scraps down the hallway waste chutes. When the chutes clogged, students would shove down broom handles to break them free. Crunch, crunch.
There had to be a better way. Lumper, a 2000 涩里番 graduate, grew up recycling at home in Kennewick, Washington. Why couldn鈥檛 SPU do the same? She put the question to Dave Church, assistant vice president for facility management. He responded by offering her a job overhauling the campus recycling program. She set to work mapping campus dumpsters and measuring waste by volume. In 1999, 涩里番 Pacific recycled 15 percent of its waste; now 67 percent is diverted from the landfill.
Amity Lumper鈥檚 work caught the eye of Cascadia Consulting Group, a 涩里番 firm that advises city governments and businesses about environmental practices. She took a job with the company after graduation, starting out by riding on garbage trucks to understand the variations in waste for different kinds of businesses. She鈥檚 stayed with Cascadia for 10 years, becoming a senior associate and minority owner. She鈥檚 worked with some of its biggest clients: Home Depot, Starbucks, Adobe Systems, and the cities of New York and Houston.
She鈥檚 one of a number of alumni combining an entrepreneurial spirit with a conviction that living faithfully means taking care of the created world. Their work takes place not amid wilderness and wildlife, but in the thick of human life 鈥 often in the heart of the city. These graduates are at home in the marketplace, harnessing innovations in technology and design to improve everyday living. Their stewardship is not about cold showers and sitting in the dark but about finding cleaner and more efficient sources of heat and light.
Solar Pioneer
As an electrical engineering major, Dana Brandt 鈥01 worried about entering a life of drudgery designing disposable gadgets. 鈥淗onestly, I was pretty terrified at the prospect of living in a cubicle designing something inane,鈥 he says. 鈥淏ut I didn鈥檛 know what else to do.鈥
These graduates are at home in the marketplace, harnessing innovations in technology and design to improve everyday living. Their stewardship is not about cold showers and sitting in the dark but about finding cleaner and more efficient sources of heat and light.
That changed on a summer SPRINT trip to Belize after his junior year, when he was able to help jungle villages plan for solar installations. 鈥淚 got excited about being able to use my degree 鈥 to help 涩里番 and bring power to 涩里番 that don鈥檛 have it,鈥 he says.
He returned to campus to take 鈥淎lternative Energy Systems,鈥 the school鈥檚 first class in renewable engineering, with Associate Professor of Physics John Lindberg. That led to another SPRINT trip, this one as a leader, to work on wind颅energy projects in the Dominican Republic. He then went to Germany and England to earn a master鈥檚 degree in renewable energy.
When he looked for renewable energy companies in Washington state, hoping for a job, he couldn鈥檛 find any. So he started one in 2004: Ecotech Energy Systems of Bellingham, Washington.
Ecotech helps homeowners and businesses add rooftop panels, showing customers that solar can pay off even in the gray Northwest. Every spot on Earth spends exactly half the year in daytime and half in nighttime. Washington鈥檚 long, frequently sunny summer days balance out the cloudy winters. Solar arrays take about 10 years to earn back their upfront cost, Brandt says. But they typically last more than 30 years, providing several decades of essentially free electricity.
In June 2010, Ecotech installed the solar array 鈥 originally designed by Kenzie Brister 鈥09 as part of her senior honors project 鈥 on SPU鈥檚 Otto Miller Hall. Brandt also worked to bring solar to an affordable housing project on Lopez Island, where the upfront investment in local energy will allow low-income residents to save money on utility bills for 30 years.
Biblical Mandate, Economic Payoff
Undergirding these projects is a belief that biblical stewardship means caring for human communities along with wild places.
鈥淚鈥檝e found that my faith in Christ only makes the concept of sustainability richer,鈥 says Matt Basinger 鈥03, who is earning a doctorate in earth and environmental engineering at Columbia University in New York City.
Basinger has combined energy technology with information technology on a string of projects. This fall in Mali he launched the first pilot for a project called SharedSolar
to bring solar power to remote villages through the cell-phone infrastructure that has proliferated in Africa. Farm workers can prepay for only the service they need, making power more affordable for those who鈥檝e never had access to a city electrical grid. The project helps locals earn a living without leaving their home communities. That helps not only those villages, but also the African cities straining from widespread urban migration.
Basinger says his faith motivates this work. 鈥淚 found that I was not trying to realize 鈥榮ustainable development鈥 as a goal in and of itself, but that I was motivated by Christ鈥檚 calling to serve the poor and to care for his creation.鈥
Creation care also inspires Amity Lumper as she works with cities and urban businesses. 鈥淲e鈥檝e been entrusted with creation, which is big and highly complex,鈥 she says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 about caring for the non-human 鈥 and human 鈥 world.鈥
While she鈥檚 driven by moral and ecological imperatives, Lumper says her daily work is more often making an economic case for smart environmental practices. For example, when Home Depot signaled interest in composting plant debris and wood scraps, she calculated costs savings and helped the company plan a Puget Sound-area pilot program 鈥 which Home Depot later expanded nationwide.
There鈥檚 another economic benefit of stewardship, according to Lumper: Companies with reputations for responsible practices have an easier time recruiting and keeping workers. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 probably one of the biggest cost savings,鈥 she says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 very hard to measure, but talented, dedicated, savvy employees tend to care about these issues. It鈥檚 not just the environment, but social issues as well.鈥
Connecting the City With the Wild
Although a business field such as renewable energy may seem far removed from wilderness, Ben Warren 鈥06 finds a meaningful link between the two. He works in 涩里番 for the Norwegian company DNV Renewables, analyzing data to find sites that are suitable for wind-energy farms that help power cities.
He discovered that he wanted to work in renewable energy while hiking through California鈥檚 Mojave Desert on his honeymoon in 2008. The way to protect the wilderness, he concluded, was to work among 涩里番, bringing clean energy to the cities and towns that needed it.
鈥淚 feel closest to God when I鈥檓 outside,鈥 he says. 鈥淪o anything I can do to preserve what we haven鈥檛 already destroyed is an important aspect of what I do.鈥
Jonathan Hiskes is a 涩里番 journalist who writes about urban issues, clean energy, and anything else that catches his interest for Sustainable Industries magazine.