South Park resident spreads the word on sustainable living

By Jennifer Kester

South Park resident Candace Vanderhoff has had a lot of jobs. She’s worked in construction, social work and union organizing, but it was a gig teaching in Micronesia that she realized her calling: to spread the word about sustainable living.
“We consume, consume, consume. The planet cannot sustain us doing that,” the 49-year-old says. “It’s only when we start being responsible for our own energy or dealing with our waste and stewarding the land will humans have a chance.”
Although Vanderhoff grew up surrounded by nature in a rural area outside of Detroit, she took it for granted until she moved to not-so-green L.A. While there, she took a break to teach in Micronesia. “That was the best education,” she says. “I got to see how people lived in a subsistent way.”
She took the lessons on indigenous architecture and decided to focus on graywater, household wastewater without serious contaminants, which includes that from the tub, bathroom sink and washing machine. “Water is the beginning,” Vanderhoff says. “If we don’t have water, we don’t have life. Graywater is a chance for us to regenerate our land. We see this as much as a spiritual effort as a practical one.”
To preach the word of graywater, she’s turned her house into a demonstration center. At a recent workshop in her garage-converted classroom, she explained the benefits of using graywater and broke down the state code of installing such a system. She gave a tour of her home, or what she calls her urban homestead, showing the graywater device hooked to her washing machine and the banana and fig trees that drink up the diverted water.
Vanderhoff also explained she’s in the process of getting a permit to put in a graywater system for her shower. Eight people — a large number for her usually small workshops—showed up for graywater 101, three even coming from L.A. for the class.
For Vanderhoff, graywater work is’t just about installing the fixtures. It’s about planning a system to make the most of your land. For example, she suggests people use the graywater to irrigate a small orchard so that they can grow their own fruit — which saves money on water and food. She looks at factors such as what you like to eat, how much water comes out of the house and how hands-on you want to be to figure out a suitable garden and graywater plan.
“The thing about graywater is that it’s not difficult, it just takes a lot of thought,” she says. Vanderhoff sells an easy do-it-yourself kit for attaching the device to a  washing machine, but for those too intimidated by the task, she offers private installation services through her RainThanks and Greywater business.
Vanderhoff isn’t limiting her environmental scope to graywater. She’s also working to get schools to become more green with the Schoolyard Pizza Oven Project. In February, she built the first state-approved earthen oven at Albert Einstein Academies with help from students from Las Casitas — Design/Build Lab, a nonprofit group she runs. The dome oven — built with clay, sand, straw, dry horse manure, water, linseed oil, fire brick, cement block and mortar — serves as a tool to teach nutrition, fire safety, natural building, math, science and culinary lessons.
When she’s not leading workshops, she’s working on publishing a book that takes an anthropological approach on how to build a te-maneaba, a traditional wooden meeting house that served as the center of the community in the island-nation Kiribati in Micronesia. As Vanderhoff points out, indigenous people were the most sustainable builders.
A sustainable builder herself, Vanderhoff, who holds a master’s degree in architecture from the Southern California Institute of Architecture, will receive her architect license this year and plans to use it. “I want to create green-collar jobs to to help the economy, jobs for people that are good for the environment.” These green-collar-type jobs include solar installation and composting.
But her ultimate goal is to expand her school and move it into a big old house — she has her eye on properties in the North and South Park areas —to showcase regenerative living practices. “I think it’s important to teach simple, regenerative living to people in the city,” she says, especially a desert like San Diego. She’ll teach lay people to design and build their own houses and projects, to retrofit existing homes, and things like how to create a constructed wetland, solar design and how to build a timber-frame house that wouldn’t require nails. She hopes to open her school within the next year.
She’d also like to build more earthen ovens at schools across the state through Las Casitas. But for now, she’ll keep chugging away at her urban homestead’s classroom teaching workshops. “I’ll be there the last weekend of every month until everyone has graywater,” says Vanderhoff.