Sustainable Living and RPM: The Elephant in the Room

A recent article in the New York Times entitled "The School of Wants and Needs - and Wood-Fired Showers" detailed the typical day in the life of a private-school in Los Olivos, California called Midland School. Midland is a private school, located in Santa Barbara, California, where "about 50 percent of the produce that students and faculty members eat from the 10 acres of land that they farm organically." The students chop wood for fires that heat water for showers. Each day individual students are appointed as "fire-starters" and take care of each other by assuring there is plenty of wood. However, "if the day's six fire-starters shirk their duties, it is their classmates who suffer." I find this model interesting from an educational standpoint, as an example of sustainable living (albeit, an expensive one) that appears to be working quite well. Unlike other private college preparatory schools, Midland's "facts and numbers" advertises factors beyond acceptance to top-colleges: "35 miles of trails and dirt roads on our campus," "3 hours it takes to hike to the peak of Grass Mountain," and "2,860 acres on which our campus sits."

Midland School, Los Olivos, CA

The merits of sustainable living at Midland aside, the "elephant in the room" in the conversation is at the fringes of the environmental movement. In 1968, Stanford biologist Dr. Paul Ehrlich’s apocalyptic bestseller The Population Bomb (1968), his infamous book on population growth and consumption. The opening passage famously begins with “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” Ehrlich observed, citing consumption and the rise of population inevitably leading to “utter breakdown” – the final nail in humanity’s coffin. At the time, many embraced Ehrich’s viewpoint; traces of his argument exist in “population growth” campaigns, such as the Engendered Species Condoms offered by the Center for Biological Diversity. Disturbingly, Buck v. Bell (1927) is a Supreme Court case still on the books, upholding Virginia statute allowing sterilization of inmates at certain mental institutions, thus preventing childbearing for those deemed “unfit”. 

In the context of the reasonable person model, the IPAT equation reveals the impact that individuals contribute to material culture. It appears that, at least in Western culture, those that are most able to adapt are those with the most resources to do so. Sending one's child to a private school that practices sustainability may be a benefit to society, in re-shaping the manner in which these high schoolers live. However, why shouldn't these same resources be afforded to public education across the country? If so, I believe participation in sustainable living could be taught to a wider variety of students and affect change on a broader scale.