California's Midland School Awarded a Governor’s Award for Environmental and Economic Leadership (GEELA) in 2009

Since 1932, Midland students have lived as though we live in a world of limited resources.  Values of self-reliance, accountability, authentic student leadership, and responsibility to community and environment are at the core of our rigorous college preparatory education on 2,860 acres.  Alternative in their bones, Paul and Louise Squibb embraced the opportunity afforded by the Great Depression to found a school that intentionally sought to live within its means, and still does.  Midland carries no debt while offering a generous financial aid program.  Over eight decades, Midland has stayed true to its soul, and its ethic of economy has evolved into an ethic of ecology.

It’s hard, in fact misleading, to distill Midland’s “green-ness” into a checklist, or a set of action steps.  Sustainability is implicit in our school’s culture, and everybody is on board – students, faculty, administration, and trustees.  It begins in the freshman year when students tend a garden plot and are assigned a daily job in the kitchen or dining hall, overseen by 12th grade Job Heads.  The benchmark for successful completion is clear; the kitchen and the dishes simply must be clean because we’ll re-gather as a community for the next meal.  Likewise with shower fires, a ritual unique to Midland, though not unique in the global perspective.  Students heat their shower water in shower fire tanks, boilers with embedded fire boxes for stoking wood fires.  A non-passing shower fire means lukewarm showers.  Students learn quickly that what they do matters in a tangible, visceral way.  At Midland, the fruits and wastes of our labors are right in front of us, where we’re more likely to take responsibility than we would by just flipping a switch to get what we need.

A Midland education is regenerative in that we balance consumption with production of food and energy.  Midland’s refurbished, state-of-the-art kitchen receives the bounty of our 8-acre organic garden and our pastures for grass-fed cattle.  Midland’s cooks can prepare on site or refrigerate and freeze the organic produce and beef to spread this garden’s bounty across every season. 

We produce clean kilowatt-hours, but our real product is informed students. Every year, beginning with a pilot project in 2003-04, our 10th grade Chemistry students work alongside a professional solar electrician to install a PV system after writing technical reports and becoming community teachers.  Economies of scale make 3-kW PV systems a good size for us; each meets about 3% of our communal electricity needs.  As of 2010, almost 20% of our needs are met with solar arrays installed by our students.  Students learn this is something they can do, rather than simply watching the professionals do it.  We take cumulatively consequential steps EVERY year, never procrastinating or being paralyzed by the scale of global climate change, while allowing our students to feel ownership of the process.  According to the Midland Model - 3% a year - it will take a generation to meet all our communal electricity needs with solar. 

In 2009, Midland was awarded a Governor’s Award for Environmental and Economic Leadership (GEELA), California’s highest environmental honor.

Read more about Midland School.