Deep Fried Cars

Life’s good. I’m sitting amongst my peers at a Sustainable Schools conference in NSW Australia and we are nutting out new approaches to the task of transforming schools into models of environmental excellence. It's been a good day and my brain is cooperating nicely with good attention spans and the odd idea worth noting. The afternoon rolls on and we are introduced to a guest speaker - Sue Lennox from OzGreen. Things are about to get complicated.

Now Sue is not your average Aussie chick, not any more. She tells us of her pleasantly conservative and safe past life, which turned a backflip worthy of a major party politician. She visited India, saw the state of their waterways and decided the best thing to do was sell her house and use the money to start a not-for-profit organization aimed at helping educate and restore India’s revered (and very seedy) rivers.

So how does this relate to running a van on waste vegetable oil? Patience, enjoy the story and trust that I’ll eventually get to that.

We are all sitting there thinking how comparitively we are all selfish and useless, when she asks for a volunteer to demonstrate a technique for identifying and working through problems, blockages and general bad stuff in your life. Of course everyone has a sudden attack of the “gee that's an interesting spot on the desk” and as the silence gets to the point of squirming I say, “yeah, I’ll have a go”. Being the youngest in the room I guess I have the least to lose.

So there I sit in middle of this boardroom at the head office of the Department of Environment & Conservation with forty or so top environmental educators and I am asked to start exploring my feelings… The only feeling I have is that of alarm. My cheeks and neck start blushing whilst my face does its best to suggest that really everything is mostly OK and I am not really really really nervous all of a sudden.

Sue asks me to relax (Hah!) and try to think of one issue in my life that is troubling me. I ask her if the present situation counts and that cheesy joke helps me and everyone else loosen up. So I attempt to follow her instructions and into my head comes a dreaded thought – my car, Bek. My beautiful, shiny, stylish 1961 EK Holden Station Wagon, which I’d spent months restoring. Bek is so chromed, so retro and so not fuel-efficient.

I had tried justifying Bek with arguments of embodied energy and conservation of materials but deep down I knew I was clutching at straws. Before I could stop myself, out it came, the tussle between being an environmentally aware person and wanting to keep that bright, shiny object. Sue listened and asked me how I felt about that.

Then she asked me to describe not only the feeling but where it sat in my body. The best description I could give was that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach, when you know something bad has happened or is about to. That was the low point.

Sue let it sit for a while and then asked me what I could do to change the situation. Just one action, one little thing you can do to start heading away from sinking stomachs and moving towards a smile. I thought of various options yet they all ended in me parting ways from my beloved chariot in the near future, until I realised that what I really needed to do was to get all of the facts together. Figures had to be compiled from a bunch of sources, data collected and the lords of the Internet consulted. I had a plan....

I was allowed to leave the seat of self persecution and return to the safety of my colleagues.