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The Makings of a Hippy Engineer

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I was born in the seventies, a child of two confirmed hippies in Australia. They sent me to one of those alternative primary schools where we could walk around barefoot and address the teachers by their first names. All our classes were held in the one big room. When it was hot we all boarded the old school bus and went to the beach at lunch time.

I loved primary school, needless to say. But the greatest thing I gained from it was the teaching approach. We were never told that we were learning maths now, or that it was time to do some English. Instead, we came back from the beach, wrote a poem about it, did some research on how ripple marks were formed in the sand, looked at the weather report to see how hot it had been, and had a look at the globe to see what kind of beaches people lived on in other countries. We were not learning English Composition, Fluid Physics, Meteorology, or Geography. We were learning about the beach.

Now one of the biggest impacts of this was that we really came to appreciate the beach (or the park, or the hills, or wherever else we went with our teacher). We saw how much interesting stuff was to be gained from one single entity. Being from Perth, Australia, things were relatively untouched, but our teachers always pointed out the devastation we encountered. Yes, the beach was beautiful, but there was litter around, and in some places seaweed was proliferating.

We visited factories and oil refineries and marvelled at the ways they made the things we used each day, but we also saw that these factories pumped out smog from their huge chimneys, and we wondered if it was worth it.

Well, of course it was worth it. The potato chip factory made products that we thought were definitely worth it. And while the solar power and wind power plants looked very interesting, it was clear that our real source of electricity was from that coal-fired plant a little farther south. My next question was: so how do we make these things work for everyone? That is, how can WE - myself,my family and all the people in my city - benefit from our great potato-chip technology and STILL keep our environment healthy?

This has been a huge challenge to this very day. But I have good news. I am now studying to be an engineer, after seeing some pretty sad results of bad engineering decisions in various countries. I know that our biggest hurdle is the mind-set of professional engineers, and convincing our financial supporters that sometimes the bottom dollar involves more than money alone, that sustainability should also be a big priority. But despite this, I am seeing huge advances being made in my field.

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