Confessions of a Carbon-Loving Environmentalist

I’ve considered myself an environmentalist since I was an undergraduate student. In my senior year, I studied abroad at the University of Ghana and learned more than I could have ever predicted. I questioned what I believed and valued, my place in the world, my relationship with things, and how we are wasting so many of the earth’s resources.  I remember talking with a fellow student who showed me a photo of a rural house. It was a simple structure with an outside area shaded by a sheet of foam from which flip flops had been cut out and then covered with leaves. This image really struck me. I was confident that in the US this scrap would have been thrown into the garbage without a second thought. But here it had a new purpose and it served that purpose well. It caused me to think about what I was throwing away. and why, when it could produce something entirely new.

I shared these ideas with my family and friends but wanted to do more to encourage others to reduce their waste. I landed on the idea of encouraging more people to study abroad so they could see these examples and experience more environmentally friendly lifestyles first hand. And that’s what I did. I’ve been working in the IUPUI Study Abroad Office for nearly 20 years and it has been amazing to see the power of international education to open students’ minds to other perspectives and other ways of living and to build a sense of responsibility to the larger world.

Sadly, it took years before I really stopped to think about the environmental impact of this travel – the greenhouse gas emission and the fuel needed to get all of these travelers to all of those places. I started talking with others in the field and we created some student resources on this topic.

And then the workload of our office started increasing. The number of students and programs we were supporting, grew dramatically. I remember feeling like we were just barely keeping our workload together, truly overwhelmed by our own success and I let the “greening” study abroad work slip. I didn’t raise environmental issues to students and program leaders as I should have.

Years went by and my feelings of guilt built up. The threats of global warning seemed ever more urgent and I was unable to reconcile my belief in the power of international education to make the world a better place with the reality that my work was also contributing significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. In the quiet moments of my day when I was brave enough to examine these issues, I found myself writing a blog post in my mind. I entitled it Confessions of a Carbon Loving Environmentalist. In this space, I would try to work through the cognitive dissonance I was experiencing.

And then COVID hit. The Study Abroad Office had a frenzied period of getting students back from overseas and untangling the registrations, fees, and financial aid from the many cancelled study abroad programs. But then after those first frenetic months, for the first time in years we had an opportunity to work on projects not “essential” to students having safe, meaningful experiences abroad, but critical to the Office of International Affairs’ new focus on the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

One of my first steps was to connect with the Office of Sustainability, with Cristina Padilla in particular. Poor Cristina! I think I must have spoken for 20 straight minutes about what we were doing wrong. Cristina made me feel better about not yet being the environmental advocate I had hoped to be. During the introductions of the first large meeting between our offices, I learned that so many of the people working on these issues had gotten their inspiration and commitment to fighting climate change because of various international experiences and study abroad. I had been on to something – that study abroad is a means to spread awareness of environmental issues. But still there is much to do.

For the last two years, I have been convening the International Affairs Green Team in partnership with Office of Sustainability and an awesome group of International Affairs staff. We are taking steps to improve our office practices (like buying recycled paper and making our events green certified) and also pushing the cultural norms of our office (by asking staff to bring their own plates to office functions and switching from plastic to refillable water bottles for office guests.) and building concepts of sustainability into our daily work (by creating a Green Travel Guide and adding these topics into our student and scholar orientations). We do also still have some large unmet goals like offsetting the carbon associated with the travel our office supports and running our office on renewable energy. Small but measurable progress!

I believe in the power of international education to make the world a better place but that doesn’t let me opt out of assessing the environmental costs of that work. I have a responsibility to investigate, examine, and take action to reduce the negative impacts of study abroad. I wish I had been brave enough to do this earlier.

I encourage you, wherever you live, whatever your work, to have courage. Ask the hard questions, have uncomfortable conversations, push for cultural change. The time for action is now. The threats to our environment are urgent and our children and grandchildren deserve a better world than we will leave them. There’s much to be done. I invite you to join us in this work.

This blog post was written by Stephanie Leslie, Director of Study Abroad, IUPUI Office of International Affairs. Stephanie shared her “confession” at the 2022 International Festival, as part of a mini-speaker series on UN Sustainable Development Goal Day. Stephanie is drawn to her work because she believes strongly in the power of international education to open minds and hearts for the benefit of our global community.