It’s my last morning in Sydney. I’m sitting under a fig tree in the Botanic Garden, watching the sunlight across the harbour. In my backpack is the same reusable cup I brought from Manchester – scratched, stained, and still forgotten in my room more often than I’d like to admit.
When I first arrived, I thought sustainability was about habits: carrying that cup, recycling properly, choosing oat milk. But this year has shown me that sustainability is not just action – it’s contradiction. Trying to live ethically in a messy, globalised world means learning to sit with that.
I’ve snorkelled over bleached coral. I’ve watched rivers dry earlier than expected. I’ve sat in class beside Torres Strait students speaking about ancestral land vanishing under rising seas. I joined a food co-op that redistributes unsold produce, last week we passed 1.2 tonnes saved. A small win, but also a reminder of how much is still wasted.
Then there’s the flight. One round trip from Manchester to Sydney generates around 3.8 tonnes of CO₂ – more than six times the global yearly target per person. I tried to justify this. I told myself I’d offset the emissions, maybe plant a few trees through a website promising carbon neutrality in bold green font. But then I dug deeper and read that most offsetting schemes barely work, often delayed, poorly monitored, or just wishful accounting. It left me feeling helpless. For a while, even skipping the bus, to walk to class felt like a drop in an evaporating bucket – a well-meaning gesture swallowed by the scale of the problem. The more I learned, the heavier it felt, like I was carrying my carbon footprint in my backpack alongside that battered reusable cup.
But here’s what changed: I began to see sustainability not as a checklist of personal virtue, but as a system – a web of decisions, behaviours, policies, and histories. As a psychology student, I started noticing how our environment shapes our choices, and how sustainable living isn’t just about what we do, but what we’re enabled to do. In one unit, sustainable cities came up, and it hit me that even a compost bin or bike lane is part of something bigger. I volunteered at the campus food co-op, helped redistribute groceries, and spoke with students about food insecurity. I joined a behaviour-change campaign promoting active transport and ran a project linking wellbeing to time in green spaces. These weren’t grand solutions, but they were good things, things I could do. That’s when it shifted: I stopped obsessing over what I couldn’t fix and started focusing on what I could improve. I’m learning that sustainability is about progress, not purity. That imperfect action, done consistently, is still action.
So, to the me reading this now: I hope you still care. We’re not here to undo a single flight. We’re here to change the direction of where we land next.
