Every great piece of music begins with a single note. A decision, a breath, a leap of faith. Mine began somewhere over the Indian Ocean, 17,000 kilometres from Brisbane, when I chose to fly to Edinburgh and carry the weight of that choice with me the entire way.
A return flight from Brisbane to Edinburgh emits roughly 3.5 tonnes of CO₂ per passenger. I know this the way a musician knows a wrong note; viscerally, uncomfortably, impossible to unhear once you’ve learned to listen. Studying psychology taught me about cognitive dissonance, that particular mental friction when our values and our actions refuse to harmonise. And so, instead of resolving the tension by simply looking away, I decided to sit inside it and compose something better.
The first movement was intention. Before I have even left, I have calculated my carbon footprint and offset it through verified reforestation projects in Queensland. Not as absolution, but as accountability. Psychology tells us that public commitment increases follow-through, so I told people. I wrote it down. I made the invisible, visible.
The second movement is adaptation. Edinburgh, as it turns out, is a city practically written for sustainable living. It is possible to walk everywhere. Not only is it possible, but I intend to use this to my own betterment, accumulating steps and stories in equal measure. I intend to continue my existing habits on the other side of the planet. I cook most of my own meals, shop at local markets, and I hope to learn that oat milk flat whites are a universal language.
The third movement was alignment. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals aren’t abstract bureaucratic poetry; they’re a score waiting to be performed. SDG 11 asks us to build sustainable cities and communities; I choose to live like a local rather than move through like a tourist. SDG 13 calls for climate action; I will take trains through England on my travels instead of budget flights, watching the landscape unspool like a slow, gorgeous piece of music I hadn’t known I needed to hear. Because why journey so far from everything I have ever known, to see so little of a life different from my own?
But here is where psychology and music intertwine: guilt is a poor conductor. Fear keeps people in their seats. What actually moves people, what sustains action, is meaning. Connection. The feeling that your choices are part of something larger than yourself.
Standing on Calton Hill at dusk, looking out over a city that is unfamiliar and intriguing in all it has to offer, or standing on Mt Coot-tha, looking at a city I have always known, I understand that sustainability isn’t a sacrifice. It’s an act of listening; to the place you’re in, to the people around you, to the long, patient note the planet has been holding long before any of us arrived.
I’m just trying to learn how to harmonise with it.
