There is a particular kind of madness in choosing a fourteen-hour journey over a ninety-minute flight. My friends thought I’d lost it when I said I was taking the train from St Andrews to Paris. “You could fly for less than your taxi to Leuchars,” one pointed out, unhelpfully correctly.
But I’d done the maths. A short-haul flight from Edinburgh to Paris emits roughly six times the CO2 per passenger of the equivalent Eurostar journey. France itself agrees with me: in 2023, it banned domestic flights on routes where a train alternative under two-and-a-half hours exists. It’s a small, exemption-riddled law, but a useful signal from a country whose electricity grid, thanks to nuclear power, is already among Europe’s lowest-carbon. If the destination takes its own emissions seriously, it seemed only right that I should too. So instead of a departure lounge, my year abroad began on a slow crawl south: train, train, then Eurostar sliding under the Channel while I watched Kent become France. No queues, no guilt, just the quiet satisfaction of doing SDG 13 (Climate Action) homework on a moving train.
Paris, it turns out, makes sustainable living almost embarrassingly easy, though not effortlessly so. The city is genuinely choked by traffic in places, which is why it’s spent a decade building one of Europe’s most ambitious low-emission zones and laying down hundreds of kilometres of bike lanes. I bought a Vélib’ pass before I’d even found a flat, and now I cycle to Sciences Po along the Seine like I’ve always lived here. The Métro is frequent and cheap, and means I never needed a car. That’s SDG 11, Sustainable Cities, ticked off before my first seminar. Sustainable travel is about how you move through a place, not just how you arrive.
Food was where I expected to fail. I am, by nature, a creature of convenience. But Paris reprograms you. The marché near my flat sells what’s in season, grown a few hours away, so my diet’s become more sustainable than it ever was at home. And when waste tempts me over wisdom, Too Good To Go is now an addiction: yesterday’s unsold pastries, rescued for €4, taste exactly as good as today’s, and that is a small, delicious answer to SDG 12, Responsible Consumption.
None of this makes me a model citizen. I still take the Métro one stop too many times when lazy, and I’ve bought things from Le Bon Coin I didn’t strictly need. But sustainability abroad isn’t about perfection; it’s about defaults. If the easiest option is the train, the bike, the market stall, the rescued pastry, you end up living lightly almost without trying.
The slow way to Sciences Po cost me half a day I didn’t get back. What I got instead was a year that started aligned with the world I’d come to study, proof that the sustainable choice and the memorable one are, more often than people assume, the same journey.
