At We Resolve MN, I’ve learned that the worst thing you can do for someone is speak for them instead of with them. Participatory defense flips the traditional legal model: instead of a lawyer deciding what’s best for a client, the client’s family and community become expert witnesses to their own lives. Nobody gets “saved.” They get heard, and then supported on their own terms.
I think travel abroad has the same failure mode as bad lawyering. Too often, study-abroad students arrive as tourists building a case about a place — collecting photos and anecdotes as evidence of a good semester — rather than becoming witnesses within it, accountable to the community and ecosystem they’re temporarily part of. My year in Edinburgh is my chance to cross-examine that instinct in myself before it becomes a habit.
Concretely, that means treating Scotland’s infrastructure as the “record” I should work within rather than override. I’ll take trains rather than fly for regional travel — Edinburgh’s rail links to the rest of the UK and mainland Europe make this not just possible but genuinely better travel, supporting SDG 13 (Climate Action) by keeping my carbon footprint tied to the country’s existing low-emission transit network rather than adding new short-haul flights to it. I’ll rely on Edinburgh’s public transit and my own feet daily, source food from local markets rather than imported convenience options, and live in university accommodation rather than displacing housing stock from residents — a small contribution to SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities). Avoiding single-use plastics is table stakes, but I want to go further: bringing my participatory-defense instinct for “who’s affected and did we ask them” to how I engage with local environmental initiatives, whether that’s a community garden, a river cleanup, or student climate organizing already happening on campus.
The through-line, though, isn’t really about trains or tote bags. It’s about testimony. My legal studies concentration has taught me that a witness’s job is to notice precisely and speak honestly about what they saw — not to perform expertise they don’t have. My music minor has taught me something similar: you can’t harmonize with a piece you haven’t actually listened to first. Sustainable travel, to me, is the same discipline applied to a place instead of a courtroom or a chord progression — arriving prepared to listen before I contribute, to notice the systems already in motion (rail lines, food networks, local governance) before assuming I know how to improve on them.
I don’t think eco-friendly travel is a checklist. I think it’s a form of cross-examination you run on your own assumptions, semester after semester, place after place — asking what evidence you’re actually leaving behind, and whether the record would hold up if the community got to examine it too.
