If you have ever dared to stroll across campus without Chappell Roan blasting in your airpods, you would have noticed the multitude of languages blending into the always-violent Irish wind. Being ranked as the thirty-first most international university in the world by the 2024 QS world ranking, your ears do not deceive you, this place is truly bustling with international students. However, the life and vibrancy these students bring to College comes at a cost that many of them have a hard time dealing with. I sat down with Kamila, a second-year sociology student from Poland, Kaja, a Polish visiting student from Science’s Po studying law, and Deniz, from Maryland, who just finished her Master’s degree in Biodiversity and Conservation, to hear how they cope with climate anxiety as international students who fly to and from Ireland for college.
At a small cafe on Nassau St, I asked Deniz whether worrying about her climate footprint had any impact on her decision to go.
“I had this moment of thinking it’s a little ironic to be studying biodiversity and conservation but to have to cross the ocean to do it. But then I was primarily excited about getting in”, she said. There was a pause before she admitted “since I’ve come here I’ve started thinking about it a lot more.”
Kaja told me that she mainly focused on what was right for her education but also noted that “for a lot of international students, like me and my friends, there is this sense of guilt.” When I asked her to elaborate on the guilt she felt, and how she tried to mitigate it, she told me that at Science’s Po she would take the train or bus as often as possible.
“From France I went to Poland by bus multiple times. I do try to make those conscious choices. But here (Ireland) it’s just impossible,” Kaja said. “There is also pressure to make those choices”.
Her comment hung in the air and it seemed to me that she had struck a chord within all of us. “At the same time,” Kamila started, “even if you’re so conscious about every single choice that you make, and I’m not trying to be pessimistic, but, it is not going to change a lot. The problem is big companies and conglomerates and people who make these decisions for us”. I couldn’t help but to follow up on her statement with the obvious question: do you feel pessimistic?
Always straight to the point, Kamila answered with one word: “Yes. I just feel very hopeless. I don’t know if pessimistic is the right word,” Kaja added. We sat in silence for a moment until Kamila broke it.
“To be fair, I feel very pessimistic, because I’m very aware of the fact that for something to change, it has to be on a policy level and not only that, it has to be on an international policy level – and the thing is, it’s just more profitable for everyone to continue what we are doing.”
Deniz, Kaja, and Kamia all expressed feelings of exhaustion – emotionally drained by trying to weigh leading a normal life with a crisis they were all too aware of.
“I think a lot of us are exhausted,” Deniz noted. “Just by being a student and all that entails but also with climate change. I also want to see my family without feeling like a horrible person.”
Especially around Christmas, Kaja emphasised, there are deadlines, tickets are expensive, and in the end, you only have so much time. “I try to balance the choices that I actually have with comfort,” she said.
As full-time students who work for hours every day to keep up with school, work, and life in general, balancing budgets, schedules, physical comfort and climate anxiety, seems daunting, if not impossible. Deniz made a comment that hits the nail right on the head.
“I think a really big thing when you’re discussing carbon footprint and personal effects on climate change is the systems that already exist and how working outside of those systems is very, very difficult and requires a great deal of time, money, and privilege, which the vast majority of us don’t have.”
Working within the existing systems is a reality everybody must face – the idea that however hard we want the world to be different, it simply is not. They all agreed that they would love to take the train, sail, live somewhere that was walkable, where biking to and from appointments does not send you straight to the hospital. Whether it be bad infrastructure or simply the fact that our world operates under a capitalistic rule, every person on this earth has to work within the systems provided for them – and, as everyone I interviewed agreed, breaking out seems almost impossible.
Unfortunately, these systems are the very same that allow celebrities, politicians, the top one percent, to jet around the globe at their leisure. Kamila put the conflict into words.
“The difficult thing is, there isn’t really any one person to blame,” she said, to which Kaja jokingly interjected, “There are actually about 10 billionaires to blame.” The big carbon emitting elephant in the room had once again been mentioned.
Leaving off on such a dismal tone didn’t seem like a very entertaining conclusion, so I ventured to hear whether anybody had discovered the secret to dealing with their climate anxiety. I asked Kamila and Kaja how they reconciled those emotions of climate dread with their own carbon consumption. There was a moment of silence before Kamila succinctly admitted, ‘I don’t’, in the wake of which we all broke into a laughter, I now can not help but think of as hauntingly illustrious of the topic itself.
I found a little more hope with Deniz.
“The way I reconcile that (studying abroad while trying to lead a sustainable lifestyle) is by thinking, hopefully, at the end of this, I’ll be doing something that will be impactful in the long term,” she said.
It seemed that, in the course of our conversation, Kamila had charged a little of that pessimism into a spurt of motivation as well.
“We cannot be inactive, and go ‘yeah fuck it, not my problem’ because it is our problem,” she said, and evoking a creative interpretation of something Jenny Maguire (God bless her) had said in a guest lecture added, “You should do the best you can within your capabilities.”
This reminded me of something Deniz had said days prior, “Caring about climate is a privilege” to which she had playfully recalled the revered Spider-Man: with great power comes great responsibility.
