“The capacity to get under the surface in order to understand these differences, to balance one against another, and try to resolve them is the hallmark of the global citizen.”

For me, the characteristics that help shape a global engagement with the world are curiosity, open-mindedness, and empathy. Simply knowing, tolerating, and accepting other perspectives allows for a mental distance between you and the place you’re traveling to, which gives a sort of relief and retreat back into your personal mental comfort zone. Attempting to create a world-view requires the intentional challenging of your own ideologies, refusing to accept anything at face value and critically examining the reason for why things are (and why you think things are the way they are).

After talking to people who have grown up in multiple parts of the world, I think that global citizenship exists. Some people cannot point to specific GPS locations for where they formed their identity and values. Instead, they point to the constant and iterative process of communicating ideas with a diverse global community of people. Especially now, we are invited to consider history and culture from a variety of viewpoints (hopefully), so I think all of us have in us a bit of global citizenship.

Would I consider myself a global citizen? Probably not. I think I still have a lot of ground to cover before I can call myself a person with strong global citizenship. I have for the most part spent the past 20 summers in Houston, Texas with my parents, which has created a large safety net for me. I am at minimum able to more clearly identify the reasons behind my personal values and beliefs. I don’t know if I aspire to have the title of a global citizen, either. I think that empathy can be developed anywhere, but perhaps travelling to a new country and culture more explicitly encourages such personal growth.

One of the most tangible ways I can be more globally engaged on this trip is to refuse to settle for only a scientific perspective on the natural wonders around me. Personally, science is one of my mental safety nets because it is supposed to be standardized and objective.

“Science often offers a powerful protection against fundamentalism and extremism. It is concerned with observable reality and, refreshingly, makes no claims for eternal truths.”

However, the social implications and human components of science can never be removed. How can we better address issues facing our natural environments if we do not to consider the human-nature interface? While not all biologists are necessarily doing conservation-based research, I think that they should all have a civic responsibility in making sure their projects actually benefit the places in which they execute their projects. Otherwise, their findings may only exist in an intellectual space that bolsters itself and nothing else. Leaving this critical engagement to someone else, unfortunately is no longer excusable now when humans continue to exploit natural resources and degrade whole ecosystems. The complexity and ambiguity of a scientific problem and its associated social implications are intertwined and part of what makes discovering something new rewarding and enlightening.

This view of scientific global engagement may be a product of my idealistic millennial mind who has yet to face the logistical constraints of tackling every aspect of marine biology and conservation all at once. However, I think it’s my responsibility to give it an honest try.

P.S. This post was written on my flight to Panama but I was supposed to have done it before this – hopefully international airspace is one of those tricky exceptions that will allow the CCL to forgive me.