Katherine Doughty, one of our own UW student farmers, recently traveled to KOREA for an international student leadership summit! Below are her thoughts on this incredible experience:

Attending the Global Daejeon Forum for College Students was surreal, enlightening, amazing, confusing—honestly, think of all the emotions: they apply. Attending a global forum or conference is not something I ever saw myself doing. I come from a small town, and I generally focus on smaller, local community work. Expanding my thoughts to a global scale was difficult, and I don’t labor under false impressions that I was right in everything I said. I mean…what do I know? All I can do is try to express the values and ideas I have gained through my education here at the University of Washington. All I can do is try to start a conversation surrounding our responsibilities as young human beings regarding the way we live on this planet. It’s so easy to get caught up in our UW bubbles (I am guilty of this), or our Seattle/United States bubbles. What we say doesn’t have an impact on a global community…right?

Wrong. The things we say are SO important. To our direct communities, national communities, and international communities. Our voices may be just a few out of a whole planet of people (WOW there are some smart humans out there, as I learned from my interactions with my fellow presenters), but the important thing is getting them heard. Because if I learned anything from my experience, it is that we absolutely have to communicate with our peers in other nations if we want to accomplish any global environmental change. There are a lot of professional adults who have expressed this already, but it is not something I as an adult-in-training was fully able to gauge until I experienced it.

The other students who participated directly in the forum were from South Korea, China, Russia, Australia, Japan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Kenya, and Vietnam. I was also able to talk briefly with students from Mexico and Pakistan. The conversations we had were interesting in that depending on a nation’s situation (economically, politically, socially, etc), the general perspective from each student on environmental issues was very different. For example, when talking about pesticide use in agriculture, the student from Sri Lanka asked me if it is even possible to stop using them in America, as well as talked about the problems in his own country. We had a hard time determining why people don’t just stop using them, if the problems they cause are so bad. He asked, “how do we get people to stop trying to find a cure for the effects, and focus on the root of the problem?” I had to pause for a minute, because that is a really good question. Why don’t we? Trying to explain the American process and the reasons why we still do things we know are bad was quite hard. We really don’t make a lot of sense. BUT the great thing is we are extremely fortunate to live in a country with the resources to facilitate and pioneer change. We do have a big problem with the way we grow food in this country, but the lucky thing is we have the ability to fix it, as long as we understand that we have to talk with other nations about what needs to happen for global change (not TELL people what needs to happen, but talk with them).

I cannot say that my career goals have changed, necessarily. Or maybe they have. As much as I though I didn’t want to work in international policy, maybe it would be a good thing for me to consider. Because like it or not, we live in a global society, and the only way anything will get done is by establishing international communities. We can develop all the technologies we want to for clean energy or efficient food production, but without proper structure to distribute those technologies to all peoples, nothing will change. And without conversations, no one will know what other people in the world need. I am so grateful to the UW Farm, my professors and peers in PoE, and the College of the Environment for a) teaching me daily about the person+planet, and b) giving me this opportunity in the first place. There really aren’t enough words in the English language, because I can’t seem to find any to describe the depths of my gratitude for this experience.

Read a transcript of Katherine’s talk HERE