Why I Chose to Go to Grad School in Sweden: Reflecting on my First Month

One of the first questions people ask me here in Lund is why I chose to study here. After they learn I’m from Oregon and that it took 14 hours to get here, they stare at me incredulously, as if I’m about to tell them I’m just lost, not actually supposed to be here.

I’ll generally reply by summarizing the description of Human Ecology on Lund’s website. I’ll say most universities in the U.S. don’t offer programs like that. But sometimes if people press me on it I’ll tell them I had to get out of the U.S. to escape the ideological constraints of conventional thinking there.

I wanted to choose a masters program that would allow me to explore the idea that protecting the environment means advancing an alternative to capitalism. I needed to think outside the box and surround myself with people who were unafraid to consider potentially controversial solutions to the environmental crisis. I needed to be somewhere where critiquing capitalism was socially acceptable.

I had plenty of graduate school options to choose from. In the United States I was accepted to Yale’s Masters of Environmental Management, University of Michigan’s Masters in Environmental Justice, and University of Montana’s Masters in Environmental Studies. I was also accepted to the University of Edinburgh in the UK and Tromso University in Norway, but none of these schools encouraged a critical analysis of capitalism as much as Lund did.

I see dismantling capitalism as a moral and existential necessity to combat environmental degradation, minimize climate change, and to achieve a socially just society. My rational hinges on three main points:

1. Capitalism is inherently unsustainable. Perpetual economic growth is not possible on a finite planet, and with the impacts of climate change, deforestation, species extinction, and pollution becoming increasingly severe we need to reduce our resource use, not increase it.
2. Capitalism is a racist institution that exploits black and brown communities around the world and which has done so for centuries.
3. Capitalism produces massive inequality between the 1% (the capitalists, or as Bernie Sanders calls them, “the billionaire class”) and the 99%.

I see dismantling capitalism as a moral and existential necessity to combat environmental degradation, minimize climate change, and to achieve a socially just society. And as it turns out, I’m not alone.

Hanging out with some classmates at Lomma Beach, Sweden

My masters program cohort and I went with our program director to his apartment in Malmo, Sweden before going out to dinner together!

Walking to dinner in Malmo, Sweden

My first few weeks of studying Human Ecology here at Lund have offered ample confirmation of this. My peers in the program come from over a dozen countries all have studied the natural and social sciences at universities all over the world. All of us are intent on challenging the way global society thinks about sustainability. And everyone I’ve spoken with so far believes this starts by challenging the logic of capitalism.

Most of the professors in the Human Ecology program are avowed anti-capitalists and eco-Marxists. They aren’t afraid to identify capitalism as the underlying problem behind environmental problems. That is incredibly refreshing after years spent trying to justify my ideas in a business school environment. Not only that, but they’re tremendously approachable and friendly, as in Sweden the classroom is a non-hierarchical environment where professors consider their students as peers.

This kind of academic environment is just one of the reasons I feel I made the right choice coming to Sweden to study. I’ve also gotten to know my corridor-mates better over the last few weeks and we’ve started having weekly hall-dinners on Saturday nights. This last week Shu from Japan and Yun from China made Oden, a common Japanese dish made with Japanese radishes, eggs, and a variety of seafoods.

From left to right: Yun, Eric (photobombing), and Shu posing with the Oden they made!

Owen (third from right) and I made homemade pizza and hotdogs for our first hall dinner on Sept 2.

I’m just now getting my feet under me, but I’m already excited to live and study with this group of global scholars for the next two years examining the unjust, unsustainable social systems of our world and figuring out how to fix them! Stay tuned!

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