Before my experience at LIS, I didn’t think much about law and ethics when I thought about sustainability. If anything, I assumed ethics was just a silent backdrop, something obvious and moral, like “it’s bad to pollute” or “deforestation is wrong.” That was the extent of it. But through what we explored in class, discussing human rights, sovereignty, and ownership, I began to realise that ethics isn’t a backdrop at all. It is part of the scaffolding that sustainability stands on.

The moment things started to shift for me was during a discussion on human rights. I remember feeling uneasy, not because the rights themselves were offensive, but because they were always spoken about as if they were natural, universal, untouchable. But the more I thought about it, the less I believed that was true. I don’t believe in human rights. Or rather, I don’t believe in them as “rights.” I see them as privileges, socially constructed expectations that we agree upon and enforce, but which are not guaranteed, not inherited, and certainly not universal. The idea that someone is “born” with rights only holds if you’re born into a system that decides to recognise them.

This became even clearer when I learned about cases like the Whanganui River in New Zealand being granted legal personhood. A river, a natural body, now has rights just like a human. And why not? If we can construct human rights out of thin air, tied to our values and institutions, why not do the same for nature? It exposed how arbitrary our legal systems really are. But it also gave me hope. If we can extend rights to ecosystems, then we’re capable of reimagining law in ways that support sustainability more deeply.

My studies didn’t just teach me about law. They challenged me to think across disciplines, which is something that has been core to my whole experience. Sustainability isn’t just about environmental science or policy. It is about philosophy, economics, psychology, design, and yes, law and ethics. It exists in the overlap between disciplines, and I’ve come to see that my own thinking does too. I’m not comfortable staying in one box. I’ve always asked uncomfortable questions, and now I have the vocabulary and frameworks to follow them properly.

Take sovereignty, for example, something I thought was abstract and irrelevant to sustainability at first. But as we studied it, I began to see how sovereignty operates in everything from climate agreements to land rights. It determines who gets to say what happens where and to whom. Sovereignty is often painted as neutral, but it isn’t. It’s a story of power, often told in legal language. Understanding it helped me see why sustainability struggles so much on a global scale. We’ve built a system where individual states protect their own authority, even when the problems we face, like climate collapse and ecological degradation, don’t respect borders.

Another thing that struck me was how ownership ties into ethics. In sessions where we looked at public versus private ownership, we questioned who should “own” land and whether land should be owned at all. It made me think about how the idea of property is deeply cultural and often colonial. Sustainability, in this context, isn’t just about protecting nature. It is about rethinking our entire relationship with it. If you believe the land can own itself, or that no one can own it, then suddenly you’re asking not just legal questions, but ethical and philosophical ones too. That’s the kind of thinking I’ve come to value most in this programme.

Personally, this has made me re-evaluate my own values. I used to see myself as someone who “cared about the planet,” but now I see how shallow that can be if it’s not paired with structural thinking. Ethics isn’t just about being “good.” It is about recognising which systems we uphold and which ones we need to challenge. I’ve started asking questions like: who is this system for? Who benefits? Who gets left out? That kind of questioning has reshaped not only how I see sustainability but how I see my own role in it.

The interdisciplinary nature of my studies also reminded me that no discipline owns the truth. Law provides the rules, but not the meaning. Ethics gives us values, but not the implementation. Science gives us data, but not purpose. The real work is in the connections. And that is what I take away from this programme more than anything: the understanding that real sustainability doesn’t just ask for innovation, it requires imagination.

So as I wrap up this project and look back on the learning I’ve done, I realise that I’ve gone from someone who thought about sustainability as mostly environmental to someone who sees it as fundamentally ethical. I’ve gone from assuming human rights were “natural” to questioning their very existence. I’ve gone from seeing law as a constraint to seeing it as a tool, one that can be reshaped to serve not just people, but places, ecosystems, and future generations.

That shift in thinking didn’t come from a single moment. It came from the way the classes asked me to think differently, to bring together law, philosophy, history, politics, and ethics into one messy but powerful conversation. That’s what interdisciplinary education does. And that’s what I’ll take with me, long after this chapter is over.