Hey everyone, my name is Jess Randall (she/her), and I’m a Biology and Global Health double-major at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Before this summer, I never imagined myself taking a backpacking field course exploring ethics. I assumed it was for people who already spoke the language of conservation or philosophy – you know, people who could identify plants on sight or debate land management policy. I didn’t really see myself in that picture as someone studying health. But, after three weeks on this course, I’ve realized that this class is for anyone who wants to understand the world and their place in it more deeply, no matter what field they’re going into. Here’s a glimpse into how I’ve connected my Environmental Ethics experience to the field of medicine and community health.
One of the first moments that stuck with me happened during our “moral backpack” discussion – where sitting in a circle in the woods, we talked about the values we carry without even noticing. I didn’t expect this exercise to matter for medicine, but it did because in healthcare, patients bring in their own moral backpacks which are shaped by culture, land, family, trauma, and history. Understanding my own moral backpack will help me understand and relate to others’ better, and this exercise helped me see how my values impact the relationships I have with the environment, with science, and with others.
A few days later was my first big “aha moment,” which was realizing that “leave no trace” is impossible. Even with the best intentions and meticulous care, we left behind rubber from our shoes, traced paths that changed the land, and left behind waste like toothpaste or our real waste. Just as I can’t move through a landscape without impact, healthcare systems can’t move through communities without impact either. In global health, we talk about environmental determinants of health like air quality, water access, pollution, and climate events, but being out in the field made those concepts far more tangible. Seeing how land, policy, and community relationships shape daily life and environmental health helped me understand these determinants in a way that goes beyond what you can learn from books or a classroom.
Another connection for me came during our discussions about institutions, where we talked about how institutions carry values, how they shape decisions, and how they can say one thing but do another. I couldn’t help thinking about healthcare, which is a system that promises care but a lot of the time delivers inequity, causes harm, and is structured around bureaucracy. The parallels between these systems were impossible to ignore: both environmental and medical systems struggle with mismatched values and actions rooted in large and powerful institutions. WRFI showed me how powerful field‑based ethics learning can be – how being out in the landscapes where decisions are made really reshapes your understanding of yourself, your discipline, and the world. Environmental Ethics helped me learn how to better question institutions thoughtfully and how to make sure I align my actions with the specific values I want to uphold.
We also examined how climate change disproportionately harms the communities least responsible for it – a pattern I’ve studied in global health but understood differently through the ethical lens this course provided. Learning from Indigenous scholars and community members helped to deepen that understanding even further because learning about their perspectives challenged the Western scientific worldview I’ve been trained in, which usually prioritizes detachment and efficiency, compared to Indigenous ones which center relationships, reciprocity, and responsibility. Seeing how values shape various environmental decisions helped me think more critically about how I’ll interact with communities affected by climate events, and how I can guide my future work toward prevention, resilience-building, and supporting people as they navigate environmental change and the associated impacts on their health. This matters because although clinical detachment has its place, relationship-based care like listening, humility, and connection is what builds trust and improves health outcomes, and that is what I strive to incorporate more into my future.
And then, of course there were the WRFI moments that don’t fit perfectly into a syllabus, like quickly moving camp to escape wildfire smoke, distributing group gear weights evenly, learning to work as a team during challenging times, and discovering how much joy can come from hard work, like hiking miles on top of miles day after day while also being a full-time student. These experiences taught me flexibility, collaboration, and resilience, which are all skills I’ll carry into medicine, global health, and my everyday life. Our strong sense of community on this course also reminded me of the importance of the collaborative, relationship-based care I hope to practice in medicine, where listening, shared problem-solving, and mutual respect are just as important as clinical knowledge.
So, WRFI didn’t just teach me about environmental ethics – it reinforced how to think more critically, question institutions, understand my own values, recognize my impact, and listen to people whose worldviews differ from mine. I’ve done research on an island in Belize, studied art and cuisine in the heat of Rome, learned about health in clinics in Uganda, and interned in rural communities across Kenya, but WRFI taught me something I didn’t expect: that environmental ethics is part of global health, and that global health begins at home. This course helped me see the U.S. with the same curiosity, humility, and care I bring to the rest of the world. I came to WRFI hoping to understand the environment better, and I left understanding myself and the world I hope to help heal much more clearly.
