SFO

In a month today, I will wait as the check-in machine at Umeå Airport prints a white and green tag with those three dreamy letters, SFO. Observing what has become my new midsummer tradition, I will then be on my way to attend the Breakthrough Dialogue at Cavallo Point for the fourth consecutive year. This time around, the theme is "democracy in the Anthropocene". Still shell shocked from last year’s elections, ecomodernism, like all progressive movements, is grappling to understand what this new wave of populism and nationalism actually means so the topic could hardly be better chosen.

For me personally, coming back to California is like being back in a novel, to resume the narrative just where I left it last time, and to again find myself among people who give me real hope about the future. As for the guest list this year, Steven Pinker from Harvard is one of the people I am most excited to listen to but also Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee are likely to add a twist or two to the ecomodern intellectual universe.