River lunch run

Before giving my annual guest lecture on green political theory for the graduate students, I was able to squeeze in a lunch run along the River Ume with Elin. With only four days left until Indonesia, I am having a stroke of “resfeber” and, as such, a run always helps to clear my mind.

In the morning, I was working on my new article project about climate change and the future of high-trust societies. My friend Leigh Phillips once came up with the term “collapse-porn addicts” to describe the obsessive interest that degrowthers and others take in the end of liberalism. Instead of strengthening our collective institutions and restoring elite interest in public affairs, their main message has been one of populist confrontation and a profound distrust in our ability to find common solutions. As such, I am thinking that “social trust” may be one of the more useful venues for articulating an alternative optimistic account of the future, one in which we do not all become localists and preppers but rather seek to ensure that the open society does not fail in the first place.